Individual Counseling

Mental Disorders and Being Human

By  | 

A good way to think of the various mental health disorders is as normal behavior exaggerated. What we find embedded in these disorders are thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make up part of the human condition as such. But these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are taken to extremes that end up exerting a highly negative impact on functioning.

The fact that mental disorders don’t exist in some other universe of functioning but instead represent typical ways of being in their exaggerated forms is probably why psychology students everywhere tend to diagnose themselves with lots of disorders over the course of their studies. They see themselves in the criteria because most of those criteria aren’t qualitatively different from ways they’ve thought, felt, and behaved but are only quantitatively different, are only exaggerated.

This can all become a huge problem if you really are struggling with a mental illness or find yourself in a support role for someone who is because the unconscious tendency is to start to stigmatize and sort of put into check any and all behaviors that suggest a drifting from the ‘normal’ to the ‘abnormal’, and sadly this often means the unwitting denial of the basic right to be a human being. Because at times we all experience ups and downs, we all get paranoid, we all misinterpret stimuli, we all obsess, we all experience existential anxiety, we all feel depressed.

But for those struggling with a mental illness it’s almost like inhabiting any of these states becomes tabu, it’s almost like the expectation becomes “You can’t be a human being anymore you’ve got to be a robot.” There’s no perfect solution to this problem, since obviously being aware of and defending against triggers that usher in episodes of mental illness is essential to mental health maintenance. But sensitivity can be increased around the issue, we can remember that everyone has the right to be less than perfect sometimes. And we can remember that it’s unfair to hold someone struggling with mental illness to a higher standard of behavior than people with good mental health.

Related posts:

  1. Dual Diagnosis A dual diagnosis is when a mental illness and a substance use disorder occur at the same time. This situation is so common that when good clinicians diagnose one they are always on the lookout for the other. It can be difficult to tease out whether substance use leads to mental illness or whether the […]...
  2. You Are Not Your Diagnosis “Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.” – Mark Epstein For some receiving a mental health diagnosis is a good thing because it creates certainty around an area that was always cloudy and threatening. Just having an explanation can provide a lot of relief, even when this explanation doesn’t do […]...
  3. Superheroes In The DSM This morning as I woke up groggy and confused from a fitful dream it suddenly dawned on me that most comic book superheroes could be diagnosed with a disorder from the DSM IV-TR. Actually all mental disorders are really just normal behavior exaggerated, which is why mental health professionals need to take great care in […]...
  4. Hallucination Many people experience a hallucination and fear that they are going crazy. But hallucinations come from a variety of sources and can be quite benign, not pointing to any sort of mental illness. If you have been experiencing hallucinations and are concerned about it don’t be embarrassed to seek help because just like all medical […]...
  5. Care With Labels The fact that these days people receive a diagnostic label they must carry around for the rest of their lives based on a one hour interview is mind boggling. There are so many variables in play, like how the client is feeling that day, how active symptoms are, what the clinician has been reading and […]...
  6. Depression As A Wake Up Call When people become depressed they’re understandably desperate to get things back to how they were before. But the flaw in this outlook is that it’s often exactly how things were before that led to their depression. The problem with the current scientific view of mental illness is that it tends to let people off the […]...
  7. Mental Illness If you ever struggle with a mental illness and notice people demeaning what you are going through, saying things like “You don’t look sick” or “It’s all in your head”, you’ve got to shrug it off. We often make snap judgments. Our brains quickly process available sensory information to tell us if something is off […]...
  8. Mental Health Defining mental health is complicated. Many of us make the mistake of thinking that it is the absence of symptoms of mental illness. It’s easy to see why because the mental health industry is powered by people who can no longer cope with their symptoms on their own and decide to try therapy to alleviate […]...
  9. Mental Illness And Causation Let’s imagine a morbid scenario. A man in good health and good spirits is taking his usual afternoon walk through the park on a summer day when he is attacked by an unidentified assailant and stabbed several times. Paramedics are unable to reach the scene in time and he dies. I could argue that he […]...
  10. Mental Health Crisis When a friend or family member is going through a mental health crisis people usually become highly motivated to get them help. One of the great tragedies is that if the crisis passes organically, plans to get that person help tend to get abandoned. The internal monologue is something like “Wow that was scary and […]...
  11. Mental Health Stigma In my view the primary reason that there is stigma attached to mental health issues is that every single person you know, without exception, is going through personal struggles that you know nothing about. The human condition is a struggle. We’ve been burdened with conscious awareness of our existential situations, we are at once godlike […]...
  12. Why Stigma Around Mental Illness Is Still Going Strong One of the most important reasons why stigma around mental illness is still going strong despite all efforts to eradicate it is that everyone is struggling with something despite their shiny veneers. Most people work hard to repress awareness of the touchy spots in their own lives, wanting nothing to do with these vulnerabilities. They […]...
  13. Online Mentoring For Mental Health Counselors If you want to take your psychological knowledge and with it your practice to the next level you’ve come to the right place. I have expertise in existential psychology, behavioral psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapy, narrative therapy, and mindfulness, and have written extensively on all of these psychologies in various contexts. I have spent a […]...
  14. Medical Model of Mental Illness The medical model of mental illness has gained a lot of traction in recent years. Basically it posits that a mental illness is a disease, just like any other disease, and should be treated and cured like one too. While this idea has the benefit of reducing some of the stigma around mental health issues […]...
  15. Human Growth If we lived to be 10,000 years old maybe we could put off chasing our dreams or becoming the people we were meant to be. Many don’t adequately realize how short time really is, and they secretly believe they are going to live forever. This theme comes up over and over in therapy and I’ve […]...
  16. Human Connection Where authentic human connection is depression is not. Depression wants to rob you of your most important relationships. It wants to hold you back from forming new ones. It wants to keep you emotionally and physically isolated. It wants to make you appear uninterested and boring. The more it can keep you from spontaneously interacting […]...
  17. The Right Way To Approach Human Conflict The way most people approach human conflict is to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to make the problem go away. That sounds fine on paper but in the existential sense it’s a flawed approach because it puts the cart before the horse, it puts the problem before the living, breathing person. And […]...
  18. Existential Isolation And Human Connection In existential circles it’s often said that no two people have ever sat in the same room. This is because our own unique life histories and genetic makeups color the way we perceive the world around us so that the same objective data point is interpreted differently by me than it is by you. This […]...
  19. Human Growth Is A Continuous Process Most motivated people striving forward in their personal and professional lives make the mistake of constantly discounting their present progress in favor of some not so clearly defined future progress. Where they are is never good enough, it’s always where they’re hoping to get that’s good enough. But if and when they reach that far […]...
  20. Human Development Takes Time “He who would learn to fly one day must learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” – Frederick Nietzsche It’s tough to tell if it’s a Western bias or something common to all of humanity, but people want results right away. They believe in the possibility […]...
Related Items