Mental Illness Doesn’t Mean Crazy

Society over time has confused mental illness with the term “crazy.” I would know because I have told my therapists, I think I am crazy multiple times in my life. Their responses were always the same, “Well that’s good because if you think you are crazy you are not.”

People with mental illness always start out thinking they are crazy because no one else is either as honest as they are or as sensitive. They/we have multiple gifts because we are lucky to have the opportunity to see the world through our own lenses. Lenses that are conditioned to examine our feelings through truth. Only truth can help a person understand and deal with the emotions they feel under life’s general experiences. Those who go to therapy are taught how to get to the root of their feelings to understand them and the only way to do that is not to lie to ourselves. In fact we are taught to do the exact opposite and that is to come face to face with our own truths.

Why do you think people have repressed memories? Are repressed memories ever a camping trip to Yosemite or summer vacation that was the best one you ever experienced? Unfortunately they are not. They are normally molestations, rapes, or even murders they have witnessed. Repressed memories are normally so dark and destructive that the mind protects us by pressing it so far back into your memories, so you can’t find it.

Having mental illness has the gift of forcing us to look deep within ourselves in order to understand why we feel the way we feel.

Most likely, we have struggled with authority because we see truth in everything. We recognize people who pretend to be happy. We feel bad for the people who can’t see that they are lying to themselves. When we try to point this out or stand up for ourselves, it’s normally not accepted, which then make us a target. I always know that someone knows they are lying to themselves when I am honestly being honest with them. In a fleeting flash, you can see it in their face that you are right and then something in their brain causes them to hold on to their opinion, idea, or belief.

People don’t want to hear the truth and that is all people diagnosed with mental disorders know how to do. You may wonder why. If you do, it is because people with anxiety, depression, bi-polar, OCD, and all the hundreds of others are conditioned to in therapy.

Therapy that is another “no no” word in society. You hear in dialogue in movies and TV shows. It’s normally a scene of your typical step-ford wife telling another one about someone whose seeing a therapist. And they go on and on about what did he or she do to go and why are they going. They have to be crazy if they are seeing a shrink. They see it as, “Is life so hard to deal with you have to go to a shrink.” Or “Your seeing a shrink? Why you seem normal to me.” That is not the point. There is no normal because normal cannot be defined.

To me normal is being able to look yourself in the mirror and feel good about yourself and the people whom you are associated with. But no one is normal because no one really knows what normal is anymore. Christmas time is no longer normal, it’s actually crazy. Normal cannot exist because “normal” is NOT black or white because humans beings are in the gray matter. Anything that involves human emotions is normal because it is truth. How we deal with emotions and the choices we make based on how we perceive and interpret the world is where normal becomes the gray matter. Having human emotions is what makes us human. That is fact; that can be scaled using black or white. But our perceptions and interpretations is when the scale is no longer viable.

Sane people would say, “Yes, thank God for therapy or I would go crazy.” And they are 100% right. Society and people have it switched around. Individuals are not crazy; society is crazy. If you are an individual who thinks going to a shrink is for crazy people, you are probably lying to yourself or like most people who take the ostrich approach by putting their head in the sand. These are the same people who get angry when you tell them the truth about their self. We are not kids anymore where if you can’t see the monster than the monster can’t see them.

Dinner Scene that I titled “I’m Crazier Than You”

There are some mental illnesses that make people act crazy, but we can all act crazy all the time with out actually being crazy. Society is only a construct; it’s not “The Guide to the Universe.” Every here the term “if everybody jumped off the bridge, would you.” Same thing applies here. All because society says something or makes us believe a certain way doesn’t make it right or fair. Society is nothing but a large group of people in an city, county, area, region, state, country, or world that have all played “follow the leader.”

Society is nothing but a community that has created a set of behavior guidelines, which are based on inaccurate information fueled by misconceptions and interpretations by individuals through how well they can communicate and their intellect.

People’s behavior in general is crazy especially brought on by stress. It’s similar to sparkling wine and champagne. All champagne is sparkling wine, but not all sparkling wine is champagne. Champagne is only champagne if it is sparkling wine that comes out of the Champagne region of France.

The point is that everyone is in fact crazy, but crazy is not mental illness. Mental illness can make us crazy sometimes, but I know tons of people who should either be diagnosed with something or they have moments that drive them too to act crazy.

There is a difference between be diagnosed with a mental illness and the simple term “crazy.”

I am diagnosed with ADHD, extreme anxiety, and moderate depression. I do show bi-polar highs and lows with or without my meds, but it’s normally because I experienced an emotional trigger.

My behavior does in fact change enough that is recognized by family or those closest to me because they see it first hand. My emotional trigger is negativity acted out towards me or when I feel stress. I control it with three medications for each day.

I take one Wellbutrin every morning, two Adderral twice a day, and two Clonazepam in the evening or whenever I feel a panic attack coming. This keeps me pretty leveled out as long as a stay on my meds.

You have probably seen movies or TV shows that have a character that goes off their meds or refuses to take them and followed with a dramatic event as a result. This in fact is true. I have tried going with out my meds here and there, but it is always a mistake. I can feel a difference between one to three days

The important thing that I want people to understand that my ADHD, anxiety, and depression disorder is simply a lack of dopamine production in my brain.

Why is it so easy to accept and understand Diabetes, Lupus, or Cancer as acceptable illness, but when you hear that someone is bi-polar every one instantly stops and pauses because the first thing in there head is are they going to go crazy.

