Question: whats the wors mental health case you have come across?

Stephen Baillargeon answered on 8 Jun 2018:

I have come across people in my personal and professional life who’s mental illness has had severe negative impacts on their lives and the lives of those around them. I worked in a group home with elderly people suffering from chronic mental illness, which has exposed me to a diverse group of people. I’ve met people who thought they were God (very common), thought it was still 1952 (when this individual developed schizophrenia in the first place), one who had a frontal lobotomy over 50 years ago, one with catatonic schizophrenia who would go hours without moving, and some people who have some more serious criminal histories. Many of my friends, relatives, or the clients I’ve worked with have attempted suicide as well. I’ve been kicked, spat on, yelled at, and accused of some strange and impossible crimes.

It’s really hard to tell which is the worst. There are people who I develop strong connections with who are very intelligent who are just completely overwhelmed by a depression that they’ve spent decades trying to overcome. I think everyone can imagine a sadness that somehow never goes away, and how frustrating that would feel. It’s harder to imagine some of the mental illnesses that we label as just crazy, because the behavior seems so absurd at first. But after you get to know someone suffering from a condition like that, it becomes very easy to relate to, especially schizophrenia, which you can do probably better than you think you can.

I study cognitive biases. Most people (who aren’t depressed) think they’re smarter than they are, that good things will happen to good people, and that the world is simpler and more controllable than it really is. A lot of normal people have a sense of religion or spirituality, which is sometimes more of a general sense that people get, although it’s often a worldview. These biases, beliefs, and feelings are very normal for mentally healthy and intelligent people to experience, and you probably have far more biases than you realize, as almost everyone does (almost everyone thinks they’re an exception to this as well).

But if you take the biases that make you feel better than you are, you get a delusion of grandeur. If you take a normal superstition and imagine feeling the connection between the ritual and some outcome much stronger, you get obsessive compulsive disorder. If you take normal spiritual feelings and amplify them to an extreme, you get schizophrenia. So you can relate to people with depression easily because they’re experiencing an extreme version of something you feel. Whether you know it or not, many of these more extreme cases of mental illness are the same way.

So what’s the worst mental health case I’ve come across? While it’s easy to say that the friend of mine who stabbed her boyfriend because he was trying to stop her from killing herself, or the woman who would wake up in the night screaming about how she is going to bring about the rapture would be some of the worst cases, I’ve been able to relate to everybody that I’ve taken the chance to get to know, so sometimes it feels like I’ve never really seen mental illness, and sometimes it feels like I just know that everybody in the world has their fair share lurking in the corners of their minds.