The media, film, and literature have greatly influenced distorted perceptions of mental disorders. This has led to preconceptions about their characteristics. Let’s examine common myths and explain how things really are.
Mental Disorders Are Incurable
Some mental disorders are chronic, but this doesn’t mean that the disease absorbs the person and guarantees him a hopeless situation. Now almost all disorders are amenable to therapy: with the help of medication and therapy, it’s possible to achieve a stable remission for the rest of your life. Medications help restore the imbalance of biochemical processes in the brain, and psychotherapy helps to work with thoughts, emotions and behavior.
Therapists teach patients to be therapists to themselves, for example, in cognitive behavioral therapy this is one of the main goals of treatment. As a result, a person who has learned various techniques can independently reduce the likelihood of relapse and keep his or her well-being and mood normal.
People With Mental Disorders Are Dangerous and Unpredictable
The image of a maniac or a dangerous psychopath is inspired more by movies and fiction. In reality, people with mental disorders aren’t prone to aggression or violence. A person can be dangerous and unpredictable if he is psychotic and his behavior is conditioned by imperative hallucinations – when voices tell him to do something. Even so, these imperative voices are mostly directed at the patient himself and not at others. And the probability of meeting such a person is extremely small.
The first thing that arises in the mind when the word combination “mental disorder” is the danger and the image of some unbalanced and unstable person. However, mental disorders are a wide range of diseases: sleep disorders, depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive thoughts and actions neurosis, bipolar affective disorder, eating disorders and others. For example, depression can occur in the background of iron deficiency anemia – is such a person dangerous? Of course, not. This person can still look completely healthy, staying socially active, playing Hellspin Casino games, and keep working. The problem is that there is a lack of psychological education in our society and until it’s introduced, for example, in the school course, people will continue to have a distorted perception of mental disorders.
Medications to Treat Mental Disorders Are Addictive and Make People Listless
The task of drug therapy in the treatment of mental disorders is to normalize biochemical processes, that is, to reduce the substances that are in excess and increase those that are insufficient for normal brain function.
For example, when depressed, medications are given that restore mood and motor activity, and when agitation, severe anxiety, delirium and a manic episode are prescribed something that helps calm down. It doesn’t follow that medication makes a person a “vegetable”, on the contrary, medication helps to restore adequate perception, behavior and emotional state.
There is also the myth that medications to treat mental disorders are dangerous. First, when used incorrectly, any medication is dangerous. Second, only one group of medications is addictive – the benzodiazepines, strong anti-anxiety and sedatives that are prescribed only when needed.
Depression Doesn’t Exist, It’s “Laziness,” “Moping,” Etc.
It’s a harmful myth because people underestimate the severity of some mental problems. Depression is first on the list of mental disorders in terms of prevalence. It has a marked effect on the world economy, quality and satisfaction with life. The claim that depression is laziness or “moping” can be compared to saying that pneumonia is a common cough, supposedly it will go away on its own.
On the contrary, depression is an illness that needs treatment just as much as pneumonia or diabetes. We have talked at length about this in general and separately about postpartum depression.
Mental Disorders Only Occur in “Weak” People
Mental disorders, as well as other ailments, can be susceptible to any person, it doesn’t depend on the “weakness” or “strength” of character. Some people are just less likely to develop a disorder due to positive experience of overcoming problems, developed coping strategies, harmonious upbringing and lack of family history of relatives with mental disorders. And some who have experienced a difficult childhood, abuse, or trauma may be more likely than others to develop a mental disorder.
Willpower and positive thinking are useful traits that play a major role in therapy for mental disorders and push the individual to change, but they do not protect against a severe psychotraumatic event and endogenous (internal) changes in biochemical processes in the brain, for example.
Biological factors, such as deficits in neurotransmitters and receptor responsiveness, play a major role in the development of, for example, depression. And regardless of moral-will qualities, these factors cannot be influenced precisely by the “force” of personality. Therefore, to say that mental disorders occur only in weak people is at least inappropriate because it’s impossible to consciously influence the biochemical processes.
