Make Your Neuroses Work For You!

The great thing about having a mental illness is that you get to go to spend a lot of time with psychologists. It's a sometimes thin silver lining, I'll admit, but talk therapy is actually a very healing process. It requires a lot of work on the part of the patient, up to and including a full-on lifestyle change. But any type of therapy is more difficult than a pharmaceutical approach, and it is more often than not the key to recovery.

Unfortunately, there is still a huge stigma here in middle America against mental illness. People don't talk about clinical depression, or bipolar disorder, or obsessive compulsive disorder, openly in public. They don't have 5K runs or benefit fundraisers for anxiety research. As a result, people are considerably less aware of the mental health problem consuming our country right now.

It's an illness - just like cancer, or diabetes, or heart disease. The chemistry of your brain literally changes, causing short circuits in normal thought processes. And it is often lethal. People who commit suicide or homicide, or who overdose while self-medicating, often have undiagnosed or untreated mental illness.

Even those deaths are stigmatized, assumed to be the result of a character flaw or personal failing. Yes, bad choices are involved. But the same could be said for a 30-year smoker who dies of lung cancer or the 400 lb. man who collapses from cardiac arrest. And sometimes, there are no apparent bad choices - a person who eats right and exercises and makes great choices gets cancer and dies. The same is true of mental illness and its fatalities. Sometimes all the therapy and medicine in the world can't make it better.

I can't explain what it's like to be in the depths of a depressive episode, any more than a person with cancer could explain the experience to someone who hasn't been there. It is debilitating. I have lost years of my life to depression, and my physical health has suffered tremendously as well.

Unlike cancer, there is no accepted definition of remission from mental illnesses like anxiety or depression. It's more like heart disease or diabetes. Once you have it, you always have to control it, and the best way to do that is with genuine lifestyle changes. Pills can mask the symptoms, and get your neurons firing the right direction again, but if you really want to make yourself better, your whole program has to change.

What that entails is looking at yourself and acknowledging your bad habits. And then, instead of beating yourself up over them and using them as an excuse to quit trying, you have to go through the physical process of  replacing those bad habits with good habits. I am somewhere in the middle of that process.

And that, to make a long story longer, is why I'm building this farm and market. My goal is to make it a place where good habits come to thrive. And hopefully, in the process, I can contribute to the greater good of addressing the awfulness that is mental illness. And cancer. And diabetes. And heart disease.

 And to Dr. Miramar Garcia Cohn: You saved my life. Thanks.