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Mrs. Rosalyn Carter (the former U.S. President’s wife) once stated on “Larry King Live” that one person in five has had at least one incident of mental illness in their lives. That’s 20% of the U.S. population, and nobody cares. Mrs. Carter is addressing this problem among others at the “Carter Center” in Georgia. The pharmaceutical companies have estimated that 38% of the population is or has been mentally ill at some time.
My husband, a lawyer, asked me when he was in the hospital during one of his earlier relapses, “What is wrong with me?” All I could say to him was, “Vinson, no one can stand you.”
Although my husband has been treated by medical professionals in the mental health field for his entire adult life (including the 41 years that he has been married to me), I have never had much help from these people as to what is wrong with him. One doctor or social worker many years ago answered my question by saying that the control mechanism in his brain is not working. That’s it! He’s out of control. Before that time I had sat around waiting for him to get sick enough so I could call the police to take him to the hospital.
How many people suffer from insomnia? Who among us has not had an argument with someone over the telephone? When I would ask him why he was yelling, he would say that the person he was talking to was hard-of-hearing. Who doesn’t bounce a few checks? Who among us has not done that during a lifetime?
It is a combination of all of these factors and a question of the degree of control. I think it is also a question of boundaries.
On the question of boundaries, I believe the average person has an invisible boundary around him. If you don’t have boundaries, it can be frightening. I think the phenomena exhibited by obsessive-compulsive behavior sufferers are prompted by patients’ efforts to create boundaries for themselves where there are none. They make their own routines, which do not make sense to other people. Such “nonsense” behavior as repetitive turning lights on and off or not stepping on cracks in sidewalk pavement or having to start your day by having breakfast in the same restaurant at the same table and served by the same waitress even though other tables in the restaurant are empty (as seen in the movie As Good as It Gets with Jack Nicholson).
Humor occurs when you combine an everyday situation with the unexpected.
Mental illness can be equated with “out of control-ness.” When the skin is parted, there are no boundaries between the person and other people or surroundings. This can be frightening. The person does not know where he ends and the other person begins. This explains how some mentally ill people can be watching television and thinking that the person on the screen is talking directly to him.
A medical doctor once pointed out to me that my husband is unusually sensitive to noise. I had never noticed this during 40 years of marriage until the doctor pointed it out. Mentally ill people are painfully sensitive in many ways. They are far from stupid, in fact they are hyper-intelligent.” And the role of medication is to “dumb them down.” Some patients, particularly manic ones, develop a sense of superiority, since they think faster than the average person around them because of their disability, and they think they are smarter, and they are.