State of Mind

Loneliness...

I was wrong to say in my previous posts that it didn't matter to me losing more friends. The immediate effects of feeling lonely made me depressed. It made me more anxious. It affected my breathing pattern (and that is why I've started doing my Art of Living's Sudarshan Kriya). Those friends of mine read my blog and were shocked to know about the tough times I'd been through. They told me that they didn't really mean what they said, and they don't hate me. It made me more relaxed. Recently, I read an article on WebMD about how loneliness affects people. It has been shown time and again to weaken the immune system and affect the heart. Interestingly, however, loneliness is different from isolation from people. A person can feel lonely in a crowd, and another could feel content around just a few people. It depends upon the kind of relationships you develop around people, and how they meet your social needs.

One of the most disabling features for those with schizophrenia is social inacceptability, which is present even after the person has recovered from suffering social withdrawal (a symptom of sz) and inability to react appropriately in social situations and understand the social cues. Unless the stigma of this illness goes away, and the society is ready to accept people suffering from this illness, only then can we truly recover completely. And this can happen only when we have a good psychotherapeutical system in which the person can be gradually allowed to adjust in a social environment, taught again to understand social cues, to come out of the years of social withdrawal that they have put themselves through. The need of the hour is to build up on these systems so the individual can lead a socially productive life, and not live on streets from hand to mouth. In India, we don't even have enough psychiatrists to help the ill, leave aside the psychotherapy, no medical aids to help the lower classes which constitute 70% of the population. It is time now to start spreading information about the illness, to fight for the rights of the ill, to bring about a revolution against this stigma!