Discussing Mental Illness

by Dick Mac

Many of us have received rudimentary first-aid training and can stop or staunch someone's bleeding, we know about the Heimlich Maneuver and CPR, and we might even know how to perform these, we have all learned lessons (effective or not) about making a sick person comfortable and we use phrases like "Feed a cold. Starve a fever." Or is it the other way around? No matter which it is, we all have some experience addressing sickness and injury, and it is the rare person who runs away from a physically ill or wounded person in need.

Most of us have no skills in addressing a mentally ill person, never mind assisting them in getting help. There is a stigma, there is fear about discussing the issue either with a person, or with others around them.

Mental illness is mysterious to us, and we often develop dismissive attitudes about it. We take positions about a person's decisions and choices, as if they have actually analyzed their situation and said: "Yeah! Paranoid schizophrenia: that's for me," or "I'm going to become a drug addict to deal with this confusion."

Mental illness is not choice; and although there are entire industries based on "depression" and "attention-deficit" it does not mean that every consumer in those fields is mentally well. Many depressed, paranoid, sociopathic, and psychotic people need real treatment.

Drugs are one treatment, and drugs are the treatment of choice in our society. Drugs are tangible, can be produced by a manufacturer, and bought and sold like commodities. As a society, we accept solutions that can be purchased and we debate not their efficacy, but their expense. In the big picture, though, drugs only address the symptoms of mental illness, not the underlying psychological problems.

Fundamentally, we are ill-prepared to have a conversation about mental illness, because it cannot be quantified like a broken bone or a virus. Mental illness cannot have a packaged solution that is sold in one form over-the-counter and in another form by prescription-only, its treatment is intangible to those looking in from the outside, and some who suffer mild forms of mental illnesses and still function tend to believe that people with more severe forms of the same condition should be able to "buck-up" and move on.

Many people suffer mental illness at low levels, and we sometimes refer to the manifestations as "ticks" and "quirks" and "habits" and, generally speaking, these are not debilitating problems. Left untreated, however, some mental illness that seems "irritating" at one point could develop into a serious mental health problem.

It is easy to dismiss mental illness because we don't understand it, and dismiss mental health because it is expensive and historically was not covered by medical insurance; and dismiss it we do, regularly.

Perhaps it's time we say that mental illness deserves the attention that every other illness is afforded, and look with suspicion upon those who would tell us the purchase of a pill will address the problem.

There were times in the not-too-distant past when people dared not discuss aloud the issues of cancer, sexual dysfunction, and AIDS; but today those issues are discussed open and freely. Perhaps we can move mental illness out of the shadows, and into the social dialog.

One side benefit might be a reduction in the number of manufacturers and their physician-clients who simply prescribe pills to address anything that might remotely appear to be a mental illness. And, perchance to dream, those who need treatment might get it.

I was sparked to write this after reading this article :
Getting Someone to Psychiatric Treatment Can Be Difficult and Inconclusive, at the New York Times site.