Mental Illness: Reprogramming The Mind

I know there are exceptions to every rule, and I really hate to say what I wish to share in this blog, but sometimes I have to get things off my chest. Hopefully it will turn on the light within someone's mind. Before I start, I would like to state that anyone who knows me, and knows the challenges that I've overcome, will understand why I've often felt compelled to share my feelings about mental illness. What "possesses" people to do what they do?

To continue, being an observer of life, most of my life, I feel that society, lately, tends to give more credit and effort to animals being trained (programmed or reprogrammed) than humans with mental issues. To me, it's vaguely insinuating that we're less capable of being better, being able to be reprogrammed, or being able to overcome a challenge. It's insulting!

Is society just tired of the challenges they've faced in the past, are humans just too much animal to be reprogrammed for society's approval, or are we being programmed to accept our weaknesses instead of overcoming them? If so, then why? What has created this flow?

Then I also think about the whole leading a horse to water thing. You can't make someone do something. You have to have two willing beings involved, one to teach and one to be taught. I have seen extremely productive results when this occurs. The only tag then is teacher and student; challenging but not necessarily a strong stigma.

However, to tag a medical "mental" name on someone, give them a pill, along with an excuse to fail, due to stigma, just isn't the slightest bit logical. It promotes negative programming right from the start within some people. It's like saying, "you're an animal and cannot be taught anything." We know this isn't true, with a functioning brain, many various animals, with time and patience, have proven they can be taught many things.

So, why do we allow this demeaning conditioning to humans? More importantly, why do humans keep allowing it? I'm not saying all humans feel this way or act this way. I do see adults and children working on overcoming their challenges, sometimes very serious challenges; knowing it's going to take time but they're worth the effort. Yet, lately, I have seen enough adult victimizing to have me wonder ... what's up? To have me wonder ... why am I being shown these examples?

Is mental illness increasing due to population increasing or is mental illness really on a rise? Are we tagging too many situations with mental illness that are just people being people? I can understand the limitation we impose on children, but why would any adult human accept being treated as an untrainable animal?

What do we do when we want to train an animal? We give love, repetitive training, discipline, and positive reinforcement.

Maybe that's our answer.