Understanding Our Own Minds

You spend your life just an inch from madness. You don't know it, but that is one of the tricks of madness. You break a leg, you know it. You get the measles, you know it. But madness, the drift of the rational mind into the irrational, the lucid to the delusional, is not always easy to see as it is happening. At what point does joy become mania, sadness become depression, apprehension become anxiety, fear become phobia?

A lot of this changeability is governed by a sort of internal weather system. On good days, the mind is calm, temperate, sunshine. On bad days, things can be torn by rain and wind shear. The cycling of bad days and good days, darker seasons and brighter seasons, is simply part of the natural process. Until it is not. For some unlucky people, weather becomes climate, the dark-light cycle becomes stuck on dark. Everyday seems to bring a new emotional cyclone, depending on severity.

Even though Sigmund Freud was badly flawed, and concentrated on just a few issues, women's issues, he understood that there was a complex unconscious mind lying just beneath the conscious one. Thank goodness he understood the need for patients to talk, and talk and talk, as needed. Eventually, antidepressants came along to rebalance neurotransmitters. I first was prescribed an antidepressant for severe post partum depression. It gradually enabled me to sleep, with less anxiety and less depression. Back then, it was Halcion; you slept like the dead! But thank goodness!

And yet, even now, 450 million people worldwide suffer from some mental health condition, according to the World Health Organization. In the U. S., 1 in 5 adults will experience mental illness in the course of a year, with anxiety disorders being the most common among them. Treating depression/anxiety has come such a long way from profound ignorance to a crude understanding to a true science that is yielding true therapies and remedies.