Of Sessions and Stand-ups
Last night our church held an informative session on "Walking with People Dealing with Mental Health Issues." I was seemingly the youngest person in attendance, but I likely wouldn't have gone if I wasn't the youth pastor of the hosting church. I was hoping to be presented with new and helpful information. While new insights are always helpful, with such a loosely defined field, I found little that was new.

Also, to my dismay, there were two things running through my mind that I tried to forget but couldn't. One, the irony of hosting a session about mental health on ... yes, April Fools Day. I just couldn't bring it up at any of the meetings where it was suggested, and didn't want to make a farce of it, or appear to be taking the issue lightly. Nobody else seemed to notice the irony, and if they did, they didn't mention it to me. The other thing was part of a stand-up routine by Chris Rock, where he talks about developments in assessing mental well-being in children, and he asks the question, "What ever happened to crazy? What's the matter? You can't be crazy no more? Did they eliminate crazy from the dictionary?"

Maybe part of the goal of sessions like the one last night is so that people will take mental health more seriously, and then rants like Chris Rock's won't be as funny. It's one of those comedy things where I laugh because I see that I probably shouldn't. "Just in case they go crazy, they would only hurt other crazy kids." Many questions remain unanswered, but not because the session wasn't informative enough, or because the presenter didn't know her stuff, but because we know so little about the human brain. Much of mental illness is attributed to a chemical imbalance in the brain, and so medication is prescribed, but is that purely genetic, or do situations create chemical imbalances? Are the things we learn from our parents, environment, etc. the things that we use to recreate the same environments, thus creating a "genetic" stream of chemical imbalances?

I pretend to know a lot of stuff about a lot of things, but mental health issues isn't one of them. The only thing I do know is that there are questions that I have, even if I'm just asking questions that I've heard others ask, that haven't been answered, and the answers don't seem to be forthcoming.

   [ posted by William @ 3:11 PM ]