Stop saying "mental illness", stop thinking in terms of "mental health".

keeping it all the way real does not
mean telling the truth at all times all right you know if you attend your grandfather's funeral that might not be the best time to let everyone in the crowd know that he was a worthless alcoholic and a gambler there is a kind of limited and spare and tactical use of truth in our daily lives with loved ones and certainly even in politics okay if you've been watching this YouTube channel for six years you will remember at some point I used the example of saying hey you know what if you know women who lie to you about their body weight if you don't women who lie to you about their diet and you know we're gonna lie to you about your age you know I'm inclined to just let them keep on lying to me you know I really don't feel that the value of truth in my life is interrupting someone and saying no you're not 135 pounds no you're more like hundred six five I don't do that you might think my personal commitment to honesty and keeping it real means that I I don't I don't actually all right there are some types of half-truths and self-deceptions that are dangerous and there are sometimes and the people who know you we surround you in life or lying to themselves and like do you lie to others well you have to ask yourself do I love this person enough do I care about them enough to be honest even if it's really gonna hurt them even if it's really gonna upset them and as I say that's not gonna be about something like hey you've been saying that you're 29 for three years and it's not gonna be about oh you say you're 135 pounds and you know you gain 20 pounds since last night it's not it's not gonna be about something that that's yellow okay I I check on Hannah mania every so often you know and it really struck me today that there's a very slip a very dangerous kind of self-deception that goes on even in describing yourself as having a mental illness you know and if you're gonna address this with somebody like I say it's got to be out of a certain kind of love it's got to be out of a certain kind of compassion it's got a bit of a certain kind of engagement you know what I had a cold that lasted 28 days a couple months ago now it's possible it was the corona virus I don't know and it changed me while I had that cold there was a pathogen in my body there was a virus in my body possibly also bacteria in my body there was something that changed my personality and changed my behavior and changed my voice and made it difficult for me to sleep at night and difficult to get out of bed in the morning and difficult to do grocery shopping made it difficult to breathe I actually ran out of breath when recording YouTube videos during the twenty eight days and for a couple weeks afterwards I said I don't know that was coronavirus just a really serious cold all right there is absolutely no sense in which you have mental illness in the same sense that you have a cold and the reason why this is such a dangerous deception is that the notion of having it as an illness brings with it the assumption that you're gonna have a recovery there's a different person that you were before you had the illness and others this brief interruption of you having the illness and then afterwards gonna be your real self again right just like when I got over my cold I can breathe through my nose again right and my voice returns to normal and right when when it's hard for you to get out of bed in the morning because you have quote-unquote mental illness right it's hard for you to get out of bed in the morning because of who you are because of the life you're living and and how you feel about it right I'm not saying this from a place of being disparaging or dismissive or hateful I know what it's like to be suicidal for years for several years in a row and let's go past let's go past this slightly vague notion of Quantico being suicidal I know what it's like to live a life where I wake up in the morning and think I would rather be dead than to keep on living this life notice already there's a real difference in phrasing it that way right this is partly about Who I am how I feel and it's partly about the life I'm leading and then of course how that makes me feel right you can even see this new apartment in the background here okay for some people the life I'm leading right now would be paradise right and then some people have ambitions that would make this life that I'm leading stultifying cloister ring confining dissatisfactory miserable there are some people who might even be driven to the edge of suicide but living the life I'm leading right now and let's go back to the other side of the world when I was leading a totally different life doing humanitarian work and historical research and political research and studying languages and had no electricity in the jungles of northwestern Laos have to add a footnote here that there was really no jungle left or everyday I saw the jungle being cut down blah blah blah but whatever you know living for someone else that would be misery and for me being motivated about what I was motivated by right in a lot of ways it was wonderful I could even just pause it's all about me it's not just the life I'm living it's not just the circumstances right like I could be in that village worried about getting malaria but I chose to be there I was there for a reason I had my motivations in