Photo by JD Hancock on Flickr

Please note that where I refer to mental illness I am focusing on my own particular cocktail of crazy, but hopefully this post will be of interest to others too!

I once had… let’s call it a debate with a pair of psychological wellbeing practitioners about the nature of logic in reference to depression and anxiety. It was in response to a list of “rights” given out in a group therapy session (which was neither therapeutic nor conducted with a sizeable group, but that’s beside the point), one of which was something along the lines of “I have the right to make decisions with no logical basis”. An example given of an illogical action was that you could decline an invitation for no other reason besides not wanting to go. I disagreed with this – it is logical, after all, to look after oneself, and one way to do that is by putting your own interests and desires first. When and how much you do that is all down to you. By this definition, nothing is truly illogical because of cause and effect. Nothing just happens for no reason, you can trace back a series of reasons for anything even if it initially seems absurd. Why on earth would you want to be illogical, anyway? How could it be good for anyone?

The only thing that makes you do things that truly defy logic is mental illness. It is mental illness that would have you decline an invitation that you wanted to take up and would do you good – in other words, lead you to respond to situations in a manner that’s only rational within the boundaries of your illness. Each person with a mental illness gets infected with their own bizarre system of logic, at odds with the real world. (Perhaps it’s also like a transfusion of diseased blood.) The trick is consolidating the real-logic with the mental-logic. I’ll give you an example of that.

Spock: Were I to invoke logic, however, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Kirk: Or the one.

— “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982)

This is a sentiment I’ve been taking too far since my first primary school, where we were told to always put others first. It’s real-logical, after all. Spock says so. However, my mental-logic eventually grabbed hold of it and made the concept its own, rendering it as “others are the important ones, you’re worthless”. The only way to get rid of that logic was a lot of hard work and some strong medication, and even after that I’ll never be fully alright.

Physical illnesses like cancer and diabetes have a chance of one day being cured and to me that makes them slightly less scary – still terrifying, but a manageable terror. Mental illness is, of course, also a physical illness at its root, but the brain’s complexity is such that that an imbalance of chemicals manifests itself in more weird and wonderful ways than it might in another organ – to say nothing of external factors like abuse or trauma. I don’t see mental illness ever being curable, particularly when I think of my own, and that’s me being realistic. It’s just too complex – like a virus with mutations unique to every host. Everyone needs slightly different treatment and finding out which is a trial and error business that reaches too many too late.

I think my complaints can be boiled down to one simple idea: brains are imperfect computers, Turing-incomplete, and their imperfection isn’t something that can be fixed by turning them off and on again. It’s a frustration to someone with a brain like mine. However, things are starting to look a bit brighter – the real world is starting to saturate the one my mental-logic has created. I’m learning how to cope with triggers and somatic symptoms and voices screaming at me in my head, slowly but surely. I don’t view any of my maladies as bad, they’re just a frustration. I want to be logical, but it’s become something that goes against the grain. At least now it’s more a question of working harder. I just wish I could reboot, or install a more robust operating system, or run a virus scan…