Living with mental illness can be a trying and tiring ordeal. Many times, people who have no personal experience with it have deep and disconcerting misunderstandings about what suffering with some of the more common problems can be like. Some people think that mental illness is exaggerated or that it's some kind of falsehood, pointing to a nebulous and poorly documented past as evidence that it's a new invention that only demonstrates the frailty and weakness of modern culture.
They ignore that the fundamental aspects of many common mental illnesses can be seen in innumerable contemporary documents and are even reflected in the cultural output of many societies throughout history. Having little to no personal experience with these issues, people will dismiss them as weakness or, worse, manipulative or attention-seeking behavior.
So how can we put these ideas into a context that people with no experience can understand without bogging down in modern science and the inevitable pitfalls of pop science and quackery all too commonly used to exploit people who are suffering from varying degrees of these problems?
Well, first it might help to get an understanding of what some of the most common disorders are like on a fundamental level in a way that puts the experience into a perspective they are familiar with. To start with, I want to try and explain what depression is like for the people who struggle with it every day. Depression isn't overwhelming sadness or crippling despair. That is a fairly infrequent symptom of serious depression.
Instead, think of it like being the examination room at your doctor's office. You sat in the waiting room for somewhere between thirty and ninety minutes then were brought into this humorless and sterile room. Your appointment was supposed to be an hour ago, but you know you'll be waiting for the doctor for another half an hour, at least.
You wait, fiddling with your phone, looking at the horrible selection of magazines, maybe washing your hands or reading the inane posters about diabetes, quitting smoking, or whatever other hot topic in your doctor's clinic they've plastered all over the walls.
You sit in the hard plastic chair, then the doctor's little drummer stool, then the raised examination table/bed with the paper sheets. Maybe you pace a little. Maybe you look out the oddly tiny, elevated windows near the roof or stare at the ceiling tiles with their gray-brown aluminum lining and odd perforated design. You might hope that you'll have to go to the bathroom to break up the monotony but worry that, if you do, you might miss the doctor and they'll move on to another patient, increasing the length of your wait.
The time passes, slowly. Nothing in the room is appealing or interesting. You want to get out but you can't leave. All you want is to not be there but you know that you can't just walk away from it.
This is what depression is like much of the time. A bland, listless, dull landscape.
The examination room is the patient's life and many things that depression effects can be found there. The magazines are their hobbies, the sanitizers and soaps are their efforts at hygiene, their phone is their support structure, and so on and so forth.
If you can imaginesitting in a doctor's examination room, waiting, for several hours every day,you can start to have an understanding of what some of the more mild symptomsof depression are like for many people.
YOU ARE READING
One Word Narratives
RandomThese are short pieces of prose, generally fiction, that are inspired by single word prompts. They can take interesting turns from what you might expect just seeing the word or they can delve into what you anticipated in various ways, sometimes glor...
