Mentality

We are all mad. Try to prove you are not mad and people will really think you are a nutter. Whether we are deemed crazy or not depends on people’s opinion. Some will think so, others won’t. People have compiled a list of potential defects of the mind. The list is so long it fills a large tome big enough to make a dictionary seem like a pamphlet. We each have a most varied upbringing. So many cause and effects. Scintillating random chaotic events that produce individuality and cause to categorise suboptimal behaviour. Some will class it as suboptimal. Some will class is as something that needs addressing. Some see it as beneficial. Morality is opinion. It also a matter of opinion whether a mental condition needs to be rectified or not. Lots will gauge it differently. This was demonstrated with an experiment in madness detection.

Students were sent to psychiatric hospitals. They were all told to complain of a knocking sound in their head. All were committed and held captive in the wards. They came clean. They were not released. The doctors thought they must be mad if they came to the hospital pretending to have a problem. The only way they could get out and back into the world was by admitting that they had a problem and would accept treatment. Over the following days the student said that they were getting better, satisfying the doctors of the eligibility to go home. When news of this was published it caused outrage and shock. How could this be. The story did not end there. A year later the professor who sent these students out in this experiment got a phone call. “Ha-ha, we have another one of your students here!”. The professor replied, “I haven’t sent any more”. It demonstrated that mental conditions are difficult to diagnose. It also speaks about pride. The doctors where happy to release them on the basis that their treatments had worked.

Mental conditions can be debilitating, or they can be a nuisance in the same way as tinnitus can be a little ringing in the ear or something that drives people to distraction. The radio in your car may get stuck on mute but that doesn’t prevent you from driving the car like a puncture would. A bit more limiting would be a car with jammed windscreen wipers. You can’t drive safely when it is raining. Your ability to drive your car depends on the rain, an external factor. We have mental issues that we ignore, issues we contend with, issues that bother us and things that stop us in our tracks. Sometimes we have to dismantle the car to find the fault, then put it back together to get going again. Whilst taking our thoughts apart can shatter our pride, damage our ego, or smash our self-belief, taking our thoughts apart can be remarkably positive. A puncture is a tiny hole in an otherwise fine tyre. One small change in perception can be life altering. We spend years not knowing, not realising, not understanding that we have nothing more than something equivalent to a puncture in our mind. It can be easily fixed. If we want to fix ourselves that is. Call it what you will, fix, enhance, change. The mind is malleable. With a little work, you can improve the state of your mind.

Is your problem different, more complex, unlike problems others have? It may seem so but in truth it is a mere variant of a common issue and curable as any other.