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“one who has a variety of learning disabilities and nascent mental problems leading to a frustrating time in school and a tendency to pursue interests outside the traditional rules of a society that rejected him.
Only by being useful or talented, and receiving external recognition, would I achieve personhood. I couldn’t imagine a world where I was a worthwhile person by dint of mere existence; I felt like I needed to earn it and prove it every day.
Addiction is a mental disorder that messes up the logic parts of your brain and replaces them with a need to get the substance.
If you have an alcoholic parent, you build a little fortress around yourself. You don’t trust people to be looking out for you, and you gather such vivid memories of being let down that you reduce or sever relationships so the risk of disappointment is eliminated. You are a rock, you are an island.
Reader, the whole point of a doctor is to know more than you do, assess a problem, and then help you. Seeing people and trying to help them is the entirety of their job, and thus if you are a person, you are worthy of being seen. You are worthy of help.
Society should have been evolved enough to notice problems he had with hyperactivity when he was a kid. Schools should have noticed his learning disabilities and addressed them, rather than concluding that he was a bad kid and a dumb kid. He shouldn’t have accepted that assessment. He shouldn’t have thrown away his school career as a result. Those guys at the airport shouldn’t have offered drugs to a kid. He shouldn’t have accepted the drugs. I should have had more sympathy. I should have called him back. America should run a mental health care system that isn’t shameful. America should offer
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So these jerks make jokes and roll eyes, and the average person gets a little more hesitant to go to therapy and work hard at it because they’ve been told that these issues—which might be causing a lot of pain and stunting development—are ridiculous. As that discriminatory mindset further infests society, people might believe that therapy itself is ridiculous and that people who seek it are ridiculous. And then people who need help don’t get it.
Yes, there is discrimination against people with mental illness and, yes, it can be a scary thing to talk about. But the hunger to do so is there, and by being open yourself you can get that conversation out on the dance floor.
We say we’re “totally OCD” for lining up our pencils in the right place on our desk when in fact all we are is tidy.
By applying actual words with significant specific diagnostic meanings to much lighter circumstances, people are robbing and devaluing people with mental illness.
Because I am over fifty years old now and a dad, I have an interest in history. Didn’t always. In high school, I thought it was boring and irrelevant to my boldly innovative MTV young person life. Only now do I realize how fascinating it is because it’s how we got here. History is why everything that’s happening is happening.
