A Catch 22
When it comes to taking psychiatric medications, and overcoming mental and emotional health deficits, it’s a catch 22. For I, having legitimate mental illnesses, and majorly deeper levels of emotional baggage, and needing to take psychiatric medications to bolster up my mind’s activity, to a place where I could function mentally, I would also have an unnatural mental high, causing an emotional disconnect from my deeper emotional pains. This because with having a drug induced disconnect, by having the unnatural high from taking the medications, it would cut off a proper way to connect with my emotions. I then could not get beyond the point of what the emotional baggage and weight I carried was, it acting as an unnecessary anchor, stopping me from sailing smoothly forward, through my journey in life. For to heal, one needs to feel their damaged emotions, and then work their way through them, through a variety of therapies, such as talk. However, on the other hand, if a mentally ill individual is off their medications, they then would not be in a healthy state of mind mentally, to be able to work through their emotional problems, through forms of effective therapy, to overcome these deficits.
With legitimate mental illnesses like mine, meaning the physical brain has a chemical malfunction, no matter what the cause, be it stress, street drugs, or even being injected as I was, medications are most definitely necessary. It is worth noting here that, for further understanding of these medications, that a study done by the University of Utah, showed by scientific experiment, that the same areas and chemicals in the brain that are effected when one feels the Holy Spirit, are the same regions where the chemicals are effected, when one uses drugs, illegal, or otherwise prescribed (psychiatric drugs – which are a slow release version of such).
The difference being, that one way is healthy, true and right, namely feeling the Spirit, and having other natural highs, and the other ways are unhealthy, not normal, right, or ethical, as in the case of using illegal street drugs, which sends a person’s brain chemistry way up, too high and fast, and then way back down, fast and even lower than before, which is harmful to our brains, and the extremity of their effects are not healthy or good, and can actually cause mental illnesses.
As one having mental illnesses, I must do the next right thing, and that is to take my psychiatric medications, regardless of the emotional disconnect. But as you will see, in this great and unfair arrangement of which I just explained, God still made a way to come through for me to emotionally heal, and He did, twice!
As a consumer of psychiatric medications, I feel it is always naturally harder for me to feel my emotions, and thus have the needed love connections with others I need and desire, because of how the medications normally blunt them, but with the medications, I have a much better opportunity to socialize, for with a more proper, stable state of mind mentally, I can still at least still be somewhat in the same ballfield as many others, no matter how sundry I may play my role. For by stimulating and altering my brain, even though it is not natural, I can at least begin to have some grounding beneath me to stand upon, to begin to do so. Otherwise, I’d be a downtrodden mess, and not even a spectator of the game. I take my medications very seriously, and though I don’t have the actual thing I want, namely the close family relationships I desire, I still choose, knowing better, the next right thing.
Shane