my ambitions and there's some other guy living in that village and he wishes he could be in this apartment in Canada taking a shower in the shower and having this electrical light that plugs in and I'm not joking I was in villages with these really basic things didn't exist and they still had bomb craters from the war and well military bases it's not worth describing to leftovers the war on the poverty and and what have you and they were living under a communist regime right you know I mean I think probably the thing that made me most unhappy when I was out there I wasn't unhappy about you know you have to boil the water before you drink it because all the water has shall we say pathogens and it has parasites you know wasn't chopping my own firewood I was I was eating absolutely nothing but yellow lentils were white rice and a vitamin pill when I could get garlic I had a garlic when I couldn't get garlic nothing else none of that made me unhappy you know what maybe I'm happy being disrespected by my boss having my trust betray but having conflict with my twittle maybe you know look I think for a lot of people that's what life's like you can have a fabulous apartment in downtown Manhattan Paris Berlin doesn't matter and you have a conflict with your boss and you're unhappy too and I was sleeping in a bamboo hut with no electricity but living life I wanted to live terms of research and all these other things and why am i unhappy cuz I got conflict so I just say this is a kind of great human human enclosure and and I've known people I knew one woman in / - I remember she she had really been suicidal for years because of a relationship with her boss and we weren't we weren't friends for a long time we were friends fo two weeks or something and I remember she described to me when she finally sat down with her boss and told her that she was quitting he had no idea he had absolutely no idea of the impact he'd had in her life for I think was about five years you've been working same job and that same she had no idea was making her life miserable you know I do you know I you know uh alright so these are the palpable and impalpable ways in which all of us suffer and our suffering takes place in the shadow of our ambitions it takes place you know on a canvas the frame for which we choose ourselves limits we figure out and impose from our own imaginations of the life we could be living you know and you can be haunted by that whether you're in Manhattan or Paris or Berlin or in the jungle right that there's some other life you could be living or should be living this link better you could do my grandfather on my mother's side he owned a small factory that took a marble and cut it into lighters interesting guy as soon as he learned cigarettes cause cancer completely shut down he genuinely didn't know cigarettes are bad for your health and we learned they worried completely got out of that kind of business but he made you know ok money with a small workshop of guys who would take take stone and polish it and cut it and make a make a lighter you know very fancy high-end lighter miserable his whole life because he want to be a lawyer and he could have been he knew he was smart enough he knew he couldn't been and I think about once a week or something he'd just be sitting there he ate the same thing for dinner every night unusual guy mismatching he'd be sitting there with his wife he just wouldn't be talking to be miserable and she'd say to him do it today put in your application to go to law school don't regret it you'd hold for another day too and you know again his terms of his a member of the house he lived in you know he lived in a nice enough house he had a good you've seen it to start my girlfriend self-camera you saw though that was he lived in it was a the front of it at least it holds nothing nothing wrong was like he was miserable he was miserable every day that's life because he felt he wasted his intellectual potential he was you know and hate come on only so many ways you can cut a slab of marble into a bunch of letters and then I guess maybe you have the irony of learning you were just helping people kill themselves with cancer - filthy terrible have it me I don't know I don't know how much that matter did I just don't know all right [Music] the concept of mental illness is dangerous it's a form of self-deception you know far far worse than telling yourself you weigh 135 pounds when you weigh 165 or telling yourself you're still 29 years old when you're 32 or whatever the case may be all right because what you're telling yourself is that your sickness is something other than who you are and that arose from some kind of pathogen that has nothing to do with you and your values and your ambitions and doesn't have to do with your circumstances and the life you're leading and how you feel about it and it doesn't have to do with the decisions you're gonna make we're gonna change it all right and illness absolute by definition right what there were two possibilities here right either like the corona virus however long it lasts 14 days or 28 days either this too will pass or you you too will pass but even if the corona virus kills you right it is something other than you you at least have the comfort of knowing this virus is not me it's not who I really am and what you're calling mental illness is you it's who you really are and the cure is whatever you are willing to do about it