Yeah maybe, probably. They might be too honest, but there is no such thing. To me being honest is the best way to communicate in our world otherwise information, facts, ideas all become misconceptions because it was based on inaccurate information from the beginning.

In Silver Lining’s PlayBook, Matthew Quick does and amazing job showing this when he has a system that he relies on truth to understand his emotions. Emotions is what makes people act crazy. It’s not the person, it’s emotions.

Someone who is not diagnosed with a mental illness can experience high levels of emotional stress to the point they act crazier than I do without my meds. The problems is society doesn’t accept mental illness as a real disease. We are judged because of our mental illness.

I have called in sick to work because I was up all night battling panic attacks, and I finally got my self dosed down enough to where I could finally sleep. But I called in sick with the flu. I knew if I told them the truth in that cased I would be seen as a liar, risk, or liability.

People with mental illness should not be treated this way. If anything, it should be the opposite because the feeling of being judged or talked about is a trigger. It is normally society that causes people to go on meds because the stress amount is what is crazy, not the person. The people who are the biggest trigger for me and others with bi-polar or something closely related is family who acts like they are better than you because they appear to have a “normal” life and their family does “normal things.” And all you here is normal and perfect over and over again. They give you advice that makes you feel like a child while they are worse off because they have an entire heap of issues that they bury their head in the sand on.

If you can identify, TRY THIS next time you go to a family gathering and someone starts making you feel the way I described in the previous paragraph, call them out on the stuff they won’t face in their own lives. It will probably start a fight by blaming your illness, or they will of course say, “at least I am not the crazy one.” Then that will entice your trigger, so you will loose it because you are so frustrated that they turned their refusal to deal with their own problems on the fact that you are “the crazy one.”

We always wonder about how one person can do it all and everyone is in disbelief by their performance. My perspective is, they are either over medicating to keep up with demands of society, or they are working themselves into a trigger point and they fall apart when they get home. Where society can’t see them loose.

It would be CRAZY to think that person is super human for appearing to be capable of a heavy workload. I know this because I have been this person. I have always battled my three little mental abnormalities. I have worked myself to death because I didn’t think I had a choice because of the demands of work. So, I overmedicated my Adderall, which kept me held together long enough to get all my work done without loosing it. Which in turn made me double up on my Clonazepam because I was still stimulated by my Adderall.

I hate my Adderall at times because it curves my appetite terribly which causes my blood sugar to go down and then I become impossible to deal with because I am so annoyed by everyone around me.

But going off my meds or dealing with my mental illness each day is not different than a diabetic taking insulin everyday and when they don’t it causes them the same problems mental and physical.

The body and mind all work together. Physical ailments can lead to mental side effects just as mental ailments are often felt with physical discomforts. My panic attacks make my heart raise because my brain thinks it is in survival mode so my brain over produces cortisol, which is a stress hormone to help with fight or flight. My brain over produces cortisol. Why? I don’t know. Nor does the doctors.

Science and technology has achieved unbelievable advancements; however, it took twenty years, a plethora of psychologists, psychiatrists, behavioral therapy, licensed mental councilors and once I tried checking myself into a psych ward.

That sad reason I didn’t get to stay, is I couldn’t afford it or afford to take time off of work because I couldn’t tell my job the truth, which was that job caused me too much stress and my medication was not enough and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Our society is full of hate and judgement because other people are different. So groups are taken care of in regards to their labels, but mental illness is still not one of them. Even if you tell them, they might cater to you just to follow legal issues, but you can’t erase that judgement they feel about you when deciding what to do with you in the future. My point is people with mental illness constantly feel judged because people act different around us. People make us feel ashamed for our illness instead of support us. People see us as week when we are not. People see us as a threat because they are either scared or jealous or both.

For me and many others, it is the stress of our outside world that is our trigger, which causes our emotions to run wild within us. We cannot digest and understand these emotions therefore we use rational and practical reasoning, which leads us to only depend on the truth. People can’t handle the truth was correctly stated by Jack Nicholson. He’s 100% right. In Silver Linings Playbook, Pat is always wanting to know the truth because he needs the truth in order to make since of his emotions.

Mental illness is the same as the body’s ailments like the hundreds of various diseases, cancers, or just born that way. Some people have these problems that are genetic, so is the different diagnoses of mental illness. The silver lining to this truth is people don’t have to ever worry about a person using their mental illness as an excuse because society has already made us feel so ashamed of it, we wouldn’t dare speak of our mental illness. People are always surprised when they know my illnesses because they say, “but you don’t act crazy.”

The saddest part of mental illness is the lack of attention the media or society puts into it. Movies like Silver Linings Playbook and Netflix’s My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are the two forms of media that helps open people’s eyes to it but we need more spot lights on this. I should not feel I have to call in sick with the flu when it really because of sleep deprivation because of ten hours of triggered anxiety. My insurance should cover mental illness under the same umbrella as physical conditions. I would love to see a therapist and get off my meds and try to understand my anxiety and depression and why my emotions are what they are but I can’t afford $250 an hour and insurance doesn’t cover it without a $10,000 deductible.

Society calls me crazy while I am the one who is trying not to “the crazy aunt, ” or “the weird girl who doesn’t talk very much” or “the employee with all the excuses” of why she called in sick.