Our Relationship to Mental Illness
This year, I decided to take a Creative Writing Class. Though I have considered myself a writer since the age of about eleven, I had never actually taken a formal class on the subject. The community around here has "community development classes," that you can take on various subjects for a small fee. I signed up to take a Creative Writing Class and enjoyed it thoroughly. In this class, we were talking about how English has so many words that mean the same thing--but they aren't interchangeable. The point of the exercise was to decide what connotation you wanted on the word. Our teacher gave us a list of words that all meant "weigh comparatively less than most people," and had us rank them from most positive to most negative. In the positive, we had positive words like "svelte," and "fit." There were neutral words like "lanky" and "lean." There were negative words, like "gaunt," "emaciated" and "malnourished." We didn't all agree on the order of the words. But without fail, every person in the class ranked the most negative word as the same word--"anorexic."
This made me think. Why, when we have words in the mix like "malnourished," is the worst thing you could call someone "anorexic?" I mean, anorexia is a disease. That'd be like saying the worst thing you could ever call someone is "chronically ill." It's a strange relationship that we culturally have with mental illness.
I don't take it as far as some people, I suppose. I recently saw a video where they made scenarios of "if people treated physical illness like they do mental illness." Here it is:
I agree with the sentiment. I also have to include though (and this is coming from someone who actually has OCD--and yeah I've gotten over being embarrassed about that): there is a difference. Mental illnesses are...mental. And I learned to control my OCD without drugs. No, I didn't do it on my own. There was a very, very, awesome and amazing Cognitive-Behavioral Therapist involved, but there was some element of "get control of your mind and deal with it. Actually, he was a PhD student in clinical psychology, because I was a poor college student at the time, and you could get therapy from PhD students for free in college. But he was still awesome and I owe him a lot. But, by nature of the diseases, there's some amount of personal will-power that goes into them.
The point is...why is the worst thing you could be described as is anorexic? I think it was just somewhat telling. And this is more a thought splurge than an organized post, but there you have it!
This made me think. Why, when we have words in the mix like "malnourished," is the worst thing you could call someone "anorexic?" I mean, anorexia is a disease. That'd be like saying the worst thing you could ever call someone is "chronically ill." It's a strange relationship that we culturally have with mental illness.
I don't take it as far as some people, I suppose. I recently saw a video where they made scenarios of "if people treated physical illness like they do mental illness." Here it is:
I agree with the sentiment. I also have to include though (and this is coming from someone who actually has OCD--and yeah I've gotten over being embarrassed about that): there is a difference. Mental illnesses are...mental. And I learned to control my OCD without drugs. No, I didn't do it on my own. There was a very, very, awesome and amazing Cognitive-Behavioral Therapist involved, but there was some element of "get control of your mind and deal with it. Actually, he was a PhD student in clinical psychology, because I was a poor college student at the time, and you could get therapy from PhD students for free in college. But he was still awesome and I owe him a lot. But, by nature of the diseases, there's some amount of personal will-power that goes into them.
The point is...why is the worst thing you could be described as is anorexic? I think it was just somewhat telling. And this is more a thought splurge than an organized post, but there you have it!
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