"Across the country, in small towns and cities, hundreds of people with severe mental illness live what appear to be normal, successful lives. They work in demanding jobs. They juggle responsibilities. They pay the bills, study, fall in love, raise families — all while knowing that their secret, if ever exposed, would mean almost certain ruin.Now, a small number of them are taking that chance, saying that it’s time. The nation’s mental health system is in a shambles, they say, criminalizing many patients and warehousing many others in nursing and group homes where they receive minimal therapy.Moreover, the enduring stigma of mental illness teaches people with a diagnosis to think of themselves as victims, snuffing out the one thing that can motivate them to find treatment — hope."
Neurosis is a class of personality disorders that do not rise to the level of “psychosis” and they aren’t generally helped by pills, shock treatment and lobotomies. Generally speaking, neuroses won’t land you in prison or the morgue; they just trip you up and make your life a pain in the ass. Often, they are rooted in conflicting messages from parents in early childhood, medium level trauma early in life, self-esteem issues and the like. In "A Bio-Social Theory of Neurosis", Dr. C. George Boeree characterized the effects of neurosis this way:
...anxiety, sadness or depression, anger, irritability, mental confusion, low sense of self-worth, etc., behavioral symptoms such as phobic avoidance, vigilance, impulsive and compulsive acts, lethargy, etc., cognitive problems such as unpleasant or disturbing thoughts, repetition of thoughts and obsession, habitual fantasizing, negativity and cynicism, etc. Interpersonally, neurosis involves dependency, aggressiveness, perfectionism, schizoid isolation, socio-culturally inappropriate behaviors, etc.
While I don’t suffer with “schizoid isolation” (the world won’t leave me alone) and “socio-culturally inappropriate behaviors” (unless you include a certain fondness for assault rifles), virtually all the rest of that stuff has plagued me at one time or another. I have a phobic avoidance going with the Highland Kroger supermarket; I would rather go hungry than enter that store. I will impulsively post weird crap on my blog that I know makes my friends question my sanity. “Unpleasant or disturbing thoughts” – are there any other kinds? Vigilant? Not only am I vigilant, I have two German Shepherds to help me, and one of us is going to pick you up before you get over the wire. “Sadness and depression, anger, irritability…” – if you don’t have these, you just aren’t paying attention.
I have acute mental confusion every time I read the news because it looks like the people running this planet are a whole lot dumber than I am. So, why are they in charge and not me? This confuses the hell out of me. I compulsively take photographs, draw pictures and write things, trying to capture the glimpses of beauty and interest that present themselves to me. I habitually fantasize that this is some kind of bad dream that I’m going to wake up from real soon.
Carl Jung said, “I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life…” OK, Carl, what are the right answers? Shall we all become fully integrated cosmic Buddha-Jesus-Brahma-Godhead, and how many deities does one planet really need? Don’t get me wrong; I like Jung, but not everyone can devote their lives to undergoing psychoanalysis until perfect personal wholeness is achieved, if that’s even possible, and I doubt it actually. Cynical, I guess – see there’s that neurosis popping up again.
You know what’s really wild? I don’t want to be cured. I won’t go to a psychoanalyst to “fix me” because that whole writhing snake pit of personality flaws is a big part of what makes me myself. If I got cured, I wouldn’t have any motivation at all. I guess I’d just sit there like Buddha and soak in nirvana, but honestly, that’s just not my style. I actually kind of like my disturbing thoughts, and maybe, just maybe, a thinking person ought to be a bit angry these days. Yeah, the supermarket thing is kind of psycho, but I’m working on it.
"The other thing you quickly learn is that she lacks an edit switch, and in an interview the main person you want to protect her from is herself. As always she answers questions with disarming honesty, leaving herself wide open to more of the attacks and criticism she so hates. It’s like watching someone complain they’re hot, while continuing to feed the fire."
(,,,) "I began to have this quiet little voice every now and then – although ‘voice’ is the wrong way to put it. It’s your own thoughts just gone completely skew-whiff: ‘Look at that tree, you might hang yourself on it.’ Until the volume went up so loud that I took myself to hospital. There would be nothing wrong in your life, but you’d think about suicide all the time. It was almost funny. But after Shane was born I was really ill, and I was really worried because I was close to actually doing it. So when he was about about five months old, I took myself to hospital.”
She’d been to hospital before, a couple of times, but says they just left her crying in a bed for a week or so before discharging her. She’d also been to various therapists – including one, in London, whom she saw five times a week for well over a year. But this time she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, or manic depression. O’Connor describes the illness as like having a gaping hole in the centre of her being. She took the drugs she’d been prescribed, she smiles, “And within half an hour it was like cement going over the hole.”
(...) I wonder if she feels angry that so many professionals failed to notice that she was suffering from a treatable medical condition, and she shrugs and says that when she went into therapy she was young, and stupid – and famous, and rich. “I don’t so much get pissed off, I get sad about it.”
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