It’s All in Your Head

Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I want to talk about the idea that mental illness is all in your head. This is something I frequently hear and has never made sense to me. I just want to take a minute to break it down, look at this and expose why it doesn’t mean what people think it means when they say it.

When people discover that I am diagnosed with mental illnesses, it isn’t uncommon for them to respond with “It’s all in your head.” When they are saying this to me, it is generally meant that mental illnesses are somehow less real or less important than illnesses of other types. Let’s look at why that isn’t true and we’re going to use this very statement to prove it.

Yes. Mental illness is in my head. That’s where the brain resides so, this statement is accurate. It would rather be like saying that a heart attack is all in your chest though. It’s kind of strange and seems like an unimportant thing to note. It is stating the obvious. Yes, I have an illness in my brain and my brain is in my head.

The retort is often then that there is nothing physically wrong with the brain. I offer a nod. This is generally true. The anatomy of the brain is considered to be normal in individuals with mental illness, assuming that there isn’t another diagnosis also present. Ok. Sometimes, organs that are structurally normal, do not function the way that they should. Sometimes, the physiology is abnormal. A another example of this would be atrial fibrillation. The structure of the heart is normal, yet it doesn’t beat the way that it should. If not treated properly this abnormal beating can cause numerous problems including blood clots that can kill a person. Illness is not limited to just the anatomy of the body.

This is usually the point that people drop it, but once in a while I get a person that really clings to their premise and pushes forward. They will toss something out there like “You’re imagining it” or “You make it up.” I find this very interesting and ask the question if they think that would be normal behavior. Would a person imagining or making up symptoms be normal? If they are not normal and their brain is not functioning the way that it is expected to function then wouldn’t that imply that there is a disorder in the functioning and thus an illness?

So, yeah. Mental illness is in a person’s head. Atrial fibrillation is in a person’s chest. But it is kind of weird to just state the location of the organ that is effected by an illness. That’s weird behavior. Maybe the people engaging in this behavior don’t have normal brains either…

Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!