Misconceptions About Mental Illness We Need to Unlearn
Mental illness is not like a sinus infection. You can’t just wait it out or take a pill to make it go away. Our brains are complex and mysterious, and mental illness is no exception. This leads to many misconceptions that make recovery much more difficult. Here are a few things you should know whether you are suffering or not.
Before we talk about misconceptions, it helps to understand what exactly “mental illness” means. Everyone has stress and difficult emotions from time to time, and this is normal. On the other hand, mental illness is any condition that makes daily life difficult . It can affect your relationship, your job, or prevent you from achieving any other achievable goal.
If that sounds like a pretty broad definition, it’s because the human mind is complex. Mental illnesses can range from anxiety and emotional disorders, which have a serious and tangible effect on your emotions and motivation, to psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, which affect your perception or feelings with things like delusions or hallucinations. Life with any of them can be exhausting. During the day, we rely on our feelings, emotions and perceptions. When either of them fails, it can make life difficult.
I have been fighting mental illness for decades . Over the years, I have been diagnosed with a wide variety of diagnoses, from depression to Asperger’s, and have faced a host of misconceptions. Some of these are basic things that the general population simply didn’t know about, while others are deeply ingrained beliefs that even I had to give up. Here are a few that seem to still remain.
Misconception: “Mental health problems last forever.”
Doctors, patients, and friends who talk about mental illness often tell you they “never really go away.” They say this both to set expectations (since “cure” in the traditional sense is rare) and to help others understand the struggles people with mental illness are going through. The problem is that this is often interpreted to mean that the symptoms of mental illness will never go away.
If this were true, therapy and treatment would be meaningless. In fact, telling someone with a mood disorder, such as depression, that their problems will never go away can undermine their already diminishing motivation to try. However, the truth is a little more encouraging: while we do not know how to cure mental illness, it is very possible to cure many types of mental illness to the point where symptoms can be controlled and a person can live a fulfilling, happy life. a life.
For decades, it was believed that when a person reaches adulthood, their brain will no longer change. As Dr. David Hellerstein explains, even as recently as the 1980s and 1990s, little attention was paid to the concept of physically changing the brain over time. However, in recent decades, researchers are increasingly discovering that neuroplasticity – which simply means your brain makes new connections and realigns throughout your life – can play a huge role in how your brain develops and changes over time:
In short, we realized that “neuroplasticity,” the permanent remodeling of brain structure and function, occurs throughout life. It can be influenced by life experiences, genes, biological agents and behavior, and thought patterns. Interestingly, exercise and physical activity in general have a large effect on “neurotrophic factors” – chemicals that stimulate the growth and repair of brain cells.
The concept of neuroplasticity is still a new area of research, but it offers hope for people with mental illness: just because your symptoms are now severe and unbearable does not mean they will always be. Like many people, I first learned about this idea just a few years ago. For the first time in decades, it seemed to me that there was hope for my situation.
Of course, this is still a difficult path, especially for psychotic disorders like schizophrenia, which are much more difficult to treat. However, over time and with therapy and treatment, your brain can adapt. You may never be “cured,” but it is still possible that mental illness will someday become just a minor annoyance rather than a severe disability that will make it difficult even to get out of bed.
Misconception: “Only aggressive or unstable people have mental health problems.”
If you’ve only read comics, you might reasonably assume that radiation gives you superpowers . Likewise, if you’ve only watched movies, television, or news, you might believe that mental illness makes you a crippled genius at best and a serial killer at worst. Both of these correlations are wrong.
Mental illness, by its very nature, destroys a person’s life. However, the way they appear can vary greatly from person to person. Mental illness is not the only factor that determines how a person behaves and interacts with others. Some people with depression internalize their symptoms and may outwardly appear perfectly happy, while others may show their symptoms very clearly. Worry can make a person irritable or simply avoid social interactions . Assuming mental illness makes someone unstable is like assuming an engineering career makes people wear polo shirts.
With regard to stereotypes about violence, there is little evidence that mental illness and violence have any meaningful relationship. As Dr. Heather Stewart explained in a 2003 article on violence and mental health , mental illness “is neither necessary nor sufficient [to cause] violence.” In other words, having a mental disorder does not inherently make someone aggressive, just as being violent does not mean that someone is suffering from a mental illness.
This does not mean that coincidences never happen. People with mood and anxiety disorders can be aggressive. Anyone else can do that. If you are a friend of someone with a mood disorder, you do not need to worry about them using violence unless they demonstrate a violent tendency. Likewise, you can have anxiety disorder even if you feel like you are living together. Everyone, regardless of personality, lifestyle or background, can suffer from mental illness.
Misconception: “Relationships can’t handle”
Mental illness is never perfect, but that also doesn’t mean you can’t go about normal activities like maintaining a relationship. Because mental illness can be stressful in any relationship, there is often a need to “get together” before you can maintain friendships, work relationships, or romantic endeavors. However, it is usually the other way around: Isolation from a normal relationship can hinder recovery.
As Lisa R. Rhodes , a mental health journalist and schizophrenic sufferer, explains , supportive relationships can help you get better. Because mental illness affects how you perceive or react to reality, having relationships with people who can help you is a huge benefit:
Years of research have shown that having social support is an important part of recovering from mental illness. Supportive romantic relationships are especially important in depression because a good relationship can help support the person experiencing a depressive episode, while a bad relationship can trigger depression or worsen preexisting depression.
