State of Mind

Sympathies and Sneering

There is a classmate of mine who asked me yesterday why i didn't clear my previous exams. He's become a good friend of mine. I told him about my illness, and he was shocked but sympathising. Everyone who knows about my illness is very understanding and helpful. Or maybe as I mentioned earlier, we only tell people about our illness who we believe would understand. I asked my friend if he had seen "A beautiful mind" and he nodded his head. Then he asked me if I had gone through the same thing. I told him that every case of schizophrenia is different, and I had gone through some similar things. I further told him that I was on medication, and he was surprised once more, as he didn't know that their were medicines for controlling this illness. It shows that people may sympathise with you, but most of them don't know anything about mental illnesses and don't even know that medications for them exists. They would sympathise with you and try to help you out, but once you start behaving really weird, they might try to keep their distance to preserve their own sanity (as my previous friends did). 'A beautiful mind' has made a breakthrough within the minds of the populace, showing them how tormenting this illness can be (though I haven't yet seen "One flew over the cuckoo's nest), and it has changed the way most of the people look at the mentally ill. However, there is still the crowd like those in the IIT (the top asian technical colleges in India) who made fun of John Nash when he visited their campus. But this is life, there are the good and the bad, the empathising and the sneering ones, those who want to bring a change, revolutionaries, and as RD Laing said - "Schizophrenia may not always be breakdown, it may be breakthrough" (though I don't take any sides between the psychologists or the psychiatrists).