I am part of a broad legacy in which those who have gone before me have dismissed all mental disease, addiction, and actually any illness they can’t see with their eyes (i.e. dental cavities) as non-issues.

My aunt Patrice was the most extreme example in the family. Frequently taken in by people who preyed on naive and sincere faith, her ever-changing views were thrust upon the rest of us with relative pushiness.  No one can say she wasn’t true to her beliefs. I don’t remember all the causes of her failing health toward the end. She had breast cancer that spread all over her body; she spent her last years with her arm in a sling with an open wound that had to be cleaned regularly. Her teeth were rotting, and she always took Breath Asure geltabs which weren’t fixing the problem. My mother tried to take her to the hospital toward the end, and she threated to jump out of the car onto the freeway. We still think she would have done it; Mom turned the car around. In the last few months her faith allowed her to accept medical help. But she was just too far gone.

My father is unwittingly upholding the same belief system as Patrice, albeit to a much lesser degree. I can tell he tries not to let his irrational fear of doctors and medication run his life, but they do. Look, there’s not a lot a could say about my family with this. My father’s own health is my primary concern. Secondary is how his behaviors have affected the rest of us for so many years. Third is my general dismay with his turning up his nose at the medications that I admit I need. And I’m confused, because my own mother takes more medicine than anyone I know, and always has.

So. I wonder. I wonder about bipolar disorder and whether it’s really just a hallmark of weak character. Is ADD a sign of low self-discipline? Is insomnia a result of an unbalanced work/home life? Is drug addiction just self-enslavement to drugs? Is obsessive compulsive disorder a choice, motivated by a sense of insecurity?

Just as Christians do not like to bear the stigma of those who have abused its message, people with psychiatric ailments can tell you that some of the “sick” are not sick at all, and that those cases should not be the measuring stick for real sufferers.

No matter what side you lean toward, there is a very concrete separation between impulse and choice. If my impulse is to turn this door handle 3 times before I open it, I do have a choice whether to let OCD govern that movement. But I ask – if everyone could just say no to those impulses, there would never have been a disease so well established in popular culture as well as medical documentation. There has to be something else that compels the sufferer to act.

It is psychiatric pre-school, a knee-jerk response of the outsider, to attribute that disconnect to a weak character. Perhaps the person doesn’t have the self-confidence to fight their impulses. Maybe they think they *ought* to be controlled by irrational behavior, in much the same was as superstition has given an odd comforting feeling to the same.  Maybe there is too much fear of what would happen if there was not complete obedience to the impulse, maybe they want attention, maybe they are not trying.

It is with those theories in mind that I wonder about Scientology and other belief systems which might advocate the betterment of self over “a pill.” I wonder if either one is making any real headway.

Here’s where I stand right now. I had a professor once who criticized my brother’s ADD medicating, saying, “I’ve got ADD but I don’t need to take medicine. I have learned the self-discipline of fighting ADD.” <em>What is it that makes people feel superior about doing things the hard way, fighting their body’s chemistry, and acting as though the mind cannot have diseases?</em> What makes a brain so different from any other organ, that it is immune to real disease? Part of me wants to scream, “Then you don’t have ADD! If you did have it, you wouldn’t be able to talk yourself out of it!” And of course, there’s what my family suffers from: Pill Fear. I had a roommate once who would let a headache go for 48 hours before she decided she ought to take a Tylenol. She was afraid to take medication at the onset… or any time soon after, it appears. Some part of her was convinced that experiencing the pain was a more beneficial situation for her. Sometimes that’s true in life, but I think most people agree that it’s not a universal rule.

Many people fear antidepressants because they think that they will mask problems that need to be dealt with. THEY WILL NOT SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS. Antidepressants will not change your situations, your relationships, or your beliefs. If you are worried about those things hiding themselves away from you, you need to know that Prozac isn’t cocaine, it’s not morphine and it’s not a trip to a desert island. Depression is the trip.

