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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 was wrong with him "in plain English." One doctor or social worker many years ago answered my question about what was wrong with him by saying that the control mechanism in his brain was not working. (That's it! He's out of control.) Before that time I had sat around waiting for him to get sick enough that I could call the police to take him to the hospital and wondering, "Is this ill, when he walks around all night and can't sleep? How many people suffer from insomnia? Is this ill when he calls people at all hours of the night and yells at them? 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. Is this ill when he bounces 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 degree of control. I think it is also a question of boundaries. Mentally ill people don't seem to know where they end and another person begins. They don't know what their business is and what someone else's is.

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. 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 each day in the same restaurant at the same table and served by the same waitress (as seen in the movie As Good as it Gets with Jack Nicholson).

A medical doctor 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.

Everyone has his/her own carefully constructed skin that surrounds them. Once in a while it is pierced, and a person becomes aware of more of his surroundings. There is increased sensitivity. People who are natural comics can see relationships that the average person can't because he is enveloped in his "skin." Humor occurs when you combine an everyday situation with the unexpected.

Mental illness can be equated with "out-of-controlness." 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 think the person on the screen is talking directly to him.

The lack of boundaries also explains the obsessive-compulsive disorder. People afflicted with this illness develop their own routines, such as turning light switches on and off two or three times when entering a room, not stepping on a sidewalk crack, needing to sit in one special table in a restaurant which happens to be occupied, when the other tables in the restaurant are empty (reference Jack Nicholson in the movie "As Good as it Gets.")

Mentally ill people are painfully sensitive.They are sensitive to noise, for example.

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. Some leaders and other geniuses use their hyperactivity to advantage. It is OK to be hyperactive as long as you don't lose control of yourself. What is needed is enough self knowledge to be able to turn the sensitivity, which they have, on and off as the occasion requires. It has been said that there is a fine line between genius and insanity.

Another fact that I have noticed about mental illness is that one's feelings appear to be detached from one's thoughts. That explains why mentally ill people give inappropriate responses to situations fraught with emotion.

Studying law can exacerbate problems among people who are already prone to mental illness. Aristotle said "Law is reason devoid of emotion." It is a new way of thinking. Since mentally ill people are already detached from their emotions and tend to respond to questions "literally" rather than "emotionally" or "empathetically" (reference As Good as it Gets-when Jack Nicholson responds to a receptionist in his publisher's office by insulting her when she gushingly asks him how he writes about women so convincingly and he says he starts with a man and then removes all reason and sensibility and then writes about what is left) the study of law can be a hindrance to them rather than a help.

Medical professionals in the mental health field give many labels to manifestations of mental illness or "out-of-controlness." I believe there are basically only two kinds of mental illness: schizophrenia-paranoia, a thinking disorder, and manic-depression, a mood disorder. And some people have both, and that's call schizoaffective disorder. The latter is my husband's diagnosis.

One can see a manifestation of paranoia in a person who is a "control freak." He/she needs to rule or ruin, because she/he does not trust the environment where they find themselves.