Knowing right from wrong

Knowing right from wrong makes all the difference when dealing with mental illness and the court system. Of course, those filling up jails and prisons are mentally ill, to a degree, and many of them are smart enough to crawl under the umbrella of mental illness to escape their sentence. Likewise a great many, while in prison have seen the error of their ways and have used the sentence as a way to heal themselves.

This topic of knowing right from wrong surfaced today while reading mental illness headlines. It seems that many are shouting that dollars need be spent to to treat mental illness in jails and in prisons. This is good and is something that should be considered, but there is that caution that says, those likely to repeat their offenses should not be so easily turned loose.

In a way it seems this is just another item that can be turned into a reason to generate hostility and a cause that many will want to take up arms against. That method of dealing with mental illness is a sick idea. The courts must keep to their distinction between insanity -- knowing right from wrong -- and mental illness in general. An ill mind is not a safe mind, that is true, but not all ill minds are criminal minds.

A person using a free will to plot a crime of murder, is not a well mind, but most often they know it is something they should not do. Neither should they be allowed to spend their sentence in a hospital with others who may not know right from wrong.

This is one small attempt to set the thinking straight about any attempts to use the mental illness labeling to avoid incarceration. When a crime has been committed, justice must be served. A more hopeful setting is one where the prisoner has the time, and the safety, of learning about themselves, why they did what they did, not the time to plot how to undo the system that put them in prison.

Yes, treat the mentally ill, but be sure everyone involved knows the difference between right and wrong. That is a lesson society, as a whole, has been reluctant to learn.

After writing the above article, I also uploaded it to a website where I usually post article. Check it out at Helium.com. I added several sources of information readers can look to for more information. These I looked over briefly, but have not have actually read.

PS: The piece of art is something I found among my papers and I don't remember exactly when it was done. I most often keep my art dabbling, although I am never sure why.

When is Mental Illness not Mental Illness?

Mental illness is a sick mind the same way physical illness is a sick body. Both of these can recover, and both of these may be permanent, or transitory and they affect the over all health of the mind and body to varying degrees, at different times and at various degrees. And at the same time it near impossible not to have these two conditions overlap, one causing disturbances in the other.

The above need be said if the topic is to be answered, when is mental illness not mental illness? A mind is well when it has the capacity to understand the possibilities of its own sickness. It must guard against mental illness constantly. A mind can become become suddenly ill, was born that way, or it can gradually develop into a full grown illness, much like an undetected cancer can do. As an example, when a mind finds itself blaming others constantly for one's own wrong doing and not even admitting or even realizing that at least a part of the fault lies with them.

Admittedly, these may only be tainted lifestyles and many will argue that blaming others is a coping mechanism and is far removed from mental illness. It relieves the stress from one's own guilt. That may be true, but when getting down to the nitty gritty of mental illness, this refusal to take a look at one's own irresponsible behavior is definitely not leading toward mental health.

Mental illness is not mental illness when we can stop our finger pointing long enough to help others who are in stress, or who need our help. And that happens to such a degree when tragedy strikes that there is indeed hope of recovery for most of us.

Therefore mental illness is not mental illness if we can see what we did wrong to others and say, I am sorry and mean it. A lesson has been learned. But being human, and therefore subject to mental illness, we may again do the same thing, but maybe it will take longer, and will occur under different circumstances, but
we will again see our mistake and attempt to overcome.

When we can put ourselves, or attempt to put ourselves into the other's shoes and truthfully answer, to the best of our ability to know the truth, even though their shoes may not fit our dainty feet, and to answer the question what would we have done, honestly, truthfully, and with the grace God gives us to know the truth,
we will be on the road to recovery if we say, much worse.

The road to mental health is a long one, a long sentence we we must serve and one often where there is more darkness than light. Help comes in many forms, but first it must be recognized as being, not something apart, something that afflicts others only, but part and parcel, of us all. When one hurts or lives in darkness, we all hurt.

The Tower of Babble: Wrong or right messages

Today, a word of explanation about Headline Hunting. What exactly had I in mind when I created this blog and entitled it Headline Hunting? That is easy to answer. It dealt with my habit of reading only the headlines online each day to quickly learn what what was going on in the world.

Headlines fascinated me. and as a writer, reading them have become somewhat of a hobby. Although I find many that could be made into something other than what was spelled out in black and white, I choose not to. To do so would make someone a butt of a joke, and that has never been my intent.

Therefore, I elevated my purpose of headlines to those whose message I wanted to share with others. That is how mental health, as an ongoing theme, eventually took over Headline hunting on a regular basis. Say something that matters, I told myself. What do you know that others need to know, I further told myself.

