The rain is really soft. But there’s lots of it. And gradually, like the other morning when the same kind of rain woke me up, you begin to hear it, despite whatever it was that you were doing.
It’s that kind of afternoon today.
CNN talks about the latest news — the Boston Marathon Bombing investigation, the sequestering of 3 girls in a house for ten years (now there’s a sentence where the word sequester makes sense.) Don’t know who thought of that word to explain whatever the fuck is going on in America, cause I sure don’t know what they mean by their use of the word “sequester.”
(Did that make any sense? Probably not.)
Moving right along…
I am in another place.
I’ve been coping remarkably well with the use of alternative medication, used in conjunction with my prescribed medication. I am on hiatus. The depressive symptoms are simply somewhere else, but not where I am now. They may be in a shoebox, for example, not far from me, yet far enough for now. Or, they may be pinned to the wall of a room. Like I said, no idea where.
What a relief!
I don’t know how long this holiday will be, but I wish it to be long. Otherwise, it’s like being on a high speed merry-go-round that plumbs the depths of the human psyche. And you get sucked deeper into the pit. It makes sense for this word pit to be used to explain one manifestation of Depression. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is a cautionary tale. Things can very quickly dissolve into cruelty and where the ones on the outside are as messed up as “the crazies!” Perhaps, more so.
But we have come a long way in the past 25 years.
And longer.
Today it is common to hear the word Bipolar among adolescents. The word and to some degree the illness is somewhat understood by adolescents. Today students can tell you when they were diagnosed and what they are on.
Well, that’s not how it was in the 70s. Still, people have weird ideas about what a mentally ill person looks like. The phrase Mentally Ill is itself something that needs to be substituted with something with less stigma attached to it. As a phrase, it is dehumanizing.
Go ahead and describe what a Mentally Ill person looks like.
Most will find that a mentally ill person looks a lot like me and you — i.e., normal. We can be mistaken for lawyers, designers, artists, professors (which we frequently are!) after a cursory inspection. But a deeper inspection yields the same result. Usually, you can’t tell who is and who isn’t mentally ill. Some persons show symptoms which make it visibly obvious they are not well. That is a different group. A sub-group.
COMPLEX BRAIN DISORDER
That’s what I propose we use to replace Mentally Ill.
Complex Brain Disorders. A bit wordy, but categorically superior to Mentally Ill.
It’s an umbrella for all those afflicted by some type of Brain Abnormality – whether it be Epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Brain Trauma, or Bipolar Disorder.
And it’s stigma-free!
