Might Be A Boring Post to Some...

As I have stated before, being in psychopathology has brought a lot of feelings and ideas to me. I realize that I really struggle with mental illness. Ok... let me rephrase here. I don't have a mental disorder, but I struggle to understand it. In class, every now and then, we get a presenter to come to us. This person is someone suffering from a mental illness who wants to share his/her experience and allow us to ask questions. We've already had a speaker who suffered from bipolar disorder and another suffering with post traumatic stress disorder with severe depression. Today we had a guy come to us. It was obvious that something wasn't right. The man stood in front of the lecture room, swaying back and forth with crumpled papers in his hand. He was unkempt. Inside his camping boots were the legs of his dress slacks. His shirt was half-tucked and his tie hung loosely outside his tight fitting jacket. On top of all this was his dingy red baseball cap. I mean just looking at this man, from his appearance, you could tell that their was a disconnection between our worlds and his.

I have to inject that I have no idea where I am going with this. I'm just typing.

So H, as I will call him, went to MIT at 16. The man is part genius. As a kid he went to a top notch school and decided to work with robots and artificial intelligence. You could tell he was smart too. He was well versed in his presentation. I guess the thing that is so hard for me to digest is the why. What happened to turn his life completely around. One day he was doing his college thing and the next he was sitting in his laboratory fearful that robots were coming to get him (I, ROBOT). An instant later, he thought that he was Jesus Christ. I mean was this a gradual build-up. The way he described things made it seem sudden. I have difficulties wrapping my head around that. Why? Who knows!! I guess the best analogy I can use to help me understand it, is a car accident. He was riding along the way when suddenly another car came along and totaled his. That most likely is not the best analogy but right now it will do. By the way, H has schizophrenia disorder.

I guess this interferes with my main train of thought. For the most part, I believe mental disorders development from environmental stressors and that the difference between those who fall prey and those that do not are their psychological makeup. Sounds crazy, but I think some of us are just built to handle more than others. Don't get me wrong I know that biology plays a big part. I know that there is a lot more going on with some disorders such as Alzheimer's and schizophrenia... things of that nature; however, the majority of mental illnesses (my opinion) develop when people find themselves without the ability to handle life. This would cover mood disorders, anxiety disorders, somatoform and eating disorders.

I realize my opinion is most likely the product of the environment I grew up in. Mental disease just isn't mentioned often and not something any of us better be dealing with. As with many ethnic groups you turn to your religion, your family and community culture for support and that is that. The doctor isn't going to be prescribing you no pills because you can't keep it together. If it's (life) getting to you, then you need to take a break. Don't go spending any money talking to a head doctor when you can handle this here. That's generally how it goes round my household.

I don't know... I was just rambling here. I just realized today that I don't think I could specialize in working with people with mental disorders because I lack the kind of enthalpy needed to get these people to recover. I'm not even sure if it's even enthalpy I lack. I mean I feel greatly for what they are going through. I just don't know how to deal with it and how to digest it all. Geez...