Sharing about my mental illness and popularizing future-oriented thinking: feedback appreciated!

I think I am very confused about the idea of mental illnesses.

First of all to understand an illness, we need a ideal of health to compare to. Where does this ideal come from and what it is? When I come to LW (or even Reddit) I feel like i am depressed compared to you because I never really had much of a goals or passions or interests in life, so generally being anhedonic and alway have to keep fighting boredom. On the other hand, as far as I can tell, my attitude is not different from that of my parents and family members, I was raised so that they told me life is hard and it is about survival, not fun, and indeed my parents had their two hands full and more with just securing a comfortable middle class existence, they did not really have any energy for personal goals. If my father was alive and I would complain about boredom, he would say "you have it too good, when I was 37 I was standing 12 hours on top of a ladder painting houses so that we can pay off our flat" and things like that. So compared to LW, I am depressed, compared to my family norm, I am normal (except having it too good, obviously). The point is, there is no cast in stone definition of what is healthy. It may depend on culture, on age, on time, on a lot of things how we define the healthy.

A decade or two ago I had a strong interest in Buddhism. And my teachers were of the opinion that what most people consider healthy, in the sense of happiness / non-depression, is still a very low level and we can improve on that. They kept quoting Freud, saying the goal of psychotherapy is to turn abnormally unhappy people into normally happy people. And they claimed to take over from there, to try to turn people into being radiantly happy, through meditation. Their philosophy was that only complete happiness can be defined as healthy.

So, the point is, we do not have a "cast in stone" level of mental functioning that we could call unanimously "healthy", so we cannot really objectively define mental illness as a comparison to that. Pretty much it seems like the question of whether people like me or my parents / family members are depressed or not just depends on whether they want to change their mood or not , seek therapy or not. They can be seen as pretty normal, in a society that not too "dreamy" (i.e. not US-type "follow your dreams" type of society, but a more grim one).

Another weird issue is blame, stigma etc. In my childhood it was very confusing. It is the natural instict of children to be cruel assholes to people who seem to have some deficiency or problem. And then they tried to teach us e.g. "do not make fun of this man who sits in a wheelchair, he cannot help being disabled" so we tried to learn the distinction that sometimes you can be an ass to people, if it is about something they can help, but sometimes not, when it is about something they cannot help. As children we developed roughly this model, a milder defect is usually something that "can be helped" and thus you can be an ass to people who have it, and a harder defect is something "cannot be helped" and thus to be met with compassion. So for example we could make fun of a child for being clumsy, but not if a neurological disorder made him very clumsy. We could call a child stupid as long as he was only little stupid, but someone with serious mental retardation, very low IQ not. Our model of illness was largely a more severe version of normal defects, the kind of normal defects we made each other fun of for. Or bullied each other for verbally. When we grew up, of course we stopped behaving like little pricks about it. Still the essential distinction stayed there: if, for example, a man is only somewhat stupid, you can think "haha what an idiot" and consider this an insult or censure. If a man is very ,very stupid, clearly mentally retarded, then not, then your appropriate atttude is compassion, not censure. Later on I learned that there is no reason why not think that moderate versions of the same problem do not work through the same pathways as illness. So this distinction is not tenable. Since then, I cannot tell the difference if a person is simply an ass or has antisocial personality disorder, is a fucking coward or suffers from anxiety disorders and panic attacks, and so on. I can no longer tell the difference what could rightfully drawn criticism, scorn, censure, and what should be met with compassion. The only consistent solution would be to consider virtually everything an illness, and think "he cannot help being what he is" and meet everything with compassion, but that is an entirely unusual and weird human norm. It is not how people normally feel. If for example a soldier runs away from battle leaving his comrades in the shit, they will not think "poor fellow has anxiety disorder and panic attacks". They will think "fucking coward". This is the normal human attitude. And we are trying to wall it off into illnesses that "he cannot help being what he is" in which cases we do not use this normal attitude but more like think with compassion and understanding. But this distinction is not really tenable. Ultimately the illness and non-illness are very much the same thing. So what is the truly proper attitude? Give up all kinds of censure and criticism? I am really confused by this.

I would start the post by talking directly about your mental illness and the effect it has on your life instead about talking to want to share it.

The ending can flow in a more natural format than a list - this is that "call to action" stuff my high school writing teacher was always on about :P Separating it out makes it more explicit but feels less compelling to me.

Here's my lazy translation from list format to imperative format:

You can apply this story to your life. Not only if you want to come clean to people in your life about some unpleasant news, but for overcoming the short-term emotional pain of taking any action that would help you achieve your long-term goals. Consider an action that you are not doing because of some barrier. What would the world look like in one year if you take the action? What would it look like if you did not take the action? From the point of view of a year from now, is it worth it?

Pick that world you want to live in, and decide on the actions needed to get to that world. Make a plan, and take the plunge. Be flexible about revising your plan based on new information such as reactions from others, as I did regarding sharing about my own condition.

You probably already have evidence in your own life. Almost everyone has put off acting on something important because of emotional distress. How did you deal with this in the past? What advice would you give you past self? Seriously consider the advice you would have given to yourself - you have the chance to follow this advice today. Seek out those areas of your life where you need to be oriented to the long-term rather than the short-term, pick the world you want to live in a year from now, and put it into practice.

EDIT: Also, I think this is really great, thanks for posting this!

Future-oriented thinking might not always be desirable. It seems to have helped you in that specific situation, so I don't want to discourage you from using it as a rule of thumb. But sometimes what people need is to start thinking more about the present, or past. It depends on the situation, and on the person.

Philip Zimbardo, the person who ran the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, has a book about different time perspectives. It is called The Time Paradox. I liked it, and it gave me some insights into how the time-orientation of a person's thoughts can affect their perspective.

I think what helped make it work in your situation is that you could see a connection between your short term actions and your long term goals, that you could see how taking a specific course of action would likely take you closer to your goals. There are some situations where it is not clear what action to take that would get a person closer to their goals, and even when taking advice and consulting experts, choosing a course of action that would help can be murky. If a person wants to change something where the mechanism of how to change it is unknown, or unknown to them, future-oriented thinking can feel discouraging.

redacted

'If you're not working on your best idea right now, you're doing it wrong' - David Hansson, Creator of Ruby on Rails