The problem with Mental Health is that it's never me who has the problem - it's always that other guy, or that other girl, or those other people - never me. I'm perfectly OK - it's the rest of you bastards who are totally nuts, Baby!
And THAT'S the problem! We have to own our own peculiarities before we can adequately deal with those of others. And it is becoming a world-wide problem, as we keep on breeding ourselves out of a decent future, and affordable housing, and jobs that allow us to be independent, and interpersonal relationships with real meaning, not entered into for survival purposes alone.
Why is this problem growing seemingly so rapidly? The simple answer is because there's more and more and more of us. And as that human genome gets replicated, and replicated, and replicated, over and over, the problems with damaged or missing genes in that double helix of DNA gets worse and worse. People with damaged or missing genes are parenting others with damaged or missing genes, and the problems are compounded.
Am I preaching from a smug position as one not directly affected by all of that? NO! I am not. I am a bipolar who didn't discover that side of myself until middle-aged, and recently dried out from life as an alcoholic. The booze, being a tranquilizer, had been masking those ups and downs of my mood-swings of the bipolar episodes. I didn't notice those mood-swings until I'd been sober for about six months. And that opened up a whole other can of worms. But it has been a good thing, in one sense, because it forced me to deal with it, and part of that has been to learn everything I can about it. And there's lots to learn. Beginning with "We're all in this together!"
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