Not enough tigers

 YouTube video 

It’s great that we have the societal knowledge and technology to combat mental illness. However, the way mental illness “works” looks like a kind of systemic shutting down or “checking out” rather like exist at all levels of the organism, eg, there are lots of genes and processes at the cellular level that literally say “we’ve suffered a radioactive or other insult and we need to hit the self-destruct switch before we hurt the rest of the organism” and these switches and mechanisms exist and cancer researchers study them. 

Having said that, bipolar and even alcoholism may be “adaptive” at the group level à la “we’re going to lose this war or miss this product deadline or whatever unless one individual can step up and not sleep for weeks at a time, talk a thousand times faster than any of us, have visions, steamroll over social conventions, etc, until we ‘win’ even if that person burns out and dies or is burned at the stake once it’s all over.” The Joan of Arc effect. 

Then there’s what I call the “there aren’t enough tigers” effect. Tigers eat the stragglers, the sick, the members of the herd who “just aren’t getting it” but there aren’t enough of them, they’re busy, they can only eat so many, and if there were enough tigers around to get the job done, it would probably be Really Bad. 

Hence, I theorize, the individuals do this for themselves. Something clicks, and the self-destruct mechanism is set in motion. One isolates, alienates others, neglects self-care, even commits suicide. That may be the source of the feeling of being so utterly trapped, but at the same time as if nothing is specifically wrong, as such. 

That may be a useful description of what one is going through in struggling with a mental illness, or trying to intervene or treat someone, as well as why “hitting bottom” is so crucial, and so heartbreaking to sit by the sidelines waiting for it, and why so many tend to “gallop through the gateways of madness or death” before they reach it.