Thinking about mental illness

My friends who take depression so seriously also take mental illness very seriously.

When you are young it is easy to be more passionate about things. That's not just that you discover more shades of gray the longer you live, but you are also aging and getting less energentic. Maybe it's related.

I understand their anger when people lightly tweet that their OCD is acting up that day, or call themselves depressed when they are merely sad. There are people for whom this is a debilitating condition. They have a hard enough time being taken seriously already, without making their condition a joke. It is hurtful and harmful. I also kind of understand the temptation to draw the equivalency.

It all started with an episode of "Head of the Class", a television series that ran from 1986 to 1991, focusing on a class of gifted students and their unconventional teacher. (Teachers, actually. It changed from Howard Hesseman to Billy Connolly toward the end.)

Anyway, in one episode a psychologist evaluated all of the students, I believe as part of a larger study. They were not patients, or technically invested in the results of the study. That meant they were not going to get the results, but their curiosity was unbearable and they were gifted. They hacked in and were devastated by their findings, as the notes made them all seem deeply disturbed.

After the usual sitcom-plications, the tester came back and explained to them that the terms they used were descriptive of tendencies, but none of the notes were diagnoses. They were fine.

It made a deep impression on me then that things that you might see a counselor for could still be present, even if not at the level where you would see a counselor.

This kind of came up in the story of my one friend. I said he had a tendency toward depression. Usually he is not depressed, so you would not say he had depression. It is easier to get him there than it would be for most people who are not depressed.

A lot of common OCD behaviors are issues related to risk and safety. I'll go back to popular entertainment with As Good As It Gets, but it is easy to see how hand washing and door locking can start as a form of protection, even if it takes on a life of its own. It seems reasonable that a person who is more anxious - even if they are not yet at the point where anti-anxiety medication would be recommended - might find that their anxiety focuses around things they hope to prevent.

What I am trying to say - and do not feel like I am saying elegantly - is that perhaps we have more similarities than we realize. Perhaps we have a lot that we can learn from each other.

Tomorrow I want to focus a bit more on how we get there.