Understanding Mental Illnesses

Some people might think that others might not believe that a mental illness they live with is even something it is possible to experience to begin with.  When it seems unlikely that others will even understand that a possible mental illness is really possible, secrecy will almost certainly ensue.  This does nothing to actually resolve a mental illness or make it more bearable, and it can easily make the situation all the more difficult for the person struggling while others look on with few or no outward clues about what is happening.  The unwillingness of someone else to understand a mental illness--what it is and is not and that it is possible--only persists when someone is irrational enough to think their own exact experiences or the words of some subjectively respected figure dictate what others really experience.

The logical possibility of different mental health issues like depression or emotional numbness can be discovered by merely reasoning out that such conditions do not contradict any necessary truth and therefore could be faced by someone even it oneself is not facing anything similar.  Not everyone experiences every mental illness or unwanted psychological condition, but knowledge of possibility is not restricted to those who have directly experienced mental illnesses or specifically spoken with other people about them.  What follows from this is that people truly can understand the smaller or more immense struggles someone else says they are going through--not through empathy, but by reason.

No one needs to actually experience depression, anxiety, PTSD, emotional numbness, anhedonia, or emotionless themselves to be capable of intellectually grasping the nature of them, even though the experience of living with them would be different from thinking about or conceptually understanding them.  Empathy can help two people connect with each other, but it is not in any way epistemologically necessary to approach mental illness as a subject.  What is necessary either way is the total avoidance of assumptions and the careful recognition of what does and does not logically follow from the concept of having any of these mental illnesses or others.  This much is within anyone's reach regardless of their experiences with their own mental health.

Even though it is possible for someone to just think of different mental illnesses by reflection and using reason apart from personal struggles or social contact with someone else who struggles with them, it is extremely unlikely; this is simply about more than necessary truths and one's own introspection.  Rationalistic analysis prompted by personal experiences or conversations with others who claim to have certain mental health problems is the more probable way someone will start identifying specific truths about mental conditions that not everyone can or will experience firsthand.  Regardless of the exact circumstances a person might come to initially discover these logical truths, people can understand the concepts others express when they share their psychological burdens.

It is vital to the process of collaborating to diminish or remove symptoms of a mental illness, when it is possible to do so, that psychiatrists, friends, and those afflicted do not make assumptions about the nature of any condition, no matter how normal or rare it is.  Assumptions entail conceptual ignorance and can lead to further misunderstandings, false diagnoses, the wrong treatments, or the untrue belief that it is logically or empirically impossible for anything to be done to rid a person of the stronghold that mental illness can create.  True understanding of mental health, as is true understanding of all things, is rooted in a total avoidance of assumptions.