Find your mind behind you
KUWAIT CITY, June 13: Everyone knows our body is vulnerable to morbidity then why is not our mind! Despite being the best creature in the world and living in a super-advanced era of science and technology some parts of our society are still skeptical of accepting the fact that disorders of mind are of equal importance to the disorders of soma.
Unacceptable nurturing a mental taboo is the only reason why we are not prepared to expose our mental disorder even to our near and dear ones, even when we can feel the disorder within us. There is still a large section of the society which can easily define a person to be ‘Mad’ if they notice unusual behavioral change in a person. Unfortunately, this is a harsh reality.
We must accept the fact that our knowledge about mind is much limited in comparison to our knowledge about our physic or soma. So far as we relate our mind with our brain, thoughts, feelings, emotions, intelligence, memory and with some chemicals which are called neurohumoral transmitters discharged at the end plates of the neurons; mind is still an undiscovered entity.
All our feelings and expressions like love, affection, hatred, anger, sympathy, joy, sorrow, respect, jealousy is said to be arising from our mind. But has anybody seen what is in our mind? Certainly not, mind is not an organ or a viscera. Mind may be hidden somewhere or everywhere in our body.
We have past and recent memories of different audio, visual or audio-visual experiences in our life. These memories give us a standard concept about the words spoken and attitude shown by a common person. Repeated unusual drift from this, like unusual anger, unusual sorrow, and unusual expression of joy or fear raise questions about sanity of a particular person is unfortunate as sanity cannot be easily defined.
Memory
We have hypothetically classified the two steps of mind -- conscious and the subconscious. It can be said grossly that our conscious mind deals with recent and old important and significant incidences which are encrypted, and subconscious mind has a huge store of mainly old significant and insignificant experiences sculpted in our memory. It is said that many of the disorders of mind arise from stray memories hidden in subconscious mind.
Sleep is an essential and integral part of our life and it is closely related to the rate of metabolic activities, regulated discharge of different essential chemicals in our body. Sleep refreshes our body, mind, and soul. This is the time when our subconscious mind comes into play. Persistent lack or excess of sleep may lead to depression, anxiety and other disorders.
Our physique and psyche are closely knit and any long-standing disorder of either of them is bound to affect the other. This may give rise to many psychosomatic illnesses like bronchial asthma, arthritis, allergy, and Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Sometimes in our lifetime we face such situations when we are compelled to accept those things which we usually avoid or dislike at normal times.
For example we dislike our children spend long hours behind the computer screen, tabs, laptops, or mobile phones as this makes them idle and addicted to cyber world. They lose their play and fun-time with their friends. But, as we are passing through an exceptional torrid time due to the pandemic, we along with our children are compelled to stay inside our homes.
We cannot meet people and friends and are forced to keep social and physical distance. Even our children are unable to go to school for months together. In this situation they are forced to use tabs or laptops to follow online classes, to chat with friends and play some video games.
Orientation
In fact, we also get dependent upon social networking sites like Facebook, WhatsApp etc to keep connected with our friends and relatives. Do we really accept this situation? The answer is a big ‘No’. Though orientation of our conscious mind adapts the situation temporarily we all are waiting eagerly to get back to our normal life.
Sometimes accidents, crimes, persistent mental stress, natural calamities, and war produce deep impact on our mind. We get depressed, anxious, panicky, or may show signs of aggression.
Prolonged solitary confinement, loneliness, gross lack of entertainment, monetary deficiency, conflict in love and relationship, getting obsessed by any specific idea are the usual causes of depression.
Depression may lead a person to get addicted or dependent to some or other drugs. There are two kinds of depressions -- endogenous or exogenous. When a person thinks his associates and surroundings are responsible for his or her poor state and gets depressed then the person is said to be suffering from exogenous depression.
When a person blames himself/ herself to be the reason for his/her misfortune and gets depressed then he/she suffers from endogenous depression. Endogenous depression is the main cause of suicidal attempts as the person thinks that it is not worth living any more.
Most uncommon conditions seen in our society are severe depression, severe anxiety, panic, mania, and ruthless outrageous behavior. All this may not be accounted as mental disorders but when the person is unaware of this kind of persistent change of behavior, associated with delusion, illusion, obsession and even hallucination then the others who are around should be concerned about possible disease of mind. We must keep in mind that all these forms of disease are not the result of organic brain damage. Most of the ailments may disappear permanently by changing attitude towards the person, changes in the surroundings; change of place, good music, entertainment and by the timely advice of a good psychiatrist. Mind your mind before it is too late.