About These Blogs

Welcome to "Beyond Mental Illness." This site was created to give advice to people who have a psychiatric history and now are working to re-build their lives. It is definitely possible for people with psychiatric histories to have meaningful lives with important contributions, and these pages are designed to give suggestions on how to do so.

There is minimal discussion of medication here. Medications can be an important step for some people, but they are only one step. Medications can help mitigate some symptoms, but they cannot do everything a person needs. The author hopes to give suggestions on filling other needs people with mental illness have.

Right now the blog has two composite characters. One is Tony, a young man who has recently been released from the hospital and is low-functioning. The letters addressed to Tony are here on this page.

The second character is Kayla, who has been stable for a while but needs advice on taking next steps and moving forward. The link to Kayla's letters is: beyondmikayla.blogspot.com.

The author recommends people interested in mental health consider reading the following books: http://beyondmentalillness.blogspot.com/p/recommended-reading-list.html.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

More on Dealing with Pain

Dear Tony,

I want to expand on what I wrote in the last post about having feelings.

The first feeling you have is pain. That is to be expected. I have really genuinely had some very bad things happen to me, and I would bet you have, too. Of course you feel pain. It would not be healthy to suffer and not feel pain. As I said, pain can sometimes be a good thing. It means that you are still able to have feelings. Some of the sickest people just go numb.

Once you start having feelings they come in out of control. They can come flooding back. There could be a minor feeling about a minor upset that just refuses to leave. They become mixed with each other. For a long time, I would focus and emphasize with small issues while ignoring larger ones. No one has been able to adequately explain feelings. Every conscious human being sometimes wishes s/he had the capacity to turn his/her feelings on and off the way we turn a television on and off. We don’t.

When my feelings started flooding me, I had to sort it out. This took just about every spare minute I had (and then some). I had to consider, dwell on, and analyze every feeling which I had. This was not because I really believed every feeling I had deserved such contemplation and expression. I simply lacked any sort of triage system.

I was eventually able to understand and start to triage most of my feelings. I know I could not have done it without all the contemplation. There are no shortcuts to that I can suggest. Just lots and lots of practice of recognizing your feelings and (as much as possible) figuring out the root causes. It was definitely worth it, and it was definitely necessary to my recovery. But it was admittedly extremely laborious.

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