America has a serious problem with the crazies. Something in the water here has made it shameful to be on anti-depressants. Something here has made it necessary to be on anti-depressants in the first place because no one wants to talk about what’s wrong. Why is it hard to accept that what’s in my brain is different than what’s in yours?
College students expect to be insane. It’s part of the deal. Never sleep, never sober, never mentioned. What we’re doing here is HARD. It has GOT to be OK to talk about things when they are off-balance. It’s fairly ridiculous what one person is expected to do in college. I will list the things we are expected to do, so that everyone feels accomplished for doing them. Take classes, join clubs, make money, date, self-define, move out of your mom’s house, eat, sleep. A small sampling, clearly, but very different from high school because your family is not here and your professors generally have better things to do than teach here. In short, it’s a lot to handle. Everyone feels overwhelmed sometimes.
This is not meant to be fuzzy and lovey. Although I do love fuzz, and I do love love. The point is that every SINGLE person has felt out of control of some aspect of their lives, I’d wager. And yet there is a line drawn somewhere that officially labels some brains as healthy and some brains as sick, based largely on the fact that some people talk about it, and some people don’t. If you go to a psychiatrist and say you feel crazy, you are more likely to be diagnosed and medicated. If you don’t go to the doctor, people will probably leave you alone until you start eating cats. All the pre-cat time, you may be desperately unhappy and/or craving cat meat for every second. But you won’t tell because “medical conditions” show up on all those important applications you’re filling out for grad school or your huge promotion. No one wants a cat-eater running their business. Everyone loves a blank “medical conditions” column.
Truth is, mental illness is chemical and outside of individual control. Like getting the flu in your brain. And yet, you don’t have to write flu down anywhere when looking for a job. The medicines you get for a mental illness are taboo subjects and not covered by many insurance companies. If you take NyQuil, your life insurance policy will not go down. If you are bipolar, it might. Because you chose to get help when you needed it, your life is not worth protecting.
Some places in the world worship schizophrenics because they are believed to be channeling divine energy. Our schizophrenics live on the street or in straight jackets. We really like it when everyone thinks the same way. And yet, google famous people with autism or bipolar disorder, and you will get a who’s-who of creative and academic genius. Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, Beethoven, Marilyn Monroe, Mozart, Jim Carrey, Tim Burton (all bipolar), Darryl Hannah (autistic) to name a few. And we love those motherfuckers. So…why not love all motherfuckers? Why not support the mentally alternatively-abled (of whom I consider myself one) as fully functioning members of society who have medical conditions? You’ve had a medical condition before. And people like you, right? Right.
There is no such thing as a blank “medical conditions” column. So stop judging it. Go to the Counseling Center, or write about what’s bugging you, or go run around Ankeny naked. Apparently all the kids are doing it these days. I’ll probably be there this weekend.
