How Perceptions of Reality Can Be Subjective

Spend any real time studying psychology and one pattern jumps out: the mental illnesses we name are built on behaviors we've decided are abnormal. Abnormal compared to what, though? Compared to whatever the bulk of society happens to do. I want to look at how applying personal growth to ordinary life might let us hold onto our own oddness, even in moments when everyone around us is convinced we've gone off the rails.

Start with the word reality. Press on it and the definition gets slippery. The working version most people use is something like: reality is whatever counts as normal for society at large. Follow that logic and anyone who comes across as even slightly strange gets filed under chemical imbalance. The next move is almost automatic. We decide the person needs help, and the help is aimed at making them more like us. Say that out loud and notice how strange it is on its own terms.

Consider someone who drifts through the usual low stretches of depression and some mild anxiety, then suddenly stops sleeping for days while running on a huge surge of energy. We tag that as abnormal mostly because most people don't live that way. The label that follows might be Bipolar Disorder, and the prescription is treatment. Worth sitting with: a large share of the people working in psychiatry don't actually buy the chemical imbalance story. Much of the time the engine is money, specifically what insurance companies pay out when expensive medications get written. A handful of doctors still point patients toward growth techniques and a decent therapist, but you usually have to ask for that route yourself.

Push the thought further, into schizophrenia. It's a serious psychotic disorder, defined by intense hallucinations and delusions. But what are the odds that a person diagnosed with it is simply operating out of a different reality rather than a broken one? A separate layer, not a defective version of ours.

As the century turns over, it's becoming harder to insist that life is nothing but flesh and blood. There seems to be a spiritual dimension that runs past this one. The evidence shows up in accounts of the afterlife and in near death experiences. A few people have been declared dead in hospitals, literally pronounced gone, and then returned with stories to tell.

Plenty of people in the middle of a psychotic episode are certain that others are out to get them. Flip the frame: in their reality, perhaps they're picking up on things the average person misses, and perhaps some people genuinely are out to get them. The people who get labeled mentally ill often turn out to be unusually sensitive and unusually bright. Maybe that sensitivity reaches into another world, one with spiritual beings doing the talking.

Spirituality and religion aren't the same thing, but there are documented cases of a religious person describing a close relationship with God and winding up diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia for it, precisely because they felt singled out by that relationship. Only a thin slice of society is actively spiritual or religious, so to the whole, that experience can read as abnormal.

Factor in how self-interested people tend to be and the rest isn't hard to piece together, at least if you know a little psychology. The so-called mentally ill often land above average in intelligence, and that alone can rattle people of ordinary or even genius-level ability. People who feel intimidated rarely warm to the source of it, and the business world is especially unforgiving on this point.

Picture Joe Average, overcompensating with raw ambition, catching sight of a more sensitive man nearby. He may set out to tear the guy down, needling him until something snaps. The sensitive one breaks, gets carried off to a hospital, and ends up on medication. The diagnosis handed to him is paranoid schizophrenia, with the footnote that he'll need the pills for the rest of his life. What he might have needed instead was a set of personal growth tools and some practice at not taking things so personally.

By committing to real self-development, that same man could build coping skills so no one can provoke him into snapping and tipping over into a heightened reality that whispers the truth that people really are after him. That whisper tends to trip the fight or flight response common to anxiety, and paranoid delusion is arguably anxiety in a severe form.

So here's where it lands. Maybe the mentally ill really are living out of a reality of their own. It isn't normal, but then nobody is truly normal. There's a saying about the not-so-black sheep of the family rarely being as white as they appear. It's the same reason a person suspected of mental illness who kills someone out of perceived self-defense still gets charged with second-degree murder. The judge may notice the mental health piece and show some leniency, at least the first time, handing down a few months in a psychiatric hospital with court-ordered medication until the person is judged safe again, once that person has put some self-development and basic psychology to work on learning to steer their own emotions. - Erwin Wooten