Interestingly, if we use the trip metaphor, perhaps the behaviors of the diseased are simply good preparation. Before I go anywhere, I pack my bags. Certainly depression leads one to pack up compartments of their lives. I also check the oven, twice – obsessive compulsion instructs you to behave irrationally on the off-off chance that something might go wrong and it would be your fault. (Perhaps then OCD would be one of the hardest diseases to get people to accept prescriptions for – they don’t want a problem to escalate “behind their backs” while they were medicated.) If I were going to a deserted island, I would tell my family I loved them – I would tell them in excess, because I don’t know when I’m coming back. Bipolar disorder drives loving relationships to extremes, both with love and with hatred. From what I’ve seen, the hatred is usually a reaction to an insecurity and a fear that perhaps the diseased is the more loving of the two. When I go on a trip, I think of ways to pass the time that I wouldn’t otherwise use; things I consider fun and extravagant. Alcoholism and drug use might be the most literal interpretatin of this metaphor.

The question is…. if we all eventually need to escape, who *doesn’t” have some of these diseases lying dormant in them? Aren’t all these ailments triggered somehow? I have epilepsy, and there is a song that triggers my seizures. What if that song had never been written? Would I be less epileptic, or would I just not have symptoms, or would my mind find another trigger? I never had a seizure before I was exposed to a trigger, right? If I had you do an experiment in which you did 5 shots of jager a night for 2 months, would you be somewhat alcoholic afterward? Do you think it would depend on whether you saw alcohol as your ticket out of here? Don’t we all just want a ticket out?

In one sense, I do think it’s human nature to assign meaning to something that in and of itself has none. Cocaine is just a powder. Food is just nourishment. Sex is a physical motion. But if we are all looking for escape routes, we’re going to call drugs, food, and sex addictions; in short, we are saying, I am tired of looking for a ticket out. I have decided this is my ticket, and I am going to continue to pursue it until I am convinced otherwise.

Perhaps sensible people would realize quickly that their escape route was not helping them escape in any real sense. Is that what all you “sensible” people think? That desperation would never lead you to do something irrational? Am I saying all those with mental illness are desperate? I don’t know. I have said before that I cannot imagine an adult who isn’t somehow desperate for relief from life.

The argument is starting to look pretty one-sided. Despite eschewing all self-disciplinary approaches, I seem to be saying that addictions are really just reactive behaviors. Reactive to forces which are imaginary, emotional, situational, physical, or even supernatural. A choice, conscious or unconscious, to pin hope where hope doesn’t belong.

Then where does hope belong? If sexually-initialized endorphins are an addictive chemical, then wouldn’t there be addictions to roller coasters, friendships, music? If people seek escape through performing obsessive behaviors, then wouldn’t they also seek it through performing other behaviors at church, school, work, malls? In a sense – yes.

We often cope by building routines we can enjoy. Often when those routines get to an unhealthy point, we are reluctant to accept that it is the very thing we are pursuing which is causing unhappiness. So we stay with the abusive boyfriend, because it was going so well at first, and this was going to be our ticket out. We sign on for another year at our job because this was going to be “the” job. And we just keep on trucking to every church function because church was the pinnacle of healthy escape routes, and it was going to be a haven and a source of friendship and inspiration.

But you are not perfect or even ideal; you are flawed. Idealism has never been a solution for humans; humans have never, ever, ever been ideal. Here is a short list of things that will not cause perfection: time, therapy, medicine, church, friendship, sex, alcohol, ADD, ADD medicine, rehab, good relationships, art, music, expression, school, happiness, beauty, prayer, faith, patience, character, hope, proper diagnosis, family, seclusion, popularity, direction, self-esteem, healthy eating, exercise, yoga, meditation, knowledge, seeking.

I don’t know what’s a real disease and what’s not. There are a lot of people out there who just refuse to stop drinking even though they know they could. There are a lot of people who are unable to stop. These categories make people different, but they do not designate either as a superior condition. Some people need help controlling the impulses which drive them to certain behaviors. Some people need help controlling their choices in reaction to their impulses. Again, neither situation makes for a better or more valuable problem than the other. Sometimes our weakness causes us to see a mirage. Sometimes we’re actually hallucinating. I don’t know exactly how we lose ourselves.