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. Some will believe your mental condition needs addressing others will feel that nothing needs rectifying. Each psychiatrist will gauge it differently. An experiment in madness detection was carried out to show how difficult it is to determine who is mad and who is deemed sane.

Students were sent to psychiatric hospitals. They were all told to complain of a knocking sound in their head. All were committed. All 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 was by admitting that they had a problem and accept treatment. Over the following days the students 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 couple 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.

We have mental issues that we ignore, issues we contend with, issues that bother us and things that stop us in our tracks. Mental conditions can be a nuisance or seriously debilitating in the same way that tinnitus can be a slight ringing in the ear or something that drives people to distraction. If the radio in your car is stuck on mute, you drive without music. If the windscreen wipers on our car jam, we avoid driving when it is raining. We do the equivalent with mental issues. To fix a car we must dismantle it to rectify the problem. We may have to tear our thoughts apart to get to the root of the problem. Once the root is addressed, we can reassemble the structure of our minds, putting it all back in a better order.

Taking our thoughts apart can shatter our pride, damage our ego, or smash our self-belief. However, taking our thoughts apart and making changes 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.

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