When we see things about mental health, most of the time these labels are described as a disorder; anxiety disorder, bi-polar disorder, personality disorder, Post Traumatic Stress disorder and so on.
The thing is when people are diagnosed and labelled with a disorder, they often tend to do what they can to live up to that label, whether that’s consciously or unconsciously. And they often tend to think of it as a life long problem. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The first question to ask is where did these labels originate? Well, if you read Cracked: How psychiatry is doing more harm than good by the Psychologist James Davies and The Book of Woe by Gary Greenberg, you’ll understand that very few, if any, of these ‘conditions’ are based on any scientific fact! In fact these labels were coined and the symptoms formulated by committee! A group of Psychiatrists from the American Psychiatry Association sat around a table, discussed these things and created them based on subjective experience, not on empirical science (fact).
In my own research using Google and Google Scholarly Articles, I cannot find any link between a mental illness and physical symptoms i.e. imbalance of chemicals in the brain. If you do a search for “what is the scientific evidence of mental disorders” (including the quotes) Google returns zero results, suggesting that no one has an answer to this question. In The book of Woe though, Greenberg suggests that the chemical imbalance theory was originally created by Pharmaceutical company’s in order to sell more of their ant-depressants.
If you take away the quotes in the search though, you’ll get over a billion results (probably because of the way the Google search algorithm works) and one of the first results at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov talks about what scientists believe is happening rather than actual facts of what is happening in the brains of individuals. It also sights many risk factors that could potentially trigger a mental health disorder.
The next question is what does ‘disorder’ mean? If you look it up in a dictionary you’ll find that it is ‘a state of confusion’.
Now we all get confused over one thing or another or something that someone has said sometimes, but we also know that a state of confusion is a temporary state that we get into when we don’t fully understand something. So, if we start reframing disorder to confusion, then can we not realise that the disorder is a temporary state (though temporary could mean years) that we get into in or minds and that, with help, we might become un-confused? We can get clear on what is causing us to feel the way we do in the moment and therefore do something about it. It is only when we take the time to fully understand what is happening within our minds and body, that we can find solutions to the problems that we have.
You see, our minds are doing a fantastic job, they’ve evolved to protect us, to preserve our life as long as possible. So the mind has learnt strategies to act a certain way in order to protect us in certain situations, whether that be in a healthy way or an unhealthy way. These learnt strategies are mostly unconscious, they aren’t in our conscious awareness. So, if the strategy is unhealthy, then that will prevent us from having the life we want; the unconscious strategy is over-ruling our conscious effort to get that.
If we see mental disorders as anything other than disorders, then surely they’re no longer mental disorders, more like a lived experience that we can learn from.
So if these conditions are just made up and the disorder is really confusion, what can we as individuals do about it?
There are many things we can do but most importantly it starts with learning to understand ourselves better. Asking ourselves better and more empowering questions.
In my humble opinion, one of the biggest problems we humans have is actually understanding our emotions. When we’re happy we don’t need to think about or even sense our emotions because we know we’re happy. But when we’re not happy we need to listen to our emotions and work out what they are trying to tell us. Emotions are a call to action. They’re telling us to do something to alleviate that emotion. For instance, if we’re sad, that emotion could be telling us to do something to move towards being happy, maybe go out with friends or watch a funny movie that’ll make us laugh.
Taking positive action is the key to unlocking ourselves from these so called disorders and there are many evidence based tools that we can learn and utilise either in private or with the help of a helping practitioner (therapist).
What can we do?
Please be assured, I am not downplaying how people feel or their lived experience, or that many people do have malfunctioning brain (for want of a better term). I too am human and I have lived some of these ‘conditions’ and have also been diagnosed myself! What I am saying though is that many of these ‘conditions’ are, in my opinion, not life long and they can be overcome when we get clear in our minds on what we need to do to overcome those feelings.
Reframing “disorder”
So, when you next get anxious or are feeling sad, instead of engaging with those thoughts and emotions, which will inevitably make them worse, ask yourself “What can I do to make this feeling better?”. Look for alternative ways to make things better for yourself, and let go of any labels that you have either placed on yourself or others have placed upon you.
