You're viewing a single thread.
It completely threw me off when the official statistic was 25% for those with any diagnosable mental illness. 75% of people just don’t have a problem with interacting with the world around them.
The key word is "diagnosable" though, isn't it. What is the normal levels of feeling down, temporary depression, undiagnosed, etc.? That number seems low, especially since there are so many mental illnesses.
The better questions would be, are you personally having a good day? If not, are you on your way to having better days or finding a way to having better days? If that's not possible, is there a way to make your day as good as it can be?
TL;DR: The world wasn’t made for the minority that classify as having a mental illness.
My answer to this question comes with the inherent bias of not being in a minority myself, but I have personally found myself at the bottom for the majority of my life due to my own actions. Things only got better when I changed.
That is not to say change is easy or accessible for everyone or even most. I know many people in my life that I don’t know what to recommend for them in the current state of affairs other than to prepare for it to get worse. But on the flipside, I know far more that whine and complain about their current situation and have every opportunity to change it. Those are the people that I feel fit calmly in the 75%.
I have a crackpot theory with only vague experience to back it up, but here it is: Have you ever been to Vegas? Or really any major city mall? When you go there, if it’s a good mall, the only ones still around are fashion malls. And you’ll see hundreds of people walking around with bags upon bags worth of stuff. There’s just all this money moving all around. Every. Single. Day. Who are these people? When you start paying attention, the vast majority just seem to blend in with the rest, taking on almost a general image of what might be “a person”.
But then there’s almost a separate crowd from them. Just like you reading this now. You can pick them out. I can’t give you words, but they are clearly people who have been through THE SHIT. There’s those of us who have and those of us who haven’t. Almost everyone I’ve encountered on Lemmy has been through THE SHIT. We all know what it is. And the moment you find yourself I an accidental conversation with someone who hasn’t, it’s immediately noticeable.
The 75% may potentially have a mental illness as we would think about it. But they’ve never had something bring it far enough to the surface for anyone to cast them out for it. I truly feel that a lot of what Hollywood portrays in the terrible characters they create comes down to a reflection of real people. Without THE SHIT, you don’t have a nearly as much of a chance of truly empathizing with those that have.
Feel free to find a massive flaw in my theory. I’m not a sociologist in the slightest.
Edit: hit save too soon
To circle back, it was only after coming out of it and realizing that I had to change and that the system never would that I managed to bring myself out of my 10-year depression. Not is just in the form of masking and managing my emotions more effectively. Not everyone gets that opportunity due to the oppressiveness of the society around them.
Everyone I know has been through some shit. I'm not positive I understand what THE SHIT is, so maybe I'm one of the ones where it would be noticeable.
If you're talking about depression, I have not been through that. I've helped people cope or get out of it though.
Even the people I've known who grew up wealthy, have had hardships like people dying, horrible parents, depression etc. One of my friends that grew up wealthy had a dad that went to prison and the family lost everything. You would never know any of that if you met them, they looked like a happy, upper middle class person.
I bring up the wealth because even our super duper billionaires with all of the healthcare accessible to them, look like miserable high schoolers at bad parties. This is not a healthy society in any way.
I bring up the wealth because even our super duper billionaires with all of the healthcare accessible to them, look like miserable high schoolers at bad parties. This is not a healthy society in any way.
I think this is because, despite all the wealth, these people never grew up beyond the emotional and mental levels of a high schooler. They never had to face any consequences for their actions, surrounded by yes-men their entire lives, and so developed narcissistic traits to go along with their stunted emotional maturity. And so any little interruption to their lives is cause for a major meltdown while they try to fill the gnawing void that the spoiled childhood of emotionally absent parents they never outgrew left in them.
THE SHIT is a mindset.It may not be suicidal thoughts, but they’re on the path to them. It’s a point of desperation where you really feel like there is no hope or help left in the world. To feel utterly ALONE.
Many people have been through significantly more traumatic events than I have, but they had close support in those times and felt comforted by them. Not everyone gets that comfort in those times of need. That’s THE SHIT. The understanding that you really are just a flesh bag hurtling through space and the only way to make it better is to help others.
The understanding that you really are just a flesh bag hurtling through space and the only way to make it better is to help others.
God, Cruelty Squad goes so fucking hard. I fully recommend it.
Another image since I stumbled across it while looking up that pic:
I have definitely not been through the shit then. I have mostly had support.
The understanding that you really are just a flesh bag hurtling through space and the only way to make it better is to help others.
I really like that conclusion.
Honestly, the fact that so many people are just... normal... is a huge contributor to my derealization.
Like, what the fuck?
All the people in my little bubble, whether they're friends, family or biological family, have been through shit. The result is that we have a lot of weird quirks and neurosis that we either end up working through or incorporating into who we are. Everyone else though... it's like we're in color while the rest of the world is in black and white. It's bizarre and weird and unsettling and makes me wonder sometimes how many of those people are real.
