The Freedom To Learn To Be You

We are all different, and thinking differently isn't an illness

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

There is a widespread idea of considering the different way of thinking and behaving by others as wrong, somehow, if not outright ill.

People who are careless and whimsy tend to consider deep thinkers to be too serious, or depressed. People who take everything seriously, tend to consider the more light-hearted people to be immature.

While we probably see something right in each other’s behavior, we do not always see it in the right light. People aren’t necessarily ill because they are different.

Throughout the human history, I don’t know how long back it stretches, but very long – some people have been considered mentally ill as a result of not being like the others.

Mental illness does exist, no doubt about that, and it is a matter of being unable to function, for instance by doing self-harm or seeing things that do not exist, even though the latter can sometimes be a matter of definition.

But very many mental conditions aren’t really about being ill, they are instead psychological conditions, simply being reactions and remedies to the situation people are in, or have been in.

You wouldn’t consider a moment of anger to be a mental illness, would you? Or being tired in the evening? In fact, the human brain does have a lot of reactions to conditions that will normally be considered completely sane by most people.

If, on the other hand, people have been sleeping, have done like everybody else, and then suddenly want to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, you might start wondering. Or if they suddenly, in the middle of an otherwise pleasant conversation, burst out in a furious “attack”, or so it seems.

And that’s where you with some reason can begin considering if there’s a problem.

Even though, most often, there’s not. You just don’t know everything, and there are probably good, practical reasons behind the behavior.

When you see someone bleeding from a wound, you’ll know that they have been hurt. The wound will, if it isn’t too severe, stop bleeding by itself, there will be a “clot” developed, a covering tissue of what seems to be hardened blood of some kind. A standard protective mechanism built-into humans. After a while, new skin will be created under the clot, and gradually everything gets back to normal.

When people are doing a lot of sports, they may overdo it and get sore muscles. Technically, some milk acid develops when there’s not enough oxygen left in the muscle, and that is what causes the pain. But more practically: it causes the sportsman to relax a bit, which he obviously needs, having overdone it.

The human body – and mind – is full of such mechanisms for protecting and repairing itself. Getting tired is in the first place such a mechanism.

While there’s an eternal discussion amongst scientists on exactly why we sleep, there are various studies showing evidence that the body actually does a lot of necessary repair and maintenance work while we are sleeping – some of which probably wouldn’t happen otherwise, which would become a problem after some time. And that’s just one such mechanism.

A depression is often considered some kind of mental illness, but it is more reasonable to see it as a combination of some natural mechanisms working together – basically like the clot and the sleep, which both help the body cure itself, the depression will provide a framework for the mind to cure itself.

And cure itself of what? Where’s the scar, where’s the milk acid?

That’s where we are somewhat limited as people – we tend to see what is in front of us right now. Not what has been there just before, or, indeed, during some time.

A depression develops over time due to some psychological demands being too heavy to carry.

We can all handle stress, meaning too much to worry about, for some time. That makes us run faster to do it all, or to take a conflict with the people burdening us, so that we can regulate the stress-level back to what is more normal.

But if we can’t, for some reason, either because we are under the influence of dominant people or a dominant situation that we can’t control, we may gradually start withdrawing a bit from such situations that we know will add even more stress. We feel that we cannot handle more, and we try to reduce it.

If the situation isn’t allowing us to withdraw from it, or the stressful parts of it, we get overloaded and will withdraw even more. We will look for ways out, and if we can’t see any or have limited success when trying to get out, we will develop a somewhat pessimistic (but in the situation absolutely realistic) view on life.

That’s where we enter into what can be described as a depression.

Think of people being trapped in a war. They might not be able to escape, and they can’t control when or where the bombs are falling. They’ll get more and more aware of the impossible situation, and gradually, they’ll give up.

The homeless, having lived a life, typically, that worked, and then something happened that brought everything out of balance, will try to stay on top for a while, but will often experience that they are kept in the misery by the situation itself – who will hire a person who doesn’t live anywhere, isn’t able to wash himself, and apparently has some problems? And people, on top of that practical problem, also look down on them and consider them to be unworthy. There are not many ways out of that, and they might just give up along the way.

Women in a violent relationship, employees mocked by a psychotic boss, and tons of other life situation that are only too frequently the reality for people, all have the potential for pushing people into a depression.

Psychologists and other scientists in the area want to add more possible reasons to the development of depressions, because not all people under pressure become depressed, and because some seem to become depressed without the solid reasons I indicated above.

As I’m not a psychologist, I will not argue against that kind of thinking – there could easily be a set of reasons for depressions to develop – but in my perspective, the pressure and stress, and the lack of a way out, will most often be such a burden to people that they will adapt to it.

My take on it is that it is not an illness. It is rather a healthy reaction to the conditions, just like so many other reactions the body shows. We can’t keep trying to get out, when there’s no way out – therefore, it is healthy to stop at some point in time. We can’t keep thinking deeply about the reason for a psychopath to want to harm us, or try to think out a way to escape it, when there are no reasons and there are no ways out.

The depression is simply the expression of a healthy reaction patterns under some unhealthy conditions – change the conditions, and the mind will adapt to it and get out of the depression.

There may be a scar. Most likely, because what can be years of feeling bad will leave memories, and there can be automatic reactions and defense mechanisms, such as anxiety (because bad has happened repeatedly in the past, and as far as the mind can tell, it can happen again, so better be prepared), and the avoidance of some potentially too demanding situations, like social gatherings or a job at a higher level.

But we are all humans, and this whole concept of depressions isn’t about malfunctioning or being of an inferior type – it is simply a healthy reaction, and the scars show how the body and the mind has been able to repair itself and prepare for more of the same that it has already seen.

We have learned, and it shows.

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There is a tendency in society to either consider the depressed ill, as described – which is wrong – or to apply a “get back on the horse” mentality to them, which is most often just as wrong and highly inappropriate.

A depression is not like falling off a horse, it is more like being dragged after it for a while. The last thing you want when you finally get out of that nightmare is to get up on that horse. There are some wounds to heal first.

But then, after a healing process, there is nothing that prevents people from moving on as before. Only, they may not want to, for the reason I mentioned – they have become wary of the risks and might want to preserve a more precautious life-style where they can better control the level of burdens they’re being exposed to.

That’s what many others really should do too, to avoid getting into the same situation.