NECESSITY NOT CHOICE IN MENTAL HEALTH SUFFERERS

In light of the tragedy involving the Germanwings flight allow me a personal rant on mental health issues. I'm sure the ideas presented will resonate with many who are just as frustrated.

The New Pandemic?

First of all I am not an expert in this field of mental health issues but I would like to share my personal views regardless.

Once again in the news we have a story regarding someone who has caused harm and has also been shown to be battling psychological issues. This time instead of one life taken, one-hundred and fifty lives were lost. This story does not have the celebrity status of Robin Williams (or many of the other celebrities like him in the past) but the dramatic fashion and severity of the tragedy was enough to warrant coverage around the world.

My point before my rant is that it is well past the time of idly sitting by and watching these news stories happen and then having them disappear into obscurity. It’s time to begin making a real difference in looking at ways to help make things better. “Help make things better” is the only way I can even begin to state the obvious. Or, more likely, we can do nothing and simply wait a week until a new news item strikes our interest.

There are many in the world that state that we are ripe for a pandemic. SARS, H1N1, Avian flu, and Ebola. Luckily they did not/have not come to full fruition. But maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place.

You want a pandemic? Something that is found throughout the world? That is growing and more prevalent than ever? Something that causes unimaginable suffering? This pandemic is not a contagion. You cannot get it by sneezing or coughing on someone or by sharing needles or unprotected sex. But it is still one of the most prevalent illnesses in the world today. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over 350 million people suffer from depression alone. And that is widely believed to be a highly conservative estimate. They also state that one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives.

And yes, there are dedicated professionals working today on mental health issues but they are also woefully overlooked. Why do we not have huge DEDICATED state-of-the-art modern research facilities in EVERY major city researching these issues staffed with the best and brightest minds in the industry? DEDICATED facilities that a person with a mental illness can visit immediately and be evaluated and treated.

Not the old fashioned “mental hospitals”. Not today’s emergency rooms to wait six hours to be told by overworked staff that you simply have a “headache” or “need to relax”, because let’s be honest, this is a waste of everyone’s time. Not to wait for a week to see a well-meaning but inexperienced family doctor (if you have the luxury of having one) to simply do a rote prescription for meds with very little or no follow-up.

We need places where the general public can work with dedicated staff to immediately evaluate their mental health issues. Then, test different processes of treatment under controlled and monitored conditions. Then, if treatment is successful, to analyze why it was successful. Research specific successes according to individual physiology. Determine markers or phenotypes or whatever the hell is needed to hopefully discover what works and why. And then to apply the successes to other people with similar physiologies. Eventually the strategy will expand from not only treatment but to prevention. Invite the successful people to join the research team. The up swell of people BEING helped will grow to help identifying more people who NEED help. Is this not the way polio and measles and other successfully battled illnesses were handled?

Perhaps it isn’t as easy to determine though. Perhaps it is too difficult to determine a measureable way of analyzing without error. Because let’s be honest no one wants to be sued right? Is it because mental health illnesses are not visible? No rashes or fevers? No burst blood vessels or obstructed airways? If you can’t see it then it doesn’t exist right?

But, of course, this would take money and decisions and urgency. POLITICIANS TAKE NOTE: YOU MAY HAVE TO SPEND SOME OF YOUR PRECIOUS TAX DOLLARS BUT IF YOU FIX YOUR POPULOUS THEN THERE WILL BE MANY MORE HEALTHY PEOPLE TO CONTRIBUTE TO TAXES IN THE LONG RUN.

Some people seem to think that people with mental health issues have a choice. A choice to “just feel better” or to “snap out of it”. But when it’s bad… very bad… these people have no choice -- only necessity. When everything is so horrible in their minds, when they are so far down that unfathomably terrifying rabbit hole, they simply do what is needed out of necessity to attempt to make things better. Normal rules and filters that everyone else experiences simply do not exist.

I think that what a lot of people fail to realize is that it is impossible to truly empathize with someone who has a psychological illness unless you have suffered from it as well. I do not mean to sound arrogant when I say that. We can all empathize with someone with a broken leg or a toothache because we have all suffered from pain to some degree. Even the loss of a loved one can be empathized by anyone who has felt loss. But all of these are still dealt with from a base of security. A sense of the real world around them is stable and that their own feelings of their own individual situation will ebb and flow knowing that the root of themselves is still grounded in security.

Someone who has experienced depression/anxiety or a myriad of other psychological issues simply does not have that base of security or concreteness of the world around them. There are no rules. There is simply a frantic drive for amelioration of their situation. It is like a feeling of falling off a building and never even having the luxury of knowing the ground is coming to meet you because you are already standing on it and that feeling will never ever go away. And that you will do anything, ANYTHING that you think is necessary to make it better. And therein lies the true tragedy.

So the next time the leaders of the world watch the news about some new tragedy linked to mental illness maybe they will realize that there is no choice. There is only necessity.