The human mind is one of the most enigmatic things on this planet. Well, I guess it is as I have never seen anything more complicated other than women whom I better categorize as mysterious rather than complicated but given to understand the fact that mysteries are complicated this fateful mixture of terminologies.
The human mind has been the subject of study and scrutiny for what seem like eons. There is a catch to the situation though. Humans studying their own minds lands them up on trickier grounds, since the mind is not altogether a physical entity. The human mind is a concoction of matter and all that is other than matter; the sublimity of thoughts which are somewhere quantified. The matter is that the whole matter is slippery. So what do we conclude of the studies that have been done by researchers and scientists all over the world? Are their conclusions to be trusted when the subject is so tricky? We may or we may not.
My concern here is the concept(s) of the “ailments” that afflict the human mind and thereof the prognosis of the people who are known to be the best in this field, our psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and all. The very concept(s) of the “ailments” of the human mind are disastrously off –the-wall as far I have understood.
Who am I to talk on a subject which has come up in human history as one of the most serious and complicated subjects. Well, I am not a qualified psychiatrist or psychologist but I am a person who has been afflicted with what we generally refer to pathological disorders back in time and I have undergone treatments of all kinds which I guess little helped me recover. I am a person who seriously fought against a probable breakdown into a state of “absolute madness” some fifteen years ago.
Did I fight the “disease” on my own? Well, no. I fought the very concept of the disease, the very foundations of the whole thing. This happened when I found out that the medics, well-qualified and experienced, could not motivate me to live a better life after having tried all the drugs and therapy they had “up their sleeves”. This realization landed me in a very precarious situation. I was caught between the “devil and the deep sea”. If I did not go for medical treatment, I was sure to end up in a lunatic asylum of one or the other kind (there are different types of mental asylums, for instance those called mental asylums and others called mental rehabilitation centers). So, in all probability, I was left with no choice except that I had the resource to create a choice for myself. The resource was my “will power”. I utilized this resource and entered into a battle of sorts with all kinds of theories and systems of diagnosis and treatment that concerned mental disability. When I practically healed myself, I knew I had hit the right string. And this string created music for me. And it is this music that I am sharing with you all.
The state of health of the mind is judged, peculiarly, from your daily life actions. If you are eating and tend to throw some around, you are either mentally retarded or mentally sick – there is no other way out. If you are walking down the street and smile too much at passerby’s, you are sick to the core. It is actually the systems of the society that decides on what kind of behaviorisms and actions are acceptable and which are not. When you are acting within the parameters of socially acceptable behavior, you are sound in the mind and if you act beyond, you are afflicted pathologically by some kind of a dreadful disease.
I want to go for a jog in the morning and I decide that I will jog from one tree to another while touching each of them. This suits me. There are some people around who come to a standstill and gaze at me with gaping mouths. I did it when I was a kid, then what is different now? Well, by all means, it is not “socially acceptable” – the looks of the bystanders tell me. So talk goes around the town and one day I am held accountable for something that does not even exist. This is the crux of the whole matter. We have theories to refute and counter-theories to be written but a single page can by all means not handle that. But I will try to make a brief “attestation”.
The very prognosis of the medical community as far as “mentally disabled” people are concerned is outlandish. The medical community, back in time, acceded to the segregating prognosis of the society itself that people who “act weird” are categorically mentally unstable. This happened when society, living up to its character, dubbed people acting in ways other than conventionally acceptable as “infested by demons”. This is where a practice was born which would, in the near future, contain people who were acting strange while in their own, they were within range – the practice of exorcising. Now, these exorcisms were not limited to the definitions of the term but crossed over to brutal treatment of the “afflicted”. The society had found its way of dealing with people who in one way or the other “tainted” society and its ideations.
In latter stages, as science progressed, “treatments” were meted out by medics and paramedics which happened to be just as brutal as those inflicted by the society. This included electric shock therapy and use of heavy narcotic concoctions which actually deadened the brains of the individuals and some would never recover. Furthermore, novel lexicons for the mentally handicapped were devotedly evolved. Then extensive studies were conducted by alternate researchers, doctors and scientists and it was concluded that such methods of treatment were “quite harsh” and subsequently new systems of “treatment” were arrived at and practiced and these came up with “better” lexicons for the mentally handicapped. The lexicon was and is the most powerful tool with the society. You just have to call somebody something and it is done.
So, a person who happens to wash his or her hands too often has a “disease” called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). I would say the person is very concerned about hygiene and that is not bad enough to be classified as a “disorder”. Then there is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which, according to the experts, happens to inflict people who have undergone situations of conflict. I would say these people are only sad and concerned about what happened around them and they have developed mechanisms of coping with the very thoughts of it. A major disorder called Schizophrenia is where an individual develops a dual personality. Well, aren’t we all dual natured? Doesn’t nature rest on the plane of duality? Aren’t there two opposite sexes known as men and women? What happens is that when a term is attached to a person, it afflicts him or her and this is the actual disease.
