A Humanistic Approach Towards Mental Illness

you make it sound like we may not need the mental health ordinance to be implemented to achieve the same purpo se in Pakistan.that is the right to live a normal and dignified life for a person going through or recovered from a mental upset. if awareness and empathy for the mentally ill could be developed in just aday! how is it possible to reach so many people and meanwhile the mental sufferings go on. adding to the physiological sufferings which a human bein` has to undergo anyway. a mentally ill person negatively controls the lives of those close to him.then tell me will the MHO be redundant in our hands?

Christmas carol by Psychiatrically challenged:

SCHIZOPHRENIA:Do you hear what i hear ?

MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER:We three queens Disoriented are

DEMENTIA:I think i will be home for Christmas

NARCISSISTIC:Hark the herald angels sing about me

MANIC:Check the halls,and lawns,and walls and steerts and stores and stores and office and town and cars and busses and trucks and trees and fire hydrants

PARANOID:Santa Clause is coming to get me

OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER:Jingle bell Jingle Bell Jingle bell rock Jingle bell Jingle ......

Re: # 5
Abskii, what do you do??

abskii, ok no offense meant :)

But just for interest, what can this possibly mean - Looking at life thru a broken window.
I`ve also heard/read this in several places. So it must have a meaning, to someone.

We can rule out vision problems. That would be silly.
The schizo sees things as clearly as anyone else.
so what can it mean `Looking at life thru a broken window`.

Is it perhaps, an inability to figure out (make sense) of worldly relationships?
Like when we see a bus, tree, another human or animal, we know its exact (or fairly exact) relationship to us (which is what we most care about).
So we`re not overly excited/anxious about, say, seeing a cat.

And Schizos do exhibit this charactersic - an inability to evaluate a situation `normally` (`normal` is loaded I admit!).

But that still doesn`t explain - Looking at life thru a broken window.

I think there`s something else.
This inability to evaluate a situation normally is only a `side effect`, I think, of something else.



On another note, there is this fad of `expansion of conscious`.
Drug users and various meditation techniques (TM etc) promise us an `expansion of our conscious`, all for a few dollars off course :)

What they mean is, a greatly enhanced `sense of existance`. One sees colors and smells more vividly. New relationships are seen where earlier there were none. Creativity blooms. A happy, secure feeling pervades.

Now is this a reasonable question to ask - Can there be its opposite - a `contraction of consciousness`?

Re: # 30

Yes you may by all means. It`s my privilege :)

Re: # 28
dear burpinder...if my article inspired you to write such a sensitively written wonderful

letter, i take as one the best compliments. i saw my father having a nervous breakdown

when i was a boy of ten. he had to receive shock treatment. he recovered and a man who

was a mathematics professor and a freethinker adopted a saintly lifestyle. now i have

started writing a book about my own encounters with mental illness professionally as a

psychiatrist as well as personally seeing my family struggle with it. i am also collecting

stories of other people for my next book. can i use your letter for my next project?

sincerely sohail

Re: # 27
dear delhiwala....are you confusing me someone else...known as khamakha? thanks for