Are we getting Truman Show'd or something?
Then, god forbid you interact with them because then they act like they have no personality and it makes the feeling of derealization worse. And they can't empathize with you because they haven't been through shit. And when you try to tell them, "dude, I have experience going through shit, I know what it's like" they think you're being hyperbolic. The worst thing that's ever happened to them is a car wreck which made them feel so upset they considered suicide, but then they took a deep breath, realized they could just call the insurance company, and that ultimately, it really wasn't that bad. So when you try to tell them that you experienced 10 yrs of suicidal depression as the result of untreated gender dysphoria they just kinda think that you must be exaggerating.
Sorry, this went from "normal people make me question reality" to venting about how normal people can't empathize. It's just... Weird.
I’ve felt the same way. I truly believe that these are two almost entirely separate groups of society that don’t interact. Because every time I find myself in a conversation with one of these people, they can’t seem to find a single interesting thing to talk about other than consumptive experiences.
They’ll talk about theme parks and restaurants and TV shows and all these other things, but when you ask them “What do you do?”, often the only thing they can think to respond with is their source of income. They don’t make art or seek out unique corners of creativity because they don’t yearn to convey a message and relate. They already relate with everything in the world around them.
To add to the things that others have said, I have two thoughts: the rise of "adult" as a verb in the modern lexicon and the saying "I don't get political is a weird way of saying my rights aren't up for debate every 4 years."
As Millennials reached adulthood and Gen Z and Alpha have grown up, "adulting" began entering the everyday lexicon as a thing you do rather than a thing you are. Traditional hallmarks of adulthood that had appeared under the Baby Boomers began to disappear and Millennials lost any sense of connection to the traits of adulthood their parents and grandparents told them to expect. Things like a steady job with a clear path towards promotions and a pension, financial stability and a grounded sense of home and community all began to disappear under the short-sightedness that has become the defining trait of late stage capitalism. The future became less certain and more frightening as living conditions declined and climate change became a train barreling down the tracks that the people with the power to do something refused to react to.
In this way, I think the concept of "mentally ill" has slowly changed as a paradigm. People are less healthy, more stressed, and just generally in a worse position than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Studies showed that when the Millennials were in high school, they showed similar stress coping mechanisms as active duty soldiers. The same gallows humor, pessimistic outlook on the future, and nihilism that soldiers showed. So viewed through that lens, people who may have been considered mentally ill 40 years ago may be considered to be mentally healthy today, and similar to minorities who need to be politically active in order to protect themselves, we only consider those who, as you said, have been through the Shit to be mentally unwell enough to fit the definition of conditions like chronic depression. Add in the cost of seeing a mental health professional in the US and the lack of conversation on the topic, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of undiagnosed people out there who would fit the definition of "mentally ill."
I don’t see a massive flaw in your theory but I think it needs some refinement.
I’ve been trying to understand how „healthy“ people’s minds work and I think it comes down to straight up denial of the state of the world.
The people who have been through THE SHIT as you say have probably all had some traumatic experiences in their lives that dragged them face first through how shitty and cruel this world can be and once you see it you see it everywhere and it becomes a downward spiral if you don’t find a way to catch yourself.
And then there are people who somehow managed to not look too closely all their lives, you will recognize them by their unwillingness to discuss any downer topics. They manage to live in blissful ignorance and by just copying each other they stay in their happy ignorant bubble and voila life is good?
Since this seems to be almost a 80/20 split I’d also like to throw in that about 20% of the population fall into the category of being highly sensitive and thereby prone to notice all the shitty wrong things happening around them. We just can’t ignore it and its wearing us down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_sensitivity
how shitty and cruel this world can be and once you see it you see it everywhere and it becomes a downward spiral if you don’t find a way to catch yourself.
I think you've touched on the crux of the matter here. The world can be utterly overwhealming, but the healthy response is, in fact, "to catch yourself" before you start spiraling, or to pull yourself out before it gets too hard to do. That is nothing to do with "denial of the state of the world", but having the mental facility to acknowledge the state of the world and realising that the most effective thing you can do to improve it is to not let it crush you. When the world, and all its multitudinous troubles have already ground you down, it's going to be difficult to separate your thoughts from it and build that mental structure, but I think that having it is probably the hallmark of being mentally 'healthy'.
To me it feels like people that have been through THE SHIT face a point where they make a choice:
- Wallow in defeat with the crushing knowledge that the world is unkind and unfair. Give up and angrily yell at others that haven't realized this yet. Lash out at those that are (at the moment) doing okay, because it is unfair that they are not also following choice #1.
or
- Understand that things going well isn't the normal. Things going poorly is the normal, and for the brief periods of time when things are good, you celebrate them. You save your excess resources for the inevitable bad times. If you can you also help others that are in the bad times to ease their burden a bit. You prepare for things to go poorly again, because "poorly" is actual the normal.