From personal experience, one of the hardest parts of dealing with depression was that my perception of the world was often wrong. Relying on friends and loved ones to provide information from the outside helped to resist this perception and support me. Without this psychological counterbalance, I would most likely go too far towards self-destruction or even suicide. While my illness often took its toll on my relationships (and still sometimes), they were also critical to my recovery.
A relationship can certainly be tough for someone with a mental illness. They can also be difficult for those with an incurable disease, someone with children, people living at great distances from each other, or people with red blood who breathe oxygen and live on planet Earth. Relationships are not easy . Mental illness certainly complicates a relationship, but it doesn’t deny you the right to have one.
Misconception: “You can just get rid of it.”
One of the worst and most common misconceptions when it comes to mental illness is the “stop” response. If you’ve ever suffered from a mental illness, you know the exercise: you start talking to a friend about your problems. They listen for a while and offer some support, but eventually they start talking about your attitude to the problem. “It’s all in your head,” or “Just don’t get hung up on it that much,” or “You need to move on.”
The point is, the inability to “just get through it” is the problem . This is what separates mental illness from normal day-to-day stress. Your brain is supposed to be able to filter your emotions and process thoughts rationally, but sometimes it isn’t. Everyone has trouble managing their emotions, and sometimes they need a little encouragement. What sets mental illness apart is that the part of your brain that helps transition from frustrated, anxious, or unmotivated to normal is malfunctioning. The awesome blog Hyperbole and a Half explains how this concept can be devastating and frustrating for everyone involved :
But people want to help. Therefore, they try their best to instill hope in you and to assess the situation positively. You explain this again, hoping that they will try a less hopeful approach, but reexplaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds somewhat negative; how maybe you WANT to get depressed. The positive starts to come out in the form of a spray – a giant spray of desperate happiness is directed right in your face. And so it goes on until you have this strange argument in which you try to convince the person that you are too hopeless to hope, just to give up his optimism crusade and allow you to return to boredom. and lonely alone.
And this is the most unpleasant thing about depression. It is not always something that can be dealt with with hope. It’s not even something – it’s nothing. And you cannot fight with anything. You cannot fill it. You cannot hide it. It just is, pulling meaning out of everything. In this case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to seem completely insane compared to the scale of the problem.
Mood or anxiety disorder is not just a special feeling. It is the loss of ability to feel – or else. Sure, you know you don’t have to be nervous when meeting new people , but your brain can only think about how uncomfortable you feel. You can tell yourself not to think about it, but it won’t work. In other words, if you could just “get over it,” you wouldn’t have mental illness.
This misconception is especially insidious because people with mental illness are also susceptible to it. If everyone tells you to just feel differently, but you cannot, then you start to worry about why you cannot. Your inability to control your anxiety makes you more anxious. You cannot stop feeling hopeless, so you feel even more hopeless. This is a terrible vicious circle, and the only way to break it is when patients and supporters alike realize that they need to find an alternative solution.
Misconception: “Treatment is a waste of time”
One of the most damaging misconceptions about mental illness is the notion that treatment is a waste of time. Similar to the previous misconception, this comes from patients who feel hopeless and supporters who are equally frustrated. As in the previous section, it only serves to hinder genuine recovery.
Of all the misconceptions in this article, I personally relate the most to this. Unfortunately, neuroscience is still a work in progress, which means that even mental health professionals can be error prone due to advances in science or the ever-changing models we use to understand human behavior. If you are cynical (or if the cost of treatment is too high), you can easily feel that getting help is a waste of time. Why pay someone hundreds of dollars to listen to you speak when you can voice your grief to your friends at the bar for free, right?
The reason this misconception is a problem can be attributed to the latter: your bar buddies probably don’t know what they are talking about. Talking therapy may seem like a waste of time, but you are not paying to talk. You pay to have a better mental health experience than you (and your friends). As with most other services where you hire a professional, you pay for the experience.
This process can be very long and involve a lot of wasted effort. Your first few conversational therapy sessions are likely to include many explanations of your past. Some therapies, such as dialectical behavioral therapy, may include classes on coping mechanisms or coping strategies to help you deal with emotional outbursts. If your doctor prescribes medications, you may have to try several types of pills before you find one that works for you and gives you the desired effect. And that’s not to mentionnew treatments that are still being developed .
It’s hard to deal with if you feel like worrying too often is your only problem. If you’re depressed, the thought of even figuring out which type of therapy to choose can be overwhelming, not to mention motivated to go out the door every week to make an appointment. However, as we established earlier, simply trying to “feel better” until you are healed does not work. On the other hand, getting help might. Even a small chance is better than no chance.
My personal journey took almost twenty years. When I was eight years old, I had several seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy, which, as it turned out, I did not have. Later, the diagnosis was changed to Tourette’s syndrome, then ADHD and OCD were added. After that, depression began. I’ve taken at least a dozen different medications, I’ve been in hospitals and special schools. I tried to tighten it up, I tried to pray, I tried to reprogram my brain with computers .
There have been a million moments when this journey seemed pointless. In fact, one could argue that some of my experiences actually made my problems worse . I would like to write here that treatment will definitely help, but I know all too well that this is not always the case. Sometimes you try to do something, but it doesn’t work, and I don’t want to give false hopes to anyone. However, doing nothing was the only thing I ever tried that was guaranteed to achieve nothing.