And I'll point out to you again and again that
the people we're talking about with mental disorders, they are us. We are the
people
who have issues. We all have issues. Some more severe than others.
And at different points in our lives. Some with definitive categories they meet
others maybe not in a definitive categories.
And most people have difficulties
and sometimes those rise to the level of being categorizable as
being mental disorders and sometimes they don't. But it doesn't mean they don't
struggle.
And it doesn't make people that have been disorders aren't
regular good folk who could get better. This whatever area of their life is affected.
And I left off here the end this and
I want to just point out that insanity as a term
is a legal term. It's not a term that we in mental health professions use.We
don't call people insane.
We don't call them kookie. We don't call them crazy. We don't call them nuts.
We don't use pejorative labels of people who are suffering.
Most of the regular world does. They use pretty negative stereotypes and labels about
people who are suffering
which then served to distance us from them,
stigmatize them, and make them less likely to get the help they need
and once they get the help they need make it less easy for them to
integrate back into the world that they are a part of.
And the families that they are a part of and the relationships they're a part of.
So insanity
gets into the question as to whether or not somebody really understood
the implications of what they were doing when they committed a crime. That's why
it's a legal term.
So you have heard not guilty by a reason of insanity and a lot of people think that's
used all the time. It is not.
It is used in the single digits of percentages
of felony cases and it's used successfully even less than that
and the people who actually get adjudicated not guilty but by reason of insanity
don't just go free.They actually go to usually a locked mental health facility
where they oftentimes, if not always, serve more time than they would have
if they had just been convicted and sent to a jail sentence.
So they actually spend longer times in treatment that they have no control over
leaving than they would if they had gone to jail.
Jail in a hospital setting is certainly different but they lose their freedom
and it's not something that people just do all the time. It's a misunderstanding,
of a myth. But you got to question as
if somebody hurts another person and they did that intentionally
knowing what the implications of that behavior was, well then
you would hold them responsible because they had a motive
and they'd carried out a behavior that is deemed unacceptable by society.
If for example a woman
believes her children are being possessed by the devil and they're going to
go to hell
and then she kills her children in a ritual that ensures that they go to
heaven,
that's not your typical motive and it's usually based on hallucinations and
delusions,
a mental illness and a type we will call and talk about later is schizophrenia.
right. She didn't know what she was doing in the traditional sense that
people
know what they're doing. So the question is, do you use the same
standard to judge a person
who really doesn't understand the nature of their actions. They misunderstand it
due to mental illness
as you would somebody who did understand what they were doing when they did it.
They did it on purpose. So you
you have to think about that in terms of understanding the legal system.
I'm not saying it's fair or unfair I'm just saying that's how it works .
Then you have to ask whether or not people are actually
competent to stand trial and if they're competent to stand trial,
then you have this idea that they can, they can then have
the jury of their peers come along and
judge them and sentence them accordingly.
If they are judged incompetent to stand trial, that means they don't really understand
the proceedings against them, they don't understand the charges, they don't
understand
the potential sentences, they don't understand how to plea, in other words
their mental illness is still so bad
that they can't be entered into the justice system.
Once deemed competent they can then stand trial for their crime
that they are accused of committing. So, insanity is a
legal term. I also want to point out that normal is a term that
we throw around like it means something.
What is normal? What is normal to you? What is normal to me?
Those would probably be different depending on what we're talking about. What's
normal to somebody in another area of the world?
What's normal to somebody in a different era of time? What's normal to
a person in one place and one time may be completely abnormal to another person in
another place at another time.
Right. We get into this thing called cultural relativity where people in
their in groups don't understand people other groups and they
derogate them and put them down. They don't try to understand, they don't try to appreciate,
they say that's crazy.
That's either kookie or evil. It's bad.
It's either bad in one way or bad in another way. But when you look at normality,
sometimes we don't want people to be normal. You look at our leaders.
We've got ole Albert Einstein here, right?
