I can see that... I was thinking that if that Baboon I mentioned had "mastered solitude", as Gatto says it, then being kicked out of the monkey group (are they monkeys? I dunno) wouldn't have effected the thing in such a way. As an act of imagination I can simulate what that means and when I do I find my sense of being defeated, being surrounded on all sides, being depressed and anxious - I find that it lifts.

I'm also convinced that a lot more ppl. suffer from this than is generally counted -- how many ppl. could not go to work, much less get through the day, without coffee!? I once worked at a place that was straight out of a Dilbert cartoon called Associates Bancorp. (you may have heard of them; I had not known they were this big famous company). Everyone was really perky and I felt like killing myself. One day it hit me, these ppl. inhale coffee like there's no tomorrow! One guy practically performed a blood transfusion with the stuff and was just brimming over with personality. I wonder what sunny conformists they could be without their coffee drug? Lately I've found I can get out of bed if I have my own good reasons and I'm very glad to have discovered this because I'd hate to live my whole life having only ever been able to get up in the morning and face the day thanks to a chemical stimulant (and I've never been able to tell that weird lie to myself that coffee tastes good - it tastes like sh*t - we really underestimate peoples ability to talk themselves into thinking and believing things).

I don't know that I want to define "illness" as that which you treat with a pharmaceutical...

Illness can't be defined as something treated with a pharmaceutical, but how do you define it? And if "mental illness" isn't illness, are all other illnesses illness if their psychosomatic components are taken into account? Aren't many physical illnesses bodily ailments that may have an origin in mental distress? How is the immune system affected by mind and the brain?


"The intensest light of reason and revelation combined can not shed such blazonings upon the deeper truths in man, as will sometimes proceed from his own profoundest gloom. Utter darkness is then the light, and cat-like he distinctly sees all objects through a medium which is mere blindness to common vision. Wherefore have Gloom and Grief been celebrated of old as the selectest chamberlains to knowledge? Wherefore it is, that not to know Gloom and Grief is not to know aught than an heroic man should learn?"

nt

just testing