A lot of people are going to feed you lines about how you can deal with mental illness through therapy, prayer, meditation, and by taking various herbs, vitamins, supplements and amino acids, and by practicing Yoga or similar arts, by changing your diet and various lifestyle changes, and so forth. Well all of those things are really good. I do a lot of those things. Hell, I do most of those things. They are all part of a balanced mental health diet. For some types of mental illness for a lot of people those things alone may be the answer. I'm talking about mild to moderate depression, slight anxiety, moderate compulsions, stuff like that. Not being seriously sick in the head.
Not bipolar disorder.
Not epilepsy.
Not schizophrenia.
Not clinical depression that keeps you in bed staring at the ceiling for weeks at a time.
Not obsessive-compulsive disorder where you're checking to see that the door is locked for half an hour before you can leave your house.
Not anxiety/panic disorder so bad that the physical symptoms are obvious to another person. Or agoraphobia so bad you can't leave your house. Ever.
Not ADD/ADHD where you can't hold a consistent train of thought for longer than 10 seconds and are a serious threat to yourself and others when trying to do anything involving, oh, I don't know, heavy objects or machinery.
Having brain cooties is just like having a visible boo-boo. Bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, epilepsy and the like are the psychic equivalents of having a broken leg from a car crash. If you broke your leg would anyone expect you to go jogging with a broken leg? Would they expect you to even try to carry on with your life before you had a cast put on it? OK, some of us have had some really sadistic and messed-up people in our lives who might make those demands, but let's not bring them into it.
So, what happens when you break your leg?
You need to get x-rays.
You need to have the bones set.
You need to have a cast put on the leg .
You'll need crutches and/or one of those little carts to get around.
OK, now let's compare that with the psychiatric/neurological process:
Your initial diagnosis is the x-ray (although getting a fancy brain scan, even an EEG, is the true analog to an x-ray).
Getting your bones set is the painful coming to terms with your illness yourself along with any initial crisis medications and interventions.
The cast, crutches and cart are your long-term meds.
Casts itch, you can't move your leg, and trying to get around on crutches or in one of those carts is a pain in the ass until you master it; and that's side effects and the adjustment periods to meds.
Sometimes the break is so bad that your leg needs to be re-broken (ow! owwww!!! ouch!!!!) and reset and put in a new cast, that's the process of having to try other medications if the ones you try first don't do it for you.
Sometimes you need metal pins put in your legs that mean you'll never run another marathon again and you'll always set off metal detectors in airports and government office buildings and have to explain things to strangers; that's the maintenance prescription you'll be taking the rest of your life.
This is the beginning of the 21st century, we can't yet cure these illnesses, but we can control and manage them. How far out of the mental health closet you wish to come is up to you, because the stigma is still very real, but family, friends, coworkers, et al. need to know that some mental illnesses aren't just something you can cowboy up about and get over. Your brain is physically injured, and like any other part of the body that has received a physical injury, it needs the proper care to heal.
The problem that far too many people have is that they can't see the injury, therefore it is not a real injury. Well, you can show them similar injuries here. Sure, that's not your injury, unless you get one of those fancy brain scans yourself, but pictures help people understand that many mental illnesses are, in fact, physical illnesses as well. If you're the person with the mental illness and you're trying to get your family and friends to understand why you can't just deal with it and get over it, show them the difference between a normal brain and a brain with whatever it is you have. If you're the family or friends, get some understanding yourself.
So are we clear that mental illness is an injury? Good.
What do you do when you're injured? You treat the injury.
The meds are the main part of the treatment. They aren't everything. Just as with a broken leg you need to be taught how to walk with crutches, you still need to do all the other stuff like the talk therapy and the Yoga and the lifestyle changes and the new diet and everything else. But it all starts with the meds. Without the meds you're just going to keep getting worse, no matter how much you delude yourself into thinking otherwise. That especially applies to people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, as they are the worst about not taking meds, let alone admitting they are even ill. There's even a term for it,
=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia]anosognosia[/url][/u]. It's pretty obvious what the deal about the meds is. With schizophrenia various paranoid ideations arise about the meds, or delusions about magical healings are brought to fore, or sometimes you just think you're better than the meds. With bipolar disorder it's the opposite, we often have this Nietzschean arrogance that we're better than the meds at dealing with our issues, with occasional paranoid delusions or ecstasies of miracle healing. Trust me, I've been there. I write from experience. And I'm not the only one who has been down that path.
Sometimes it's not anosognosia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia. Sometimes the side effects just suck so much donkey dong that we just don't want to take any more drugs ever again. Don't worry, we'll try to deal with that issue here.
If you'd rather live in the 18th century and trust your mental health to the herbal recommendations made by a patchouli-drenched clerk with a lip ring working in some vitamin shop, then this site is not for you. While the addition of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and yes, even herbs, can be helpful in achieving proper mental balance, using them alone is equivalent to just using splints to help heal a broken leg. For a sprained ankle splints are sort of OK. You've got to ask yourself, just how bad is it? Really? Sprained ankle bad or broken leg bad? Go back over your life and think about what you've done to yourself and the people around you. It's part of the 12 Step Method to Stay On Medications, Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. You may have done some fucked-up stuff, haven't you? Or the extent of your suffering has been so bad that it affects the people around you. That's broken leg bad my friends.
Maybe you really do need meds right now.
If so, you need the right meds. Because for some conditions, such as epilepsy and bipolar disorder, these imperfect meds are going to be life-long companions until something better comes along. For other conditions they're much more like the cast in the broken leg analogy, something that is inconvenient and a real pain in the ass to deal with, but is still temporary.
