I read with interest John Hawkins’ informative piece on the Lifetyle blog entitled “7 Ways Wildly Successful People Screw Up Their Lives.” He offers some good advice such as don’t marry poorly. Good idea. However, I had to stop and think about the advice he offered on Howard Hughes by saying he screwed up his life by “Withdrawing into Mental Illness:”
But physical injuries from an airplane crash ruined his health, he began to give in to mental illness, and eventually Hughes withdrew from the world and surrounded himself with “yes men” who did whatever he asked, no matter how weird. Over time Hughes, who was one of the most famous and important men in the country, grew so isolated that many people concluded he was terminally ill or even dead. To the contrary, Hughes declined further into mental illness, paranoia, and quirkiness. In time his wife, supposedly the only woman he ever loved, filed for divorce. She could only talk to him by phone for years. After Hughes died, one of the most admired men of the last century looked so unrecognizable that investigators needed fingerprints to identify him because his 6’4″ frame had withered down to 90 pounds and he had a shaggy beard along with grotesque, long fingernails.
After a bad marriage or a betrayal from a friend, it can be easy to lose faith in people and withdraw to keep from being hurt. Big mistake. You can listen to all the songs you want telling you that you’re a rock, but that doesn’t make it so. Human beings are social animals and we need connections with others for health and happiness.
First, I don’t know that people want to “withdraw into mental illness.” I think sometimes, it takes them over. But I get the gist of what he is saying, reach out and get some help. However, one of the problems with the mentally ill is that the help they need is sometimes hard to find. Reaching out to the wrong friend or acquaintance can sometimes make a person worse, so it makes sense in that case not to reach out to those people.
And okay, to some degree we are social animals, but some of us are more social than others. For example, in books like Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength, the author makes the point that a private homelife can sometimes provide comfort and inner peace. I remember in graduate school (at the New School for Social Research in New York), I had one class where we discussed whether it was healthy for people to be hermits. Some people said “yes,” and some “no” but it wasn’t a unanimous consensus that people were social animals. Even the psychologist professor wasn’t so sure. Today, everyone is told to interact with each other because it’s “healthy.” Maybe yes, maybe no, but for those with demons in their head, the wrong kind of interaction may make things worse, not better. The right kind with a person they can trust to help? Usually priceless.
Its hard to generalize, since the varieties of mental illness and the people it afflicts is virtually endless. We’e all be better off, though, if mental illness were seen like Diabetes, a condition to be treated and lived with effectively rather than wished away, or cured. I spent a year working at my county’s mental health clinic and know whereof I speak. All too often, the mentally “self-treat” with alcohol or street drugs, often with tragic consequences. Good treatment involves good diagnosis, meds, peer counseling, and moral support from family & friends.
Agreed. I’m in the situation myself, and I know there is no “cure” for what ails me. It’s more a matter of adaptation. You get whatever symptomatic relief is available and you find ways to work around your illness while making full use of whatever abilities you have left. All this takes clear thinking about your problem, and that’s where a good shrink can help.
“Reaching out” is easier said than done for the mentally ill. The TV journalist Mike Wallace suffered from depression. He said something like, “Depression is so demoralizing that if I were lying on a couch, and across the room was a pill I could take to instantly cure my depression, I would not be able to get off the couch to get that pill.”
Many people with mental illness feel stressed, not comforted, around other people. It takes a lot of energy to attain and maintain “normality,” and sometimes being around others overloads the circuits.
The suggestion that reclusiveness be interpreted as a sign of deteriorating mental health fills me with dread — and not just because I’m a recluse.
Collectivists and lesser breeds of Social Engineers grasped long ago that the most potent means of molding a man is to compel him into a group: to surround him with others who will press him to become “more like us.” Look at the histories of Twentieth-Century tyrannies and how they used things like “neighborhood cells” and “civic groups” to bludgeon dissenters into conformity in thought, word, and deed.
The old adage runs that “a mentally healthy person is one with the capacity for work and love.” Productivity demands that one screen out all extrinsic influences, including the presence of others. This requires either isolation or concentration — and few of us can concentrate all that well when immersed in a group. As for love, it is absurd to imagine oneself capable of this most important emotion toward a sizable group; it can only be realized, and acted upon, between individuals.
Howard Hughes was certainly an odd duck but I think it’s been established that he went insane because his brain was eaten by tertiary syphilis.
No pill you can take for that after the damage is done.
“Mental illness” is one of those phrases that has gotten completely corrupted beyond any use. I think its because of the amorphous nature of psychology which backhandedly tries to tell us how we should behave by defining some behavior as illness. Since it has no consistent structure (like morality) to guide its findings, psychology is defined by the current DSM and opinion papers.
If you can’t define the disease it is going to be darn near impossible to treat it. And if no one can consistently define mental illness its hard to know if you’ve got it, if you need to seek help, and even what kind of help you need.
I wouldn’t say that about every type of mental illness. My uncle has had paranoid schizophrenia for nearly 50 years. He is unable to live independently because his illness is so severe, even with medications. Schizophrenia is caused by a physiological brain abnormality. It is NOT simply a “behavior.”
Was Howard Hughes mentally ill or did he become an addict because of the plane crash that nearly killed him? I guess you could call his drug addiction a mental illness but most people are at risk of becoming addicts if they take opiates.
99% or the time the help you seek will harm you and the people will treat you with contempt. I can’t even write down 1/80th of what’s occured to me at the hand of “professionals” because it’s too unbelievable. Restraint therapy is fun.
These quacks don’t know what they’re doing. They really don’t. I have nothing but contempt for the entire industry. I’m now tethered with drugs to the health care system to compensate for the other drugs and treatments forced on me when I was younger.
I should have walked away from the false choice of “take these drugs or be kicked out of school and the house” and lived in the woods, but I had obedience beaten into me early.
I can’t wait for the government to get more involved in our health care, he said, tone dripping with sarcasm and venom.
Taxpayer has it right. the more people around me the worse I feel. I’m overloaded trying to figure out what person’s thinking what, what that one means, where the danger is coming from, etc. There are too many variables for me to exercise any control over the situation which leads to a freak out.
Paranoid? Nuts to that. I’m observant.
Case in point: ABC’s 20/20 freak show reporting on three little girls diagnosed with schizophrenia, all treated at the same UCLA clinic. Lots of footage of disturbing behavior and parental desperation and medication overload and insurance woes. Kicker? Quick followup statement at the end of the piece revealing that one little girl is now doing much better with one medication and a private physician. Isn’t the clinic the story here????