I recently started part time work supporting people with mental health needs.

It was my first time back in the workplace for 2 years, having taken time out to work on developing events. It got to the stage where I simply had to work, since I wasn’t making enough from events, which is fair enough since I’ve only recently started.  The work is unusual and very different to pretty much everything out there, and I haven’t run all the events I want nor published the material I want yet, so its to be expected!

I chose to work for a charity, to meet my moral stance, and I chose the job because I thought it would suit me.  I was used to working with people who were consciously willing and consciously able to work on themselves (well, most of them anyway,) and I was curious to work with people who were perhaps not so willing, or not so able.

It has been a fascinating first 6 weeks. I love it.  It suits me down to the ground.

What’s been fascinating is to take my insights over the years and seeing how it helps me in understanding the challenges these people face in the maze of the human mind, behavioural habituation, and how they have reacted to the situations in life to lead them to where they are.

So, for those of you who know me, you’ll know its perfect for me!

One of the first things I have noticed, other than the appalling ‘therapy’ on offer to them (the support offered for living is fine, its the actual ‘work’ done to help these people mentally and emotionally that appalls me,) is that many so-called ‘mental health’ patients are not very mentally sick, they are emotionally sick to the extent those emotional waves have created mental effects, patterns and problems to cope.

Real Mental Health problems are a condition of society as a whole, where our limited perceptions and ideas about ourselves and the world are a debilitating and fatal illness in themselves.

Most of the cases  I have seen in this job, and admittedly, its not many in the grand scheme of things, are no different to any of us, except they have reacted differently to experiences, or interpreted them in certain ways, or they have given too much credit, attention, energy and action to images and thoughts which have manifested in their mind.

I can see aspects of myself in every one of them, and in my efforts to understand, I can see where I too, have experienced similar things or had similar thoughts – the only difference is how I react to them, express them, and manage them (though I haven’t always had the management I now have, far from it! Still lots more to master yet too…)

The big problem is the level of medication people are on in relation to the amount of ‘real help’ they receive.  Too much of one and not enough of the other!  Many of these people need emotional therapies, not mental ones.  They need help with causes, not effects. Through dealing with some of the emotional issues which have created their mental frameworks, they can defuse the power of those aspects.  How can I sound so sure?  Because thats what we all have to, and can, do! I had to do it, and am still at it!

I hope to be able to have some influence while I am there, and I’m already developing relationships and beginning ‘work’ with some of the clients,  Regardless of whether I can help them control their mental and emotional spasms (since most uncontrolled emotional or mental expression is a ’spasm’ of that body since we have not mastered it like we have the physical one – many of all of our behaviours and thoughts are these) the experience has already been invaluable one.

Not willing to work on yourself is one thing, the problem is, those who are not able. Their energy is SO concentrated on certain fixations, there is little left for them to be objective and observe their thoughts and feelings rather than identify with them.  This is difficult even for the most sober and sane of us, let alone those who are already struggling with everyday life.

In Maslo’s famous hierarchy of needs, many of these people are not at a level of self-actualisation, though, in my opinion, many of them are within a hairs breadth of phenomenal leaps in consciousness if they can but restructure their mind into a stable framework which integrates their experiences and perceptions with the incongruousness of the society which surrounds them.  On reflection, I can see that I am talking about many others in society too!

If I am honest, for a fair few I have seen, they are simply folks who have gone through one of the early initiations, one of the steps on the human enlightenment ladder, or have had some form of spiritual experience, but what has gone wrong is how the conscious mind has interpreted that experience.  The experience people have in these events is so far removed from everyday experience and the idea of the world and what we are that it shatters the stability of the mind.  I know because I experienced it myself, and if it was’t for the fact that I could turn to my sister who had already gone through something similar ia few years before me, I would have been ’sectioned’ in minutes!

It took me a long time to rebuild the pieces of my mind where I had my experience, then I had all that I had known in the world, and the two just did not meet. What would have ‘got me sectioned’ is how I interpreted the events at the time and how I reacted to them – that does not mean What I Interpreted Is What Actually Happened, all I would be able to remember is how my conscious mind has chosen to interpret something so far beyond its usual boundaries it made it wobble on the spot.  Those types of experiences have to be integrated into our personalities somehow, if the conscious mind doesn’t omit them completely, which is what it does with much we perceive (we don’t register but a fraction of what we actually perceive.)

It can be integrated in a healthy way, which builds and guides the personality, or it can be integrated in an unhealthy way, where it delays progress due to obsessions and fixations (and again, we are all guilty of this to some degree!)

So I really relate to some of these people, and can ’see’ how their conscious mind has interpreted an experience it cannot fathom.  It’s like, for example, you dream of a dog talking to you – that doesn’t mean it WAS a dog, it means your mind interpreted whatever ‘it’ was, and if it was outside your usual framework, it would not have a frame of reference, so perhaps it chose a ‘dog’ to reach the conscious mind because it was actually a blue spherical light being from Sirius!

Anyway, I digress.  I do think the clients in the mental health field need re-evaluated though.  By people who know what to look for.  The problem is just now, an extreme shortage of that, and an awful lot of people in need of help (which is WHY these people are not geting the help they need.)

This is where I am a firm advocate of all of us seeking our Vocation, because these crappy business ‘jobs’ and ‘careers’ which serve the wants of humanity but don’t really serve the need are a waste of our capability.  If we all sought our vocation, which we all have, we would find we would have just enough genuine carers, just enough natural teachers, just enough intuitive therapists and just enough of just about everything else we need. We just need to realise that we aren’t here for humdrum and try to find something useful to do!