I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on this lately since my uncle passed away last month. He was in and out of state hospitals for a large part of his life, being diagnosed with epilepsy since a young age, and manic depression and schizophrenia since his late teens. He was on a variety of medications for the last 30 years of his life, which along with his imbalance, prevented him from having any type of normal life. He was never able to have a job or work in society, and never had the ability to build a family. I became pretty close to him over the years given our love for music, poetry, and art, as well as my deep lifelong interest in the mind and mental illness… what it is, why it occurs. And in that process I came to know who he was, which on many levels was a highly intelligent, pure soul. He would always laugh, always be pure of heart. I’m not even sure he could conceptualize a lie, let alone tell one. I came to wonder, what it was that caused this intense idiopathic problem. Was it genes, was it his environment, his experiences?
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I think about the rise in mental illness in our world, and we have no explanation for the cause. We just treat the symptoms and give big pharma a reason to make more and more money. Sure drugs help in extreme cases, but it will never treat the cause. So why is it happening? Is it pollution, waste, chemicals in our food and water? Sure those things have something to do with it. But it goes deeper, right? I obviously have a lot of questions, as I’m sure many of us do who share an interest and passion for this issue. The graphic above is awesome, but sometimes it’s not that simple.
I’ve begun to have some pretty intense ideas about it. I’ve even come to the hypothesis that these forms of mental illness, whether it be intense bipolarity, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, are natural progressions in our evolution. But why? What are we evolving to? Is it nature’s evolved method to cleanse the mind (step 3 above)? Could it be some type of accelerated empathy? A form of telepathy if you will. To be able to have a deeply personal experience, that most would perceive as crazy, and yet it be what binds us, what allows us to understand what each other is feeling, what each other is thinking. I always noticed this with my uncle. As much as he seemed to be unable to function “normally”, he always seemed to be in tune with what other people were thinking and feeling much more than most. More so, it is rather well known that some of the most creative, innovative people in history dealt with some form of mental shift. Maybe we all have this in us, the natural pull to attain personal enlightenment our own way, and when we are unable to pursue that personal journey, to cleanse and enlighten ourselves our own way because of environment, family, personal fear, or whatever, the negative symptoms of mental illness realize themselves.
It’s a very touchy subject that has impacted many peoples’ lives, and I personally find that those who have experienced it indirectly through someone close to them, have somewhat of an aversion to discussing and talking about it deeply due to fear of it possibly being in them. Our society has stigmatized it so much, and we’ve got to get past that. Again, it is idiopathic, which means that we don’t know the cause, and we fear that which we don’t understand. It is something I have the deepest compassion for and I hope you won’t take it as my rationalization, in case I’m just as crazy. Although, as a seeker of truth, I can’t rule that out Image may be NSFW.
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Whether it be a natural response to the decaying systems of our world that are disconnecting us from nature, or if it is the natural evolutionary process of our species to cleanse ourselves and reach a higher cognitive telepathic ability, this subject serves as one of the great debates of our times. Psychology and the mind is the final frontier. It will lead us to the depths of ourselves and the edge of the universe. Think about how you think.
