Nothing much...

Now that I'm feeling a little more perky, I think I might try to keep both this and my livejournal updated a little more regularly. Insanity abounds on LJ -- as it will here, only (I hope) to a slightly less degree.

I think I've decided that depression and that sort of thing (i.e. mental illness) is more like cancer than I'd noted before. In fact, if leukemia is a blood cancer, depression is (and its ilk are) chemical cancer.

Like other cancers, it's part biology, part environment, part lifestyle and part random, unapologetic and impartial luck of some cosmic draw.

And in the same way cancer used to be stigmatized and nearly always fatal, so too are many mental illnesses. But as education and research increase, so also do opportunities and options for care, treatment and even (someday) a cure.

There are ways in which one can live to reduce one's risk of cancer (and mental illness), but despite best efforts, some will fall prey to it anyway. Like most disease, it possesses a malignant pathology -- but knowing it exists and having hope is half the battle. Ignorance and apathy are part of its arsenal. It, like cancer (a body's cells against themselves), like AIDS (the body's defenses against itself), mental illness (the body's self against itself) thrives in ignorance.

Ultimately that perspective opened up the subject for me in a new way, gave me a greater understanding of mental illnesses --including my own --*as* illnesses and lessened the almost instinctual fear I have of certain types. I may someday lose my mind to mental illness, sure. But I may someday lose my leg to bone cancer or my life to lung cancer, too. I don't worry unduly about that, though, so why should I about this? Anxiety only increases my risk factors, after all....

Just been thinkin' bout random stuff lately, that's all.