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Tuesday, August 14, 2007 - (see all news for this day)
mental illness - 07:21 AM
(filed under 'general')
i've recently read two books in a row which feature main characters with varying degrees of mental illness, both of them dealing with eating disorders. one is fiction (possibly based on a real person), the other (i'm actually still reading it) is biographical. to not put too light a point on it: the girls in these books are seriously f***ed up.
this second one in particular, she goes into quite some detail describing how she felt day by day, the rituals she had, things she'd think or do: counting obsessively, praying (mostly nonsensical prayers) obsessively, looking in the mirror obsessively. she would be constantly worried about how she looked & wondering what people were thinking of her. it's difficult to convey in just a few sentences how ruled her life was by this mental illness.
it spins me out that people can be so completely concerned & consumed by this sort of stuff, because i'm so totally not like that - especially (much to my mother's chagrin) in the area of caring what others think of me; in most cases i simply don't.
when i think about mental illness, i wonder how people can become this way. it seems (in my admittedly uneducated view of mental illness) that some are born this way, through genetics perhaps, & some become this way through life experiences. i have a theory that perhaps those who become mentally unwell through life experiences, actually had a predisposition to becoming unwell anyway & it simply wasn't triggered until they went through those experiences. my reason for thinking this is because i've gone through some experiences myself that in other people, may have tipped them over the edge. i say that what i've been through is nothing really bad, but that's in my own mind that they're not really bad. i seem to have been able to move past these things a lot more easily than some others might if they'd experienced the same things.
mental illness, severe or slight, mystifies me & i suppose that's why it interests me so much.
that doesn't seem so abnormal ;P
only i don't feel driven to starve or purge myself because of those things.
I think a bit depends on the variety of mental illness, but I have heard (and I believe) that definitely for some things you do require a combination of gene and environment to foster a condition. one or the other by itself usually isn't sufficient to make you nuts.
I think it is a bit of both genes and environment, but it doesn't mean to say that each part is equal. For one person they might need to be under an extreme stress to crack, or only a little bit of stress and get unwell.
There's so many factors it's not funny.
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your welcome to study me ...im crazy !!