He wasn't seen to be much early on. He was a patent clerk.
And before he discovered the theory of relativity, he had been turned
down for a a job promotion
as a patent clerk, third-class. Then you have got Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi
his whose work inspired Martin Luther King and many many others for nonviolent
resistance to help
restore Indian rule to India and over through colonialism. You've got JFK
who faced down you know the Cuban missile crisis and
and brought about some some radical changes in an our
understanding of what it is to be American in good ways.
You've got Mother Teresa who, who was doing all good works in the world. Iis
that normal?
Would you dedicate your life
to helping children you had never met before and people in poverty and disease and did
that all day every day? And,
it's not normal. Nelson Mandela
spent years and years in prison fighting for an ideal.
Martin Luther King again somebody who was a leader
brought about radical social change for the positive, I'd like to think now,
but he was vilified and hated back then.
These people aren't normal. But they are people.
They're just human beings just like you and me in some ways, and in some
ways they are different.
But, they have, they have faults, right? Nelson Mandela
was seen to collaborate with people who were in his early career maybe
not the best collaborators.
Martin Luther King was a accused of plagiarizing parts of his dissertation.
You have Mother Teresa who questioned the existence of God in
letters that she left and
notes that she left, but was a devout Nun,
but questioning. You have
JFK who who was a philander. He had cheated on his wife and
may have used LSD, maybe while president, maybe not.
Mahatma Gandhi, once he won the freedom for the people he was working for,
wanted to put them back
into an agrarian society and throw off industrial revolution. And he
had some other proclivities, personal, otherwise that people would have
questioned. And again here's a guy that was
struggling in some ways to succeed in life who goes on to
create what may be the biggest scientific revolution outside Darwin theory.
But yet the fruits of that
discovery led to the development of atomic weapons
which killed hundreds of thousands of people. And we live in the shadow of the
danger all the time now because of that discovery.
People. We are all people. Some of us
have moments in the Sun. Some of us have mistakes we make
and you've got to be careful when you start labeling people with quote-unquote
the word "normal."
It's different bad or is different good? This is Joshua Watauga.
He used to live in Boone, North Carolina. He would sit out on the sidewalk and
he would sell poems. That's what he did. That's all he did.
He didn't live in a traditional house. He said he lived in a tent sometimes. He had
an apartment at some point.
He did not look quote-unquote "normal." His hair was dread locked,
his clothing was sometimes dirty. You can see he's got his belt buckle way over here
and he's wearing this kind of heavy gear on a summer day.
Some people thought he was really weird and
maybe bad.
But is it bad or is it good to be different?
The guy stood outside and he sold poems. I was a friend of his in a way.
I didn't talk to him all the time, but I talked to him many times
and he knew my name, and he knew the name of my kids and when I came back through Boone after I left
he would say "Hey, how's your kids," and we would talk
and he was really interesting. And, he was really nice. And he was, in some ways
just different. But alot of people had some very negative opinions
of this guy who thought he was a dirty bum, et cetera.
They had their stereotypes. But, he was different.
In way I would diagnose him, knowing what I know,
as having a mild form of probably, what we used to call paranoid schizophrenia.
He had some very different views about life.
They weren't antithetical or mean-spirited in any way to a
good society. He just had visions and he had thoughts that other people
didn't
really relate to. But he would write these poems and stories
and he would Xerox them. And he would Xerox them over, over and over again. He would just say poems,
stories. And if you wanted to buy one you could buy one, And if you did not want to buy one he didn't bother you.
It's just what he did. It's how he made his money. And he had these,
these, I guess you could call them scribbling, some would call them scribbling,
He had these
these symbols on the backs. I thought originally it might be like a count
of how many things he had printed. But no. This is 313,199,151.
There's not enough Xerox's in Boone to do that many, right.
But it gave you a date sometimes, then it gave you numbers you. It gave you symbols
and
if you ask him, he would tell you what they mean. Now, to you and me
what he would say did not make a lot of sense but to him it made a lot of sense.
