Mental Illness Is Here To Teach Us
Its lessons are excruciatingly profound
Those who have been through experiences of mental illness may agree it can teach you a lot about how the human mind works. I speak from personal experiences of mental illness, so I have intimate knowledge of both the suffering and learning potential contained within it. My personal experiences are with predominantly anxiety-related mental illness, yet the lessons I learned are, in my view, universal to all mental illnesses, and beyond. Of course, while you are deep in your illness you don’t care about the learning potential, because you are suffering immensely. It is only retrospectively that you may be able to see the illness as a gift.
Abnormality and the Medical Model of Mental Illness
The dominant medical model says that mental illness happens when physical disorders of the brain and body cause a person’s mind to function abnormally in a way which causes them suffering and disrupts their quality of life. The ideal outcome of treatment according to the medical model then looks like a returning of the individual to normal mental functioning. For some, a return to normal functioning may be exactly what they need in order to be happy. For others, an embracing of their abnormality may be what they need. In both cases, an accepting of one’s abnormal mental functioning will bring a degree of peace, self-compassion and both personal and universal psychological insights. I will therefore be talking about the learning which comes directly from embracing the abnormality of mental illness, and hopefully offering a more positive perspective on abnormality, framing it as a learning experience as well as something which requires treatment. Please do not let my focus on the learning potential make you feel disouraged from seeking treatment for mental illness. To reinforce this, I have provided a link outlining various treatments for mental illness.
Learning from Abnormality
Much of our knowledge about normal human psychology has come from stuying instances of abnormal psychology, such as mental illness, and comparing the experiences of abnormal people to that of the average or normal person. Through comparing the experience of mentally ill people to that of normal people, we get a clearer understanding of what makes those people normal. This is true of psychological knowledge, and it is also true for individual experience — a person who has gone or is going through the abnormality of mental illness acquires a greater understanding of normality by contrast.
To use a personal example, throughout most of my time at univerity I was chronically overwhelmed by the obsessive thinking characteristic of OCD. My thoughts were incredibly repetitive and distressing. Their content was shameful, both directly in that my thoughts would outright accuse me of being a bad person, and indirectly in that I would be bombarded with thoughts about things I felt I shouldn’t think about, like violent fantasies which went against my personal values, even fears of being a pedophile for simply looking at children (a commonly reported obsessive thought). The thoughts had an intrusive quality. I could not stop or control them, and I felt like I needed to perform compulsive rituals to prevent the thoughts from causing bad things to happen.
My suffering came from realisation that I could not control my thoughts — I could not make myself have less repeitive, less distressing, less shameful thoughts. In fact, the more I tried to make my thoughts better, the worse they became, like struggling to get out of quicksand. I’d had experiences of anxiety and depression before reaching university, but by this point in my life my anxiety and depression wasn’t about anything outside of myself, it was about my own obsessive thoughts. I was anxious and depressed about the state of my own mind, a mind which I had lost control over and was essentially bullying and shaming me into feeling a compulsive need to defend myself against imaginary threats to my safety, reputation and security. I was no longer able to feel comfortable inside my own head. The illness had taken away the control I had over my thoughts, and turned my thoughts against me.
This was an utterly isolating experience, as I could remember a time when my mind was normal, and I wanted nothing more than to return to that state of normality. I couldn’t help but feel a deep resentment towards the normal people who didn’t have to go through the abnormal suffering I experienced from the moment I woke up till the moment I fell to sleep. Sometimes the obsessive thoughts wouldn’t let me sleep, and I was given a delightful cinema of horrific mental projections as a substitute for sleep’s comforting nothingness. I was more aware of normality than ever before in my life, because normality had been violently taken away from me. I was left with the alienating abnormality of obsessive-compulsive mental illness.
I was also left with the deep longing to return to normality, so naturally I thought a lot about it, the same way you think a lot about a person who just died. I was grieving the loss of my normality, and at the same time becoming acutely aware of what normality is, just as you might become acutely aware of a person’s character once they’ve died. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, and once it’s gone, you know it far better than when you still had it.
Personal Lessons about Impersonal Truths
From this side of the illness, I can see clearly that I got one major thing wrong. I thought I’d lost conrol of my thoughts, but I never had control of my thoughts to begin with. Before the illness I’d been happilly ignorant to this fact. Before the illness I’d been okay with the my thoughts. They weren’t distressing or shameful enough that I felt strongly like a needed to change them. Once they became distressing and shameful, I felt I needed to change them. Only once I tried to change them did I realise I couldn’t control them.
I won’t go to deeply into this realisation, but if you want to investigate it in your own life, consider this: Can you stop your thoughts if you want to? Can you completely empty your mind at will? If so, how long for? If you can control your thoughts it follows that you should be able to stop them and empty your mind for as long as you want. Turns out most people must spend years meditating before they can empty their minds for even a matter of seconds. Most of us don’t have control over our thoughts, but we don’t realise this until our thoughts cause us such immense suffering that we try to change them, and then realise realise that no matter how hard we try, we can’t. An inability to control one’s thoughts is normal, and my abnormal obsessive compulsive experiences have given me a deep insight into this aspect of our human condition. There is an enormous sense of peace, freedom and clarity which comes from seeing and accepting this lack of control, but that is a topic for another article.
Speaking from Experience
I am genuinely deeply grateful for my experiences with obsessive compulsive mental illness. They have opened me to deeper investigations of reality and human consciousness which have imbued my life with a meaning and clarity I would never known had I not gone through such agonising, isolating and alienating experiences. If someone had told me to be grateful of my illness while I was totally in its grip, I would probably have killed them, or killed myself. Such is the retrospective quality of mental illness’s wisdom.
My view is that mental illness is here to remove us from the normal state of consciousess, so we can see that normal state more clearly from our abnormal vantage point. This is excruciating, isolating, and you never asked for it. But it happened to you. You’re here, on the outside looking in, and that’s lonely, but it will also teach you everything you’ll come to know about the human condition. Trust your abnormality of your illness, and it will teach you. Become aware of the deep shame you feel around this abnormality, and the shame will start to diminish. Find others who understand your experiences. Let others support you in whatever way they can. Take good care of yourself. Eat well. Drink water. Rest. Get professional help if you need it. Enquire about medication if that feels right. You will come through your illness better than you were before, more intact. You are safe. You are protected. You are abnormal, and that’s actually pretty cool.
