Written by Justin H. Briggs, Writer
Justin H. Briggs is the author of "Insanity Comes To Mind: A Memoir On Mental Health." which was published on May 1st, 2020. He is a good writer working at being great.
Mental illness is poor mental health, meaning our feelings, thoughts, and/or behaviors have a negative impact on our lives. These impacts are oftentimes both interpersonal and intrapersonal, meaning they can harm both the individual afflicted with mental illness as well as those around them. This seems straightforward when stated with such brevity, but the matter is far more convoluted to the lives of those of us who live with mental illness, as well as those who support us, than the written word can fully convey.
The invisible utility of mental health
Mental health is like an invisible utility. An invisible utility is something a consumer is supposed to be able to assume will work, like the power in the light switch or the water in the tap. We are to assume these services will work upon command, even at our leisure. Unfortunately, when this invisible utility fails, the results tend to be a mild crisis in the least to the definition of catastrophic in the worst.
Similar are the “failures” of mental health, for lack of a better analogy, which can show as mental illnesses that span the imagination in terms of their expressions and complexities, even within the confines of our individual but invisible utility of mental health.
Post-traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD), for example, is a diagnosis that includes symptoms of anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and hyper-fixation. These are only a few symptoms of a single diagnosis, but each symptom is its own aspect of mental illness with specific treatment methods, both psychiatric and psychological.
To make matters worse, an illness such as PTSD crosses all known boundaries of humanity, just as every other mental illness. And this type of “illness”, for lack of a better word, manifests in consciousness experiences that most of us would otherwise choose to avoid. But no one told me life was going to be easy, and so I will spare you the lie as well.
The emotional spectrum of mental illness
Here is an example of what I mean by conscious experience: emotions. Let us say for argument that tonight you feel down after days of having low energy and negative thoughts. So you choose to stay in rather than attend a potentially uncomfortable social function. In this scenario, your negative feelings are having a negative impact on your social life.
On the contrary, if you have not slept for several days because you have been attending any and every event you can find, your thoughts are racing. Your behavior, as a result, is bizarre or even uncontrollable in terms of the amount of energy you seem to have. You may be in a polar opposite position on the emotional spectrum than the previous hypothetical. I cannot begin to imagine what effects this may be having on your social life.
Those are two broad generalities of the specific mental illnesses of depression and mania, with symptoms resembling exaggerated states of either sadness or excitement, relatively speaking, which are part of the emotional spectrum. These polar opposite emotions, so to speak, are most commonly found as symptoms of bipolar disorder, wherein a person’s moods will fluctuate from one end of the spectrum to the other, often as a result of a chemical imbalance, exterior stimuli, or another similar cause such as brain damage.
While I will not get specific, there is ample evidence to prove that I require mood stabilizing medication to keep my emotions from straining too far into the negative or the positive with regard to the emotional spectrum. This medication is administered as psychiatric treatment for the bipolar aspect of my schizo-affective bipolar diagnosis.
Bipolar disorder was previously understood medically as manic-depression. Schizo-affective is a rather new term medically as well, and is diagnosed as a result of my symptoms of visual and auditory hallucinations.
I experience both mood instability and mild hallucinations still today after almost 20 years of psychological and psychiatric treatment. Many mental health diagnoses such as my diagnosis of schizo-affective bipolar disorder are considered permanent, or incurable, even if treatable.
Reason aflame
As I stated in a prior piece, we do not talk about the things that we do not understand. I will take it one step further with regard to mental illness: We are evolutionarily predisposed to fear the unknown.
Imagine people with good mental health, or at least absent of serious or disabling mental illness, as people sitting around a fire in the night. The fire is reason, order, control people instinctively know that out in the darkness is chaos, disorder, or at the very least the threat of the unknown.
So people tend to stare at the fire, ignoring the darkness beyond its flickering flames. Those of us with mental illness have, for better or worse, drifted off toward the dark. Maybe something caught our attention and our gaze strayed off, or against all effort we were slowly dragged away from the fire, and even still some of us people were simply born without a light to see.
Those who tread to dark places often do so not to return. But sometimes we make it back to the light. A combination of individual effort and societal support allows some of us who have been lost in the darkness of mental illness to return to the fire of stable mental health.
If we are fortunate enough to do so, we tend not to speak of the dark thereafter. Most who never have drifted from the light prefer not to know of anything else. Our stories are told in hushed tones and shouted down from across the fire as evil lies, or worse.
We dare not venture from the fire. I myself tend to feel like I stand on the edge of the light, hoping to never lose sight of the flame again, and knowing full well what waits behind me in the dark.
Read more from Justin H. Briggs
Justin H. Briggs, Writer
Justin H. Briggs is a writer located in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. He is more than his diagnosis and less than his potential for success, in his opinion, but he is working on that. His diagnosis of schizoaffective bipolar disorder manifests symptoms of depression, mania, delusion, paranoia, and hallucination. He is in no way medically certified beyond the occasional CPR certification, but he has been there and done that, so to speak.