Overhead Petals, Rhododendron Sonnet: The moon overhead
in the daytime. Warmth in the shadows.
Every leaf is green on everything. Pedals and rhododendron cover the ground.
Summer day abounds, lingers, stays.
White albite, Eternity.
And you have this little three line rainbow symbol down there.
And he had lots of things like this. And, and if you wanted to buy them you could
and if you didn't, that's fine, he left you alone.
I liked him. I bought all that I could.
I actually had an assignment if you want extra credit in my class back then,
you go go find Joshua Watauga, be nice to him,
purchase one of his very reasonably priced poems or stories, which ranged from
one dollar to like seven dollars,
any one of them would have been fine by me, and then write up your experience to
that. Just tell me what it was like
meeting, interacting and reading, and trying to understand what he wrote.
And this is just one of my students responses: After he noticed me, I purchased a poem
and asked him how he was doing. His response was the same as any
quote-unquote "average" person
would have given, that he was alright and how was I. Joshua was also well spoken. For my
first impression of him I would have expected him to be
uneducated, lazy, and to have a drinking problem.
Surprisingly, he seemed better educated than most people I know.
Concerning his mental health, I believe him to be fine.
Many people may see him as a bum. But he is putting in a number of hours a week
as a retailer. When I purchased the poem it was as though I was in a store.
Joshua was very professional and friendlier most sales clerks.
I believe he chose to be what he is today and is happier than the usual
businessman.
The only difference is he chooses to keep his hair long and not to wear
a suit and tie.
There's a person admitting his stereotypes, admitting his biases
and then admitting that they were changed by an interaction with a human
being.
That it made a difference to see a person as a person and not as a label or
stereotype.
And that's how I experienced him. He is a very interesting guy
worthy of my time to talk to certainly and worthy of calling a friend.
He later collapsed from some health problem, he had no health insurance and
he became a ward of the state and I do not know what has become of him. He may be
alive, but he may not be alive at this point. But he's a good example
of being careful of how you judge people. I want to point this out too.
We're talking about us. We're talking about we.
And when we look at all the disorders one can have, right.
Lifetime prevalence over a lifetime, whose likely to experience a disorder?
46.4 percent of us are. As adults,
will experience some type of disorder during your lifetime. It doesn't mean
they'll be diagnosed.
Most people won't get care. They won't seek help.
They'll suffer through it silently, whatever it is. Whether it's depression,
whether it's anxiety, whether it's a, a substance abuse problem, whether it's ADHD
or dyslexia, problems with learning,
they'll just suffer and go through it without realizing that help is available.
And realizing that we're talking about us
should lower some of the stigma. Help is available for all kinds of problems we
experience.
And you look at the types of disorders that we see in a given year and
that a quarter of us would meet criteria. Does it again mean we would
actually show up at a clinic and be diagnosed, but we would meet the criteria,
so one in four of us. Anxiety disorder is the most common. We'll talk about those in
our next section here. Mood disorders are the next most common, impulse control,
and substance abuse disorders.
And so then you look at like severity
and we see that severity is different. So you have
high severity and low severity and medium severity. So, just because somebody
meets criteria for a disorder doesn't mean that they're
necessarily
going to have severe problems with it. It means they might minimally meet
criteria for that.
Just because somebody doesn't meet criteria doesn't mean they're not having problems.
They might just fall short of the criteria but still
be struggling. So ask yourself if you know two people
and one of those people on average is likely to experience some type of mental
disorder in their lifetime because
were mental creatures, we are cognitive creatures, and we all are human and we
all suffer in one way or another throughout our lives.
Some of us respond to that adaptively and we are able to address the problems
pretty effectively
and other people don't respond very accurate or their problems are too great
to respond to any way that could be effective. And, so seeking help is not
something anybody should ever shy away from.
It's something you should be willing to do and be proud of helping
other people.