hello anyhow....sohail

One of the most disturbing images I remember growing up was a mentally disturbed woman completely nude standing at a busy traffic signal near Sion in Mumbai. I was maybe 12 at the time and my adolescent brain`s first instinct was to laugh loudly and point. But I saw the looks of utter horror on my parents` face, and my Mom said a small prayer for whatever horrific circumstances had provoked the woman into behaving the way she was, praying for her safety from evil misguided elements- and I knew there was a lot of pain there. I still remember that image vividly and wonder what happened to that poor woman.
Mentally ill people probably are the worst affected in this cruel society of ours. At least in the case of physically handicapped people, while we make life as difficult for them as possible, there is some acceptance that they may lead useful lives (e.g. blind people selling lottery tickets and running STD phone booths in India); with ``paagal`` people, we even deny that dignity.
Two cases I can think of- one of my close friends growing up: he and I were in the same class and lived a few doors apart. His mother died when he was 5 and the rest of his family (Father, 2 elder sisters) never really filled the void in his life that the loss of his mom created. The sisters were both much older than him and had their own lives to lead; the father was in permanent denial and refused to act even when the young man`s tales of horrific cruelty were brought to his notice- to animals (he used to freeze live cockroaches in bowls of water) and to his friends (he once jammed my finger in his front door and refused to open it; my cries brought down my Mom who had to open the door- I still have the scar). He had a violent temper and getting into a fight with him was a potentially life-threatening situation.
Those of us who grew up with him knew an other side to him- he was a brilliant skater and cyclist, and had a sharp wicked sense of humour. He also had excellent taste in music- most of the stuff I heard growing up was at his place (perhaps to make up for the lack of attention, his father never scrimped on the pocket money, unlike my own parents). We also watched a lot of our ``coming of age`` movies on his VCR because that was the safest place to- there was never anyone home.
He seemed to mature as he grew older, but it was an illusion. His father died in his late teens and after that there was just no hope for him. He got hooked on drugs- always lean, the habit left him a gaunt shadow of his former self. He stopped being social and the nieghbourhood children, instead of fearing him as before, now looked at him with amusement and some disgust. He had but one friend- a girl who used to visit him often and eventually started living with him; they probably did drugs together. I never lived at home much after I was about 21, but I`d bump into him on the stairs sometimes and he`d always say a tired hello. Conversation would be awkward because we didn`t have anything much in common anymore- the most we`d do is enquire about common friends and then uneasily go on our ways.
He took a big leap off the terrace when I was away at b-school and fortuitously landed on my dad`s aluminium ledge- the 3-feet wide sheet that protects our balcony from the rain. He rolled off it to safety and escaped with a thoroughly bruised back. He claimed it was an accident- that he was trying to adjust his TV antenna and slipped, but at 4 in the morning, and with his background, he had few believers. My dad grumbled about the cost of a new ledge, but we all feared the end was not far away.
He finally succeeded at taking his own life by hanging himself on the fan in his own bedroom. The maid who came a few times a week found him and had a screaming fit. His sisters turned up and took care of the funeral formalities. They put the home on the market, but found no takers for quite a while- who wants to live in a house where someone killed themself? Eventually someone saw the practical side of it and bought it at a much cheaper rate than market; he moved in and as the years passed, the unease passed as well. He`s well-nigh forgotten now, except if one of the neighbours mentions him as an example of a kid gone- horribly- wrong.
What happened to the girlfriend was never very clear. She was never seen again. Unconfirmed rumours said that he killed himself because he`s found out he had AIDS, probably from the drug use. The last sordid chapter in his desperately miserable life.
I am pretty sure he was seriously mentally ill- perhaps if his family had seen what was so obvious to us a little earlier, or perhaps, like my Mom says, `if that child had got just a little more love`, he would have still been around, zipping around on his bike, inviting us to watch movies at his place. I don`t know. I don`t even know why I am writing all this here. Just that the article triggered something that must have been buried deep inside.
RIP, my friend.

Hi Khamkwa!

Re: # 22
HD, I never said it was unique to `insanity` - it was just an example of what these people cope with (or try to). I know a few people who experience auditory hallucinations/disturbances as part of a stress response.

And I was not quoting anyone (to my knowledge) - it`s just similar to how one of my clients described it once.

Re: # 24
dear ahad...you are right mental illness is not a myth. it is a reality for people who suffer. i

believe education, proper health care and a compassionate and humanistic attitude can

decrease that suffering. thank you for your wise comments...sincerely sohail

Dear Dr.
Particularly in Pakistan the most part of the urban and rural society are mentally ill, the reason is not the poverty, Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.
Ahad

#22
Hallucination,Illusion & Delusion
Agree with you Hallucination is symptom and not disease itself...three classic symptoms of mental illness are hallucinating which is imagining things which does not exisist....Delusion is of Ideas that are irrational thaught,like thinking of one self as President of country And Illusion which is Mistaking a Rope or other Exisisting object as Snake in case of Rope.

Thaught
Feeling
And Action is distorted in Schizophrenia

abskii,
I think you might be mistaking `hallucination` for `insanity`. Hallucinations are reported by drug users, meditating yogis and even by people `madly in love` (pardon the pun). Hallucination may be part of the effects that insanity brings, but by itself is not unique to insanity.

>>Schizophrenia is like looking at life through a broken window - fragmented and distorted.
You`re just quoting someone, aren`t you :)
Or do you actually know what that means? - looking at life through a broken window

#20 I agree with you for bringing attention to very important apect of human maladies which is either denied or unrecognised because of ignorence.
In no way i am taking side or defending practices anywhere

Re: # 19
dear tolkinin....i agree with you that even in the enlightened west there are illinformed

social and religious organizations like church of scientology who misguide people and

create hurdles in people making wise choices about their lives and getting help to decrease

their sufferings....sincerely sohail