How To Manage Your Mental Illness
As recommended by people with no experience in the matter.
Mental illness gets a bad rep. It has been shrewdly observed how folks will use mental disorders to get out of just about anything these days. Responsibilities, adulthood, even accountability for criminal activities. It’s a (sic) madhouse out there, with folks everywhere claiming to be too sad, too happy, too sad and happy, paranoid, nervous, experiencing visual / auditory hallucinations and whatnot — where does it all end? It’s not as if mental illnesses manifest themselves as a result of losing the genetic lottery or anything. Biological, psychological, and environmental causes, our collective ass. Our mamas raised no fools.
What can these weaklings do to have their entropic existence cease and give way to finally, heroically Getting It Together™? In a bid to find out, UncouthX2 went out into the field and asked exactly no one but got all the answers anyway.
- Hydrate
Hydration is sort of a catch-all solution to all human troubles, currently in existence or yet to be identified. This particular catechism is dispensed so freely in response to the entire spectrum of human suffering, that we saw fit to Seussify it for easy recollection.
Drink water if you are too big
Drink water if you are too small
Drink water to fix that one problem or
Drink water to fix them all
Drink water to nurse that hangover
Drink it to break your mental fall
Drink water if you think you’re heartbroken
Drink, just drink it fucking all.
Bonus? Clear skin!
2. Don’t Be Tired
You may have these neoliberal, Hippocratic types tell you that low energy / fatigue is a common side effect of depression or anxiety. They may try to deceive you into believing that constantly fighting your brain is exhausting, and that adrenaline rushes and crashes from manias and panic attacks, respectively, take an actual physical toll. They will even go to the extent of conning you into accepting that doing the smallest of things costs more energy for those with mental illnesses. These are all just old wives’ tales for all their ‘medical’ ‘expertise’ and ‘research’. You know you’re being lazy for no reason and now that that has been pointed out, you may get up and at’em.
3. Be Productive
This one is a no-brainer. There’s a reason depression is called a rich man’s disease, for only rich men have the time to stop and question the quality of their mental health and its ringing needs, if any. The rest of us know that mental illness is just a product of sitting around and thinking about what may be wrong. The obvious solution is to push these errant thoughts and feelings down to the bottom of the priority pile while you convince yourself that you are ‘contributing to society’, all the while feeding the machine built specifically to disadvantage the working class, just as our forefathers did. The logic in this dichotomy could not be any more flawless.
4. Quit Meat
Better yet, quit only a certain kind of meat. You also have the option to quit all types of meat save for meat from an animal not usually acceptable to consume, but you can do it in the name of your mental fitness. How this particular canon hasn’t revolutionised the mental health research landscape is shocking beyond all reason.
5. Don’t Get Triggered
You may, on occasion, receive stimuli that triggers unwholesome feelings and trauma within you. For example, it’s amazing how some songs have to carry the weight of some moments, some relationships, and sometimes entire lifetimes. Listening to that song may kick your sensory memory into overdrive, overwhelming you into reliving the terrible emotions attached to it in great detail. Music is obviously not the only possible trigger. The burden of encasing memories is borne equally by everything — an item, a gesture, a way of phrasing things. Just ignore all of that crap and think happy thoughts. Think about rainbows and ice-cream and unicorns, or go all out and imagine a unicorn on a rainbow made of ice-cream.
6. Find Your Mantra
No one committed to recovering has ever done it without a mantra, a maxim you can chant to feel invincible, like a secret spell to dispel your blues. Find an incantation with your preferred triad or quad or whatever of syllables, sibilant, labial sounds, perhaps even a soft dentative. The right mantra can work better than a million prescriptions these hacks with their medicine degrees are so quick to write out.
5. Find God
Someone ought to.
P.S. Can I stop drinking all this water now? I can hear my blood thinning.
