TL;DR: The world wasn’t made for the minority that classify as having a mental illness.
My answer to this question comes with the inherent bias of not being in a minority myself, but I have personally found myself at the bottom for the majority of my life due to my own actions. Things only got better when I changed.
That is not to say change is easy or accessible for everyone or even most. I know many people in my life that I don’t know what to recommend for them in the current state of affairs other than to prepare for it to get worse. But on the flipside, I know far more that whine and complain about their current situation and have every opportunity to change it. Those are the people that I feel fit calmly in the 75%.
I have a crackpot theory with only vague experience to back it up, but here it is: Have you ever been to Vegas? Or really any major city mall? When you go there, if it’s a good mall, the only ones still around are fashion malls. And you’ll see hundreds of people walking around with bags upon bags worth of stuff. There’s just all this money moving all around. Every. Single. Day. Who are these people? When you start paying attention, the vast majority just seem to blend in with the rest, taking on almost a general image of what might be “a person”.
But then there’s almost a separate crowd from them. Just like you reading this now. You can pick them out. I can’t give you words, but they are clearly people who have been through THE SHIT. There’s those of us who have and those of us who haven’t. Almost everyone I’ve encountered on Lemmy has been through THE SHIT. We all know what it is. And the moment you find yourself I an accidental conversation with someone who hasn’t, it’s immediately noticeable.
The 75% may potentially have a mental illness as we would think about it. But they’ve never had something bring it far enough to the surface for anyone to cast them out for it. I truly feel that a lot of what Hollywood portrays in the terrible characters they create comes down to a reflection of real people. Without THE SHIT, you don’t have a nearly as much of a chance of truly empathizing with those that have.
Feel free to find a massive flaw in my theory. I’m not a sociologist in the slightest.
Edit: hit save too soon
To circle back, it was only after coming out of it and realizing that I had to change and that the system never would that I managed to bring myself out of my 10-year depression. Not is just in the form of masking and managing my emotions more effectively. Not everyone gets that opportunity due to the oppressiveness of the society around them.
I don’t see a massive flaw in your theory but I think it needs some refinement.
I’ve been trying to understand how „healthy“ people’s minds work and I think it comes down to straight up denial of the state of the world.
The people who have been through THE SHIT as you say have probably all had some traumatic experiences in their lives that dragged them face first through how shitty and cruel this world can be and once you see it you see it everywhere and it becomes a downward spiral if you don’t find a way to catch yourself.
And then there are people who somehow managed to not look too closely all their lives, you will recognize them by their unwillingness to discuss any downer topics. They manage to live in blissful ignorance and by just copying each other they stay in their happy ignorant bubble and voila life is good?
Since this seems to be almost a 80/20 split I’d also like to throw in that about 20% of the population fall into the category of being highly sensitive and thereby prone to notice all the shitty wrong things happening around them. We just can’t ignore it and its wearing us down.
how shitty and cruel this world can be and once you see it you see it everywhere and it becomes a downward spiral if you don’t find a way to catch yourself.
I think you’ve touched on the crux of the matter here. The world can be utterly overwhealming, but the healthy response is, in fact, “to catch yourself” before you start spiraling, or to pull yourself out before it gets too hard to do. That is nothing to do with “denial of the state of the world”, but having the mental facility to acknowledge the state of the world and realising that the most effective thing you can do to improve it is to not let it crush you. When the world, and all its multitudinous troubles have already ground you down, it’s going to be difficult to separate your thoughts from it and build that mental structure, but I think that having it is probably the hallmark of being mentally ‘healthy’.
TL;DR: The world wasn’t made for the minority that classify as having a mental illness.
My answer to this question comes with the inherent bias of not being in a minority myself, but I have personally found myself at the bottom for the majority of my life due to my own actions. Things only got better when I changed.
That is not to say change is easy or accessible for everyone or even most. I know many people in my life that I don’t know what to recommend for them in the current state of affairs other than to prepare for it to get worse. But on the flipside, I know far more that whine and complain about their current situation and have every opportunity to change it. Those are the people that I feel fit calmly in the 75%.
I have a crackpot theory with only vague experience to back it up, but here it is: Have you ever been to Vegas? Or really any major city mall? When you go there, if it’s a good mall, the only ones still around are fashion malls. And you’ll see hundreds of people walking around with bags upon bags worth of stuff. There’s just all this money moving all around. Every. Single. Day. Who are these people? When you start paying attention, the vast majority just seem to blend in with the rest, taking on almost a general image of what might be “a person”.
But then there’s almost a separate crowd from them. Just like you reading this now. You can pick them out. I can’t give you words, but they are clearly people who have been through THE SHIT. There’s those of us who have and those of us who haven’t. Almost everyone I’ve encountered on Lemmy has been through THE SHIT. We all know what it is. And the moment you find yourself I an accidental conversation with someone who hasn’t, it’s immediately noticeable.
The 75% may potentially have a mental illness as we would think about it. But they’ve never had something bring it far enough to the surface for anyone to cast them out for it. I truly feel that a lot of what Hollywood portrays in the terrible characters they create comes down to a reflection of real people. Without THE SHIT, you don’t have a nearly as much of a chance of truly empathizing with those that have.
Feel free to find a massive flaw in my theory. I’m not a sociologist in the slightest.
Edit: hit save too soon
To circle back, it was only after coming out of it and realizing that I had to change and that the system never would that I managed to bring myself out of my 10-year depression. Not is just in the form of masking and managing my emotions more effectively. Not everyone gets that opportunity due to the oppressiveness of the society around them.
I don’t see a massive flaw in your theory but I think it needs some refinement.
I’ve been trying to understand how „healthy“ people’s minds work and I think it comes down to straight up denial of the state of the world.
The people who have been through THE SHIT as you say have probably all had some traumatic experiences in their lives that dragged them face first through how shitty and cruel this world can be and once you see it you see it everywhere and it becomes a downward spiral if you don’t find a way to catch yourself.
And then there are people who somehow managed to not look too closely all their lives, you will recognize them by their unwillingness to discuss any downer topics. They manage to live in blissful ignorance and by just copying each other they stay in their happy ignorant bubble and voila life is good?
Since this seems to be almost a 80/20 split I’d also like to throw in that about 20% of the population fall into the category of being highly sensitive and thereby prone to notice all the shitty wrong things happening around them. We just can’t ignore it and its wearing us down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_sensitivity
I think you’ve touched on the crux of the matter here. The world can be utterly overwhealming, but the healthy response is, in fact, “to catch yourself” before you start spiraling, or to pull yourself out before it gets too hard to do. That is nothing to do with “denial of the state of the world”, but having the mental facility to acknowledge the state of the world and realising that the most effective thing you can do to improve it is to not let it crush you. When the world, and all its multitudinous troubles have already ground you down, it’s going to be difficult to separate your thoughts from it and build that mental structure, but I think that having it is probably the hallmark of being mentally ‘healthy’.