Your Mind Isn’t Broken
me and Jorji, Istanbul, 2022
Our society tends to judge people for being emotionally complex. Often, the ones doing the judging are ashamed of their own complexity.
The first time I was told my mind was broken, I believed it.
Wouldn't you, if you heard it from a doctor? I was in my early twenties and desperate to find out why I woke up every day forgetting important events or getting triggered by loud noises and crowds.
The doctor told me I was having a reaction to stress in my life. He suggested anti-anxiety medication. I knew that wasn’t the main issue, so I tried to tell him about my forgetfulness. “It’s like I put memories in one place and then can’t find them,” I said. “I have anxiety because I forget things. I need help with the forgetting part.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “Your brain just works that way. The best thing is to take medication. At least then you won’t be stressed about your forgetfulness.”
This is all too common. In trying to address symptoms and not underlying causes, our society not only mis-diagnoses, mis-educates, and mis-medicates people, it also perpetuates shame about the natural functioning of the mind.
For a lot of my adult life, I’ve been scared of being around big dogs. I don’t mean scared of being bitten — I mean scared of having an emotional connection to them. I never understood why, until recently, when I was hanging out with my sister's German Shepherd, Jorji, and I thought of my childhood dog, also a Shepherd, a beautiful loving dog who was poisoned by some religious fanatics next door to our rural home in northern Iran. I couldn’t believe I’d blocked that memory out for so many years!
But that’s how the mind works to protect us from pain.
Good mental-health support is not about just getting rid of symptoms. I didn’t need to have my fear of big dogs canceled out by some pill. I needed to remember the source of my pain. Now I can actually have a relationship with Jorji.
Good mental-health support involves, first, addressing any shame that keeps people from being able to look honestly at what’s been locked away. Then, it involves making time and space for people to feel safe enough to investigate their inner compartments. Finally, it involves being patient with people’s processes, which can take years. Prescribing medication out of impatience is totally unethical.
Of course, sometimes medication is necessary. What’s scary is how quickly meds are prescribed, and how often the underlying rationale for them is, “once ill, always ill.” But the truth is that, in most cases, psychotherapy is a reliable treatment, even if it takes time.
All healing takes time.
If you want to speed up the process, focus on removing the shame, not adding the pills.