- Mental Junkyard… mind the dogs

pick a hat any hat... any hat will do	Aug 1st, 2007 10:54:19 am - Subscribe
A friend told me something today that I just found really hard to swallow. He told me that he'd considered and got a referral to go to a psych and have himself checked out just in case there was something about him that just might show up in a personality test for a job or something somewhere along the line. I couldn't get my head around it. I told him that if he were really worried about his mental health and he was finding that there was some kind of impairment or some kind of distress in his life that he felt he could attribute to psychological reasons then yes, he should get treated. But he seemed to think that psychologists are the only people who can accurately and reliably tell you about little things to do with your own person that you won't be able to recognise yourself. I tried to explain to him that this wouldn't be any use anyway. You can lie on personality tests and you can lie to a psych. They aren't some kind of soul percieving machine that's going to suddenly be able to diagnose you so that you can look out for other situations like that in the future. I tried to explain that there are certain stigmas around mental illness (maybe even rightfully so? Subject for another blog) that he could do without. I tried to explain that when you get involved in all of this you can quite easily manifest symptoms. You can go in a normal healthy person and you can come out a jibbering wreck! He still seemed to think that there was some method to his 'madness'. Its a tell tale sign of society that my friend can sit there and over diagnose himself and his family and be okay with that. Perhaps they are a little dysfunctional, but it doesn't mean that they have mental illness. I mean, to some degree we all have illnesses in our body. Very few people get through the day without any kind of ache or pain. Without any kind of imperfection in their body and I think that a person's mind is just the same. We all can find symptoms that will match the diagnosis if we look hard enough. I just think that its a bees hive and should be left alone unless it interferes with your life. There are so many people out there struggling with mental illness. Its a pandemic. But we don't seem to be able to stem the flow of the disease. We don't seem to be able to stop the cause of the illness. We don't seem to be able to make people really better. And at the same time we don't want to let them be sick because they remind us that society as a whole generally seems to fail most people... fuck its a head spin isn't it. Well I hope you're all brave enough out there to just accept yourselves for who you are, without needing that fucking diagnosis of what you are. Night bloggosphere. Tron
mood: catatonic	(0) comments