A noted authority claimed in a recent Reader’s Digest article that as many as one in four Americans may have a mental issue such as depression or similar disorder. If my poor math skills still have an iota of function left, that means that for every 100 people in this country, 25 of them have a problem. Well, I’m glad for the explanation. I was worried that I was the only person who saw things that way.
Of course, depression or bipolar disorder are big name problems counted in this one-in-four scenario, but other people in this group may have just a little brain quirk like an OCD. I’m sure the noted authority didn’t want to scare us by implying that a quarter of the folks you see on a public street are likely to do a psychological Mr. Hyde turn any moment. It does make me wonder, though, what is wrong with people that we can’t keep our minds in check.
Because we don’t fully understand the human mind, the best we can do most times is try to find the glitch and fix it without ruining things that don’t have a glitch. It’s like fixing a computer, in a way. Or better yet, trying to find the bad bulb in your holiday tree lights and get it running without the others burning out. We will never all act exactly the same. Conformity is impossible. Understanding why we do what we do is a step in the right direction, but maybe we shouldn’t call everything a disorder or a problem. Maybe the real issue is how misdirected we can be by circumstances in our lives that we can’t control. We get so frustrated by them, we redirect our lives to things we can control, like arranging our closets obsessively. It’s only bad when we hurt ourselves or others in the crossfire.
Still, I don’t like the idea that I could be in a mall with 99 other people, and we could all be looking so distrustfully at each other wondering who the 25% are. Maybe the real mental problem is labeling a percentage of people with a name describing their problem.
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