Answers don't come easy. I had to admit I know mental illness. I know mental illness from many different angles. I know it as a sufferer of an inherited Bipolar condition; I know it as a nurse working with patients who often manifested mentally ill symptoms; I know it as a member of a family with mental illness when growing up.

And now confession time. The above was not something I cared to talk about freely, however. I much preferred other subjects and still do, but after a lifetime, almost eighty years of living among, dealing with, running away from, I have learned the value of the truth. It is truly the only way to freedom.

Freedom? What has that to do with mental illness? Everything. One is locked into one's own body and must cope to the best of one's ability. When one is programmed from birth to old age with mental aberrations that keeps one from progressing normally, physically or mentally, then one is locked out of a normal life.

The only way out is the truth. It is the truth that belongs to each one individually and cannot be programmed from without. Those on the outside trying to help can do only so much and they know that. They work from the premise of teaching the mentally ill person, if they are teachable and can think coherently, at least part of the time, how to help themselves.

Fortunately for me, thinking and writing and learning has been something I have always liked to do. In other words, I don't know much, but I am willing to learn, if that learning is compatible with what I know of myself, that is.

Therefore, the title alludes to the fact that not only do we often hear the wrong messages from those around us, we have not learned how to deal with them on an individual basis. Or maybe we take the easy way out and go with the crowd, take a pill and stop the psychic pain, deny there are problems while perpetuating problems for others in the meantime. These are temporary fixes that guarantee more problems.

Today's title, therefore, harks back to the Old Testament tale of God becoming irritated at the people of the world being so desirous of Heaven, that they attempted to build a stair way to it. He made each speak a different language and they no longer understood each other. They had no other choice but to dismantle their stairway and stop taking the matter into their own hands.

The moral of the above illustration is this: God speaks to each person individually since He created them this way. What works for one may almost work for another, but a few nuts and bolts -- no insults intended -- may be slightly different. Nations are made up of almost likenesses, but not quite. They are made up of a bunch of ones, but no two are exactly alike. But they are basically better prepared to understand their own next door neighbor than the friend on the other side of the world one met online, or through an email.

And with that explanation we are brought back to the present and to the predicament the world if finding itself in today. What is right and what is wrong, who is responsible, where is it happening, when will it stop and so on. In other words, how do we deal with mental illness?

Do we deal with it by denying that everyone of us, at some time, however infrequent the occasion, have been guilty of wrong thinking, wrong doing and then covering up the fact. Mental illness exists as societal problem and as long as the perpetuation of greed and schemes to try to cure all of us by raising money to throw at it, exists, eradication will only continue to elude a world in need. Money helps, but if only used the right way. To feed, clothe, educate and protect people.

The right question to ask is this message right or wrong? What message? The lies or the truth we tell ourselves, the lies or the truth we tell others, the lies or the truth we refuse to learn...

Overuse of Drugs

Most certainly medicine is being prescribed too freely these days. That is a known. And that is not to say medicine is not important and that we are a fortunate world to be living in such enlightened times, but when is enough enough. I believe we have reached that pinnacle. Medicine should be a second choice, not a first choice. The first choice should is to see if there are alternative routes to a cure, and not a cop out with drugs. In other words,seek the cause of the symptoms first before concluding that a powerful drug is the best choice.

When I ran across the headline stating that a study concluded that "newer anti-psychotic drugs were being overused, I immediately agreed. The article by a WebMd writer Brenda Goodman is an excellent one and traces the uses of these drugs back to their beginnings.

"In adults, for example, the use of any antipsychotic medication -- old or new -- remained relatively stable from 1995 to 2001. But from 2001 to 2006 use of the medications doubled, the study showed, indicating that doctors were becoming quicker to turn to these powerful drugs."

Those are startling facts, and it would do all of us good to stop and consider what is wrong with our society that this is happening.

PS:
The image is from a yarn creation. It is not a refined work of art but was a free-hand rendering of a coarse yarn on a piece of fabric that I sewed into a pillow. With my limited skills at embroidery, I attempted to depict an apple tree with a little by picking apples and placing them in a basket. It is now a pillow in my living room.

How does it relate to the overuse of anti-psychotic drugs? This is the best I can come up with at the moment: An apple a day may not keep the doctor away, but it could go a long way in helping the immune system do its work seeing over the health of the body. And a healthy immune system may make anti-psychotic drugs unnecessary. Well, its a thought anyway, probably not an earth shaking one, but we can't all be scientists, can we?