Why Sanity is Not Preferable

Our whole lives we are indoctrinated into the idea that we need to be sane. Ever since we were are all little, people have made jokes about behavior being crazy. No one ever really seriously defines for us what makes us crazy, until we do something they think is crazy. If we buy into the concept that maybe our behavior can be classified as such, we may deviate our behavior. Sane behavior must equal sanity, right? Hopefully that wasn’t a part of our personal makeup we just threw away, in the process of conforming.

Who decides what sanity is? Religious leaders? Psychiatrists? Medical doctors?

Who’s opinion creates your reality?

Sanity is all wrapped up in sanitation…the idea that we need to have a clean mind. Some of the readers here will remember a time when masturbation and sexual desire were treated as mental health problems. Torturous devices were recommended to keep desires down, quite often for children. Women being too active or vocal was considered to be an aberrance. If the husband wasn’t happy with her behavior, why not put her on sedatives? Or maybe even give her a lobotomy? Yes, we should most certainly trust the ideas of our mental health professionals. According to Chris Pirillo’s blog recently, there is little to support the entire structure of psychiatry…the marker by which you are judged.

Sanitary thoughts; being clean and pure in our intentions and thoughts. Wow, there are a lot of things that can be translated as. Unfortunately, some feel wiping or damaging our brains is the preferential methods of purifying our minds. Does this sound like a compassionate and real approach? The majority of mental hospitals are all white. Walls, floors, clothes, everything other than the stainless steel is white. White is a projective and sterile color, found rarely in nature, and not usually in large quantities. Our vision and mind are stimulated by color, and by the action of looking around often. In a completely white environ, the mind has nothing interesting to look at, and it lapses into inaction. Sterile environments breed sterility….nothing grows.

Mental illness is far different from sanity. It is rooted in a person’s inability to connect to the world around them on some level, and the mind breaks down in incomprehension. Our ability to understand the world is only as good as our ability to make connections, and connect to what is happening to us. Our world breaks down in chaos, the less we understand what is happening. The majority of mental illness arises during childhood, when the mind is still unable to comprehend the world it is in. We are dependent upon the people in our lives to interpret it for us, and to protect us from things that would damage our developing psyche. Often times it is the care givers who end up being the reason for a child’s mental health issues. Adults can also experience things beyond their comprehension, or ability to accept. Only through understanding why we have these issues and embracing them, can we resolve them.

Drugs for depression are one of the main solutions doctors recommend, but for some reason they forget to tell you some of the side effects. The brain works in a very interesting way. If the brain is over stimulated, emotions will be suppressed. If emotions/pleasure are over stimulated, the brain will be suppressed. This is rather funny, but bliss can lead to stupidity. It is a well known fact that anti-depressants cause an increase in happiness, and a decrease in intelligence. In people who take excessive nootropics(intelligence enhancers), emotion becomes suppressed, and a difficulty in feeling genuine happiness is a result. There is a very fine balance going on here between serotonin, melatonin, and dopamine levels. After extensive use of brain tweaking chemicals, the brain can no longer stimulate it’s own production of these chemicals properly. The longer you use these substances, the more you will become dependent upon them.

Healthy living creates a healthy mental perspective. Connecting to life on a physical level, and really emotionally connecting to the people in our lives, is where we will find genuine happiness. Detachment, unless needed, is not healthy. Suppressing our brains so that we don’t have to deal with our issues, is also not healthy. We may not be able to eliminate the past, but we certainly do not need to live in it. By facing and embracing what we have been through, we can move on to live in the moment.

We don’t need sanity, we need connection.

[tags]psychiatry, mental health, drugs, anti-depressants, psychiatrists, nootropics, melatonin, serotonin, dopamine, brain damage, apathy, lockergnome, shadowmyth [/tags]