Gone Mental

I remember when we used to say that in High School - she's gone mental. When we said it my friends and I meant that the person did something that we would not have done, like put relish on a hot dog, or yelled at a teacher. Ah the good old days of innoccence before going mental meant taking an AK47 to a random group of strangers....

I am not sure there were good old days...

I think more things were swept under the table and more people just dealt with their depression, or schizophrenia, or anger on their own. In good and bad ways. Many street people probably could have avoided it with a good bout of therapy and pharmaceuticals. Depressed people were institutionalized right up to the 1970's. And let's not forget how almost every housewife in North America was prescribed valium in order to help deal with their husband during the 60's.

So I do not think much has changed except that it is out in the open, although still stigmatized. But here is the thing, I am not sure I have ever met a sane person. Or, if I have, I have not stayed in touch past the initial contact. It is not that there is anything wrong with sanity - it is simply that most of us cannot relate.

And that is because like it or not, most of us have gone mental. Perhaps we always were. ADHD, Depression, Social Anxiety, PTSD, Mania, Bipolar, Phobias, to name my own basket list of issues, grin, plague almost everyone. I defy you to go look up characteristics of mental illness and not find anything in common with any of them.

Again, I am not saying the world has changed, although it is extremely stressful and quick moving these days. I am not saying school or society did it to us, although there is certainly a lot that is unhealthy in our systems these days. I am not blaming our parents, although many people come from broken and violent pasts these days. Nor am I blaming the damn mercury in our booster shots.

What I am saying is that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is struggling with mental illness right now, this very moment. Someone you know is going to consider killing themselves today. This week someone you have talked to will come to the breaking point and either drink themselves into a stupor or punch something or someone. More than half the people you encounter today are probably taking prescription drugs just to cope. Another third more probably self medicate with anything from cocaine to chocolate.

So for God's sake - stop being so hard on everyone. Stop thinking you are so perfect. Stop pretending life is easy. Admit how hard it is. Share your pain. Be real in your living. If we all helped each... things would be different.

The World We Live in

I grew up on the tail end of the Cold War. Just old enough to remember hiding under the desk in order to survive the impending Nuclear holocaust. I still cannot imagine who came up with that one...

Anyway – there was always that. Death from nuclear missiles. Which sort of occupied our minds in the background. But aside from that, do you know what I worried about? Nothing. Okay, that is an oversimplification I worried about what my parents would say if I did not do well in school or if I was not polite to their friends. The punishment for those two things was enough to make you never forget to say thank you.

That was not just them – it was everyone. We knew we had better not disappoint our parents, teachers, ministers, coach etc. Or God help you.

Still, this was the sum total of my fear. Someday the Russians (yes, it was always the Russians back then) would kill us all, and sometime nearer in terms of history, I was going to slip up and fail at something and get myself killed.

I want you to think back over the last week in Canada and tell me what sort of things you have been worried about? That a crazy crack addicted family of millionaires is going to once again take over Toronto, that ISIS is targeting Canadian soldiers, that terrorism is hitting close to home, that BDSM is becoming mainstream, and on and on and on it goes.

Life is not simple anymore. Some may argue it never was, but I am pretty convinced it was more simple. It was not better, or happier, or anything like that perhaps, but it was simpler.

Social scientists, religious leaders, philosophers, and all those people will tell you there is a reason for this. We live in a transitional age. Things are changing rapidly, and society does not yet know where it is heading.

Curiously this is a cyclical phenomenon that happens every 500 years or so. A quick and abysmally one-sided history lesson suggests they are on to something:

1500 was the Protestant reformation, the printing press was discovered, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote everything, Copernicus discovered the earth was the centre of the solar system and Francis Drake sailed around the world.

1000 saw the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches divide, the invasion of Jerusalem by the Muslims, the launch of the Crusades and the Vikings discovering and settling North America.

500 was when the Roman Empire finally began to lose its power, Arthur won Britain and Clovis won France, the Persians attacked Rome and the Vandal Hordes were storming in from the East. The Dark Ages began here.

You see my point – their point – the point. It seems true to say, oddly, that every 500 years everything changes. That is how long we can get along before society needs to readjust. And it takes about a hundred years for things to settle into a new way of being that no one every thought of before that point.

God only knows why the scandal between Jian Ghomeshi and the CBC brought this to mind for me, but it did. I think it is part and parcel of the millennial change in the way we as humans are going to exist on the planet – which for my money started about 1960 and will therefore resolve itself into a new era sometime after 2050.

Life for us caught up in this century is and always will be chaos. The world is changing faster than we can keep up, and that includes the way we think about things. Celebrity, sex, war, politics, morals, sexuality, family, religion – all these things are up for grabs and none of them will be the same in 30 years.

On the other hand, it is one hell of a ride.