There are so many colorful words for being mentally ill — crazy, nuts, bananas, bonkers, out of one’s mind, cracked, touched, goofy, schizo, loopy, psycho, lunatic, mad, deranged, barmy, maniac. It’s no wonder, too, since when one is dealing with the behavior of a person with mental illness, it can be quite frustrating, alarming, and confusing.

When that person is someone you love, someone you knew prior to illness, it can really feel like the person you knew left, went away, even died. It’s as if the person you loved and liked is gone, and was replaced by some stranger, who can be demanding or irrational, or hurtful or just bizarre. It is heartbreaking, for sure.

At the same time, as you can tell from the myriad words used to describe insanity, there is a huge stigma attached to it. No surprise then, that people tend to be suspicious of getting help when they need it – there is a taint to getting counseling, even though being mentally ill and needing counseling are really not the same thing. Ironically, if more people went through some counseling in their lives, that might help reduce the amount of actual mental illness, because people could work their their emotional behavior before it becomes truly a problem.

I find “mental illness” to be a phrase that is really not helpful, either. It is so vague. I appreciate its clinical sound, because so many people who suffer from mental illness are truely ILL and require some MEDICAL attention. But this over-arching term also threatens to remove all meaning.

I ask myself… am I mentally ill? I mean, I do take an anti-depressant pill each day. And sometimes I’ve had trouble where my mood has been low, I’ve gone through suicidal times where thoughts of death were constantly with me. So why is it that I find myself squirming when I ask if I am mentally ill? I’d have to say, I certainly don’t feel ill right now.

My anti-depressants work wonders. I feel great. I haven’t been having any trouble at all, and even find myself failing to over-react to the behavior of others. By which I mean, I know I would have reacted badly to certain situations, and cried or fallen into a black mood, even thought of suicide had I been depressed when someone, say, snapped at me over something trivial. Instead I just react with a calm and, dare I say, NORMAL response?

So if I’m not “mentally ill” now, was I before I started my anti-depressants? If not, then why would I even need them? You start to see some circular logic here, right?

My kids often grin and hug me and relish in how “crazy” mommy is. Yes, sometimes I am silly, or goofy, or funny. I like saying weird things to provoke a laugh, to provoke a bit of healthy confusion. I sometimes pretend to be other people for the amusement of the kids. Most recently, I donned a huge goofy blond wig and swaggered around with a British accent– I told the kids I was Keith Richards (not that they knew who that was!). It was hilarious to the adults around. They pulled off my wig, giggling and laughing at the spectacle.

Crazy mommy! Hah! Yay! A more normal person would not do all the things I do, but that’s not mental illness, that’s just my eccentric personality.

Illness of the mind is something that is awfully subjective. If I really believed that I was Keith Richards, yeah, that would be a problem. I was, in fact, only pretending. Does this make me insensitive to people who have actual delusions of being an aging rock star of a different gender than themselves? Nah… such people just have my sympathy.

There but for the grace of god go I: I am grateful that I am able to manage my depression (the common cold! ha! of mental illness! there’s that word again, damn!) so easily. I’ve had a lot of sessions of therapy, working on relationship issues, communication, self-esteem, and other issues. I can say that those sessions certainly help me to see my behavior and the behavior of others through various helpful lenses. At the same time, I feel that it is the work of the anti-depressant medication that has lifted me up and away from the seriously bad parts of my depression. Anti-depressants are not cure-alls, but frankly, I think they can come close.

Except when they don’t. It is so hard when one is going along through life, happily doing great and feeling normal (or maybe just good-crazy instead of bad-crazy) and then suddenly for no understandable reason, the black moods, the whining, the self-hatred, the whatever-one’s-issue comes back.

What occurs to me is to ask: What are we? Where does the “me” come from and where does it go to, if I am having a mental illness. I ask this, of myself, but really what I want to know is, where do people store their personalities — or their souls for that matter? It’s not exactly under the hood, between the radiator and the engine.

We are precious bundles of reactions, hormones, brain chemicals, situationally provoked. We rise and fall with our environment, and we feel — it is in our bodies, and our minds.

When a person working with D was struck by mental illness, his work performance was terrible. This makes perfect sense — who can work productively when feeling suicidal? It was so awful, because we knew that he was ill, and he knew, too. I just remember something that D told me he’d said, or perhaps written… “This isn’t me. I know this work is bad, but that is not me…”

The disconnect is between what one feels is one’s own SELF — and the strange behavior and accompanying emotions that have replaced the self. Sometimes, though, this self-awareness is actually absent. Then we have people who are around the affected person who look on in wonder, often in anger, confusion, derision… oh, god, what happened to so-and-so? She’s turned into a psycho.

If it’s your partner who is ill, you might feel deserted, hurt, angry. Everything is disrupted by mental illness, which it also is with physical illness. If your partner is going through chemotherapy, you know that they are ill because of something quite real, quite dangerous.

But mental illness doesn’t have the same feeling to it – it’s more like a person is no longer doing what they should and perhaps even just choosing not to. They don’t get out of bed, or they stay up all night. They react in weird and inappropriate ways. Oh, it’s awful. And at the same time, the treatment isn’t easily understood either.

Modern medicine has a long way to go. I’m pondering all these things, when I should probably be getting ready for work. A little philosophical thought about madness in the middle of the day never hurt anyone. Now. Back to my regularly scheduled activities.