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...
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