I feel that this is probably an essay that I should preface with the disclaimer that I don’t really know what I’m talking about here. This is a chain of thoughts and suppositions which grazes on some touchy subjects, and I could be way off base. Nevertheless I feel that these may be thoughts worth sharing.
Okay. Something that seems a bit odd to me is that we describe mental illness as being a qualitative aberration rather than a quantitative aberration. That is, we say that depression is categorically unlike mere sadness, ADHD categorically unlike mere restlessness, narcissism categorically unlike mere pride, and so forth. I think we’re doing this a lot right now to emphasize the fact that mental illness is real, it’s an actual thing that happens that can ruin lives and kill people. Unfortunately, I feel like this framing leaves a lot of more marginal cases in a terrible position. What of those of us who fail to meet the standards of depression but have mere everyday crippling melancholy? What of those of us who are merely distractible, proud, irritable, impetuous… Are we therefore completely fine, even if we find coping difficult?
I don’t think separating mental illness from mere emotional difficulty is always a beneficial viewpoint, or even frequently so. I think of emotions as being like allergies – they’re a response in our body that exists to protect us from irritants, to make us healthier. They usually do. However, occasionally they can be counterproductive – and sometimes they can kill us.
Context and quantity are the only things that separate a medicine from a poison.
There are often dialogues comparing mental illness to emotion in an attempt to discredit the concept, acting like depression etc are new inventions or that the only necessary solution to these sorts of imbalances are a nice jog through the woods or some other horseshit. These idiocies in particular tend to make this a territory that people, particularly those directly suffering from mental illness, get defensive about. The popular conception is that emotions are fundamentally controllable, and that being overwhelmed by them is a sort of personal weakness – therefore, since mental illness is not a personal weakness (except perhaps in the same literal sense as a paralyzed limb), emotions and mental illnesses are categorically dissimilar.
In describing how mental illness is fundamentally unlike emotion, people often describe it as a chemical imbalance. Again, I’m speaking as a complete layman here, but isn’t this still completely consonant with the conception of them as an overwhelmingly strong emotion? All emotions are chemical, and if it’s such an overwhelming sensation that it derails your life that’s obviously imbalanced.
If we understand emotional balance as being situational, delicate, and on a spectrum, then it becomes clear that a) we probably all need a tune-up and b) there’s little hard division between everyday overemotional and dangerously ill. Unfortunately, the mechanisms of emotion are extremely complicated and can easily be knocked out of alignment, and it’s incredibly difficult to tell when this happens. Everything that governs who we are and how we act is a machine that is a black box to us whose machinations are occasionally extremely volatile. I guess my point is… don’t wait until you’re undeniably, obviously, and perhaps irrevocably sick before you start thinking about your mental health. Those things which become illness often start as something smaller, and it’s better to go to a doctor than to an emergency room. And, I guess, also, don’t assume that just because someone hasn’t crossed the threshold to mental illness they are totally fine.