Schizophrenia Is When a Person Has Two or More Personalities
It’s worth drawing a line here: schizophrenia is a chronic disease that impairs thinking, emotions, will, personality and perception. It comes in different forms: some people develop paranoia, others have blunted emotions and the patient becomes cold, unavailable and apathetic, while others quickly turn into children. But at the same time, schizophrenic patients have no other personality; they have one personality, but it’s strongly subjected to changes.
The split personality disorder favored by writers and filmmakers is called dissociative identity disorder in the classification of diseases. In this case, the patient suffers from dissociation – the personality seems to split, and as a result the person has two complete personalities living inside, with their own experiences, fantasies, plans, and behavioral reactions. However, it’s a rare and controversial diagnosis, and scientists are still debating the nature of the disorder, its symptoms, and its existence.
Therapy Isn’t Necessary, the Person Can Cope on Their Own
Indeed, there are books of the self-help genre, psychological podcasts and video training from psychologists – they expand knowledge of mental problems, show methods of working with emotions, can improve well-being and contribute to the study of personality. But sometimes a person may be depressed, unable to see a way out of a situation, or suffer from compulsions.
In this case, self-help isn’t as effective as professional help. At the very least, he can teach techniques for working with emotions and thoughts, develop strategies to change behavior and help look at the situation from a different angle, since the person with a mental disorder is often a kind of slave to his thought patterns.
Going to a therapist doesn’t mean capitulation and inaction by the person themselves in the face of the difficulties that have arisen. One of the principles of psychotherapy is the division of responsibility for what occurs in therapy and its final results between the specialist and the client.
The specialist is more of a guide, a holder of knowledge which he shares with the client and also supports him in going through certain changes. It’s also important that work in therapy isn’t abstract; it begins with the setting of goals, which are also shaped by the client himself. So, yes, to some extent the person copes on their own, but with the help of the therapist.
If You Sometimes Feel Sad or Have “Bad” Thoughts in Your Head, Then You Have a Mental Disorder
Everyone sometimes has periods of lack of energy and sadness. Sometimes sadness can come suddenly. But in and of itself, it doesn’t mean depression or other mental disorders. Sadness is an emotion, and it’s perfectly normal to experience an emotion. However, if it’s accompanied by apathy, low self-esteem, loss of motivation, loss of pleasure, excessive self-criticism, or self-blame, it’s worth seeing a specialist because several symptoms can indicate a depressive disorder.
The same goes for thoughts. In fact, during the day there are thousands of thoughts running through the mind, some of which a person dwells on and some of which go unheeded. A thought is always a thought, not a fact, one may or may not believe in it. In itself, a thought in no way characterizes a person as bad or good.
Therefore, even those ideas, which at times arise and can be frightening in their content, should simply be treated as thoughts, not reality. It’s quite another matter, if they are regular, intrusive, hard to struggle with, they appear against one’s will, undermine one’s self-esteem or cause intense emotional distress. In such a case, you should consult a specialist. Cognitive-behavioral therapy works best with negative thoughts and compulsions.
People With Mental Disorders Are Geniuses
The relationship between intelligence and creativity and the presence of mental disorders has long been of interest to scientists. Some studies confirm a definite connection between high intelligence, depression, anxiety disorder, attention deficit disorder and bipolar affective disorder.
Some researchers attribute this to the presence of physiological and psychological overexcitability of the brain in such people. But this is just a correlation, not an explanation of cause-and-effect relationships: it’s possible to be an outstanding person in a certain field and not suffer from a mental disorder, and it’s possible to have mental problems, but not to be an outstanding creative genius.
It’s also sometimes thought that schizophrenia is a kind of genius. Some famous personalities from the world of science and creativity have indeed suffered from disorders of the psychotic spectrum, such as Sid Barrett of the rock band Pink Floyd and the founder of game theory, John Nash.
This myth is quite common, perhaps due to a number of feature movies where the main characters are people with mental disabilities who have special talents, such as “Rain Man,” showing a special photographic memory in a person with autism or “Mind Games,” where a genius mathematician has hallucinatory experiences.
In fact, people with mental disorders are people with completely different intellectual abilities and talents. There are people with high and low intelligence, there are people with a creative disposition and more practical skills, there are those with unique talents and there are those without such. There are young people, there are old people, there are men, there are women. So this statement is really a myth that describes only a small and extremely small group of people with special talents and mental disorders
