It's All Mental

It's amazing how many things are all triggered by our state of mind. Our mental health can determine how our physical health is. I don't know what the statistics are, but it has definitely been proven that placebos work for some illnesses. My friend John was saying that he thinks placebos would work for cancer even. I disagreed with him and didn't think they would work for such things, but it wouldn't hurt to be in a good frame of mind when dealing with cancer.

Just this past week, I've had the medically incurably and frustratingly annoying common cold. How can we put a man on the moon but not cure the cold. Humans are definitely not the most dominant species on this planet, bacteria and virus are. Should all other things die, bacteria and viruses would still survive I think. Anyway I digresss as usual. Even with a cold, I have found that my mental state is totally different to normally.

Having a cold makes you tired and hence irritable. Tiny things annoy the heck out of me. I can't help but get angry at small things. My moods would swing quite quickly from being happy one minute to angry the next and feeling sorry for myself. I've always said to everyone that I'm pathetically weak and at the first sign of sickness, I'll be playing the victim game. Everything will the be fault of the world and not me. And the problem is that I'm conscious of it, but yet still do it. It's like I don't have full control over it. I guess this is in a very very small way how it might feel to have a mental illness. Not that I'm comparing a cold to being mentally ill. I would never make lite of mental illness, but I guess not being able to fully control one's mind with a cold is how I think it must feel to be mentally ill. You may be aware of your actions when you are mentally ill but yet feel hopeless when you can't control them.

Out of all the mental illnesses, depression would probably be the worse one. On the surface, people with depression may look and act like they don't have a problem. But underneath, a million things must be happening in their minds that they can't control. To have a common feeling of helplessness would drive anyone to lash out and show it physically, verbally and emotionally. What makes it worse still is that other people might not know that you have a problem, so assume its just how bad a person you are. Hence, you commonly hear people with depression say how relieved they felt to be diagnosed with depression. At least then they knew they have a problem and could start dealing with it.

I think I've heard, someone correct me if I'm wrong, that Australia might have one of the highest percentage of people with depression. I wonder why that is. This is a great country as far as I'm concerned, with many opportunities if you are willing to give things a go. All the conditions would be inducive to mentally fit people. I would have expected people in countries like Japan for instance, where there is so much pressure to do well, to have high levels of depression. Maybe Japan does have high levels of depression, I don't know. But you rarely hear of people in say Ethiopia having depression. Is it merely not diagnosed there, or does the constant struggle to survive from day to day stop their minds from thinking of other things? Is depression a disease for the wealthy? If you are worrying for your life each day, does natural survival instincts kick in and therefore push out all these other negative thoughts?

All these questions will be hard to answer, since the mind is still the most unexplained part of human biology. The mind can be such a wonderous thing but can also be such a destructive machine for each of us.