By Michael Crawford

If You Think You’re Mentally Ill

If you feel you may be suffering from a mental illness, or could be in danger of doing so, I urge you in the strongest terms to seek the advice of an experienced mental health professional – a psychologist or psychiatrist.

(Psychiatrists are medical doctors who specialize in mental illness. They have M.D. degrees and are licensed to prescribe medicine. Psychologists hold graduate degrees and practice “talk therapy”.)

This is important for more reasons than to simply relieve your suffering.

As I said before, if left untreated a mental illness can cause permanent damage. Besides the kindling that occurs with untreated manic depression , there is the damage that bad decisions or the inability to maintain relationships can do to your life. If you get severely depressed, there is the danger of suicide. It is much easier to deal with a mental illness before you become desperately ill. Look at it this way: an office visit is much cheaper than a hospital stay.

Accurate diagnosis is important. It is difficult to diagnose many mental disorders, and if you’re misdiagnosed you may not receive the treatment you need. It is common to mistake manic depression for schizophrenia and vice versa. Other illnesses that can be confused with manic depression include Attention Deficit Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.

There is the danger that antidepressants may cause one to become manic. An occurrence of even one manic episode in your lifetime is enough for a diagnosis of manic depression. I feel the history of every patient who receives antidepressants for the first time should be investigated to determine the danger that their medicine may cause mania. Although general practitioners – regular medical doctors – may legally prescribe antidepressants, I am strongly of the opinion that it is unethical for them to do so except in emergencies, as they do not have the training or experience to determine whether one might be manic depressive .

Do not engage in the self-deception of self-diagnosis. It is common for people to hear about illnesses of all sorts on Oprah or Donahue (or the Internet!) and to then fool themselves into thinking they share the diagnosis with the talk show guest. If you research an illness carefully enough before you consult a doctor, you can even fool him into agreeing with your diagnosis.

Failure to diagnose correctly can be life threatening. A number of serious medical conditions cause disturbances in thought and affect, for example stroke, brain injury as well as cancer of the brain, thyroid or adrenal gland. When the grandmother of Mindfullness author Ellen J. Langer complained to her doctor that a snake living in her head was giving her headaches, he diagnosed her as senile and refused to investigate further. It was only after her death that an autopsy found the brain tumor that killed her.

Mental disturbance can be ...