Ideas of Mental Illness

    I still have to have "the talk" with people from time to time. (You know...the conversation about the fact that I have panic disorder and primarily obsessional obsessive-compulsive disorder and what that actually means.) When I tell people that I have clinically diagnosed mental health conditions, their response is usually something along the lines of, "I never would have known if you hadn't told me. You just seem so...normal." (They also usually have the same response when I tell them that I have cerebral palsy.)

    What people always mean by saying that I seem "so normal" is that I don't fit the idea that most people have of a mentally ill person. In my experience, a lot of people tend to only have an idea of the low-functioning side of mental illness. Others have this idea that people that have mental health conditions are generally "eccentric" or "weird", thanks to the portrayal of mental illness in a lot of pop culture. You know, the Johnny Depp level of eccentricity. (I'm not at all saying that Johnny Depp has any mental health conditions, just that he's generally considered to be a bit strange by most people.) Or, the beautifully chaotic and beautifully broken, romanticized version of bipolar disorder that TV shows and movies like to portray that's all intrigue and mystery and quirky and strange in a fun-cool kind of way while the mania is present and then in black and white, and lifeless when the depression is present.

    Sure, there are some people with mental health conditions that do fit those ideas, but a great many people don't realize that those low-functioning and eccentric ideas aren't the whole picture of "mentally ill people". (Side note: a lot of those people also don't really get that eccentricity DOES NOT ALWAYS EQUAL mental illness.) A large number of people that live with mental health conditions are "normal" and high-functioning, meaning that they have jobs and interests and social skills and otherwise healthy, well-adjusted lives.

    According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 1 out of 5 adults in the US lives with a mental health condition. That's around 47 million people! Some of those 47 million are low-functioning because of their mental health condition, and some of them also exhibit eccentric behaviors because of their mental health condition. But...can you see how it's impossible for ALL 47 million of us to fit into just those two categories? So, the whole picture of "mentally ill people" is incomplete without also including the idea that some people are pretty similar to everyone else even though they have a clinical mental health condition. Odds are that if you don't have a mental health condition yourself, you're probably close to someone that does at any given time in your life. Odds are also that you couldn't point that person out (unless they've had "the talk" with you) because they appear to be "so normal". 

    Now, why is that important? Because, many times, people that don't fit into the low-functioning or "weird" categories have a harder time getting people to take their mental health conditions seriously, and that may be a barrier to treatment. It's also important to those of us diagnosed with a mental health condition that society has a broader idea of what mental illness looks like so that once someone is diagnosed, it might make the diagnosis feel less terrifying if we can see a possibility for something more than being permanently low-functioning or the resident (and usually avoided) neighborhood weirdo.

    I'll end with this: You never know who lives with a mental health condition, but odds are, we all probably know someone with a clinical mental health condition. Not everyone with a mental health condition is going to be low-functioning, at least not all the time. Not everyone with a mental health condition will be weird or eccentric. So many of us that live with mental health conditions are pretty much like everyone else, with jobs and healthy relationships and other "normal" things like non-mental health-related hobbies we just also have a chronic health condition that needs monitoring.