A statement that really needs making out loud more often (CW for violent imagery):

If you are walking by a playground, someone drives by, pulls out a shotgun, and blows the head off a toddler right in front of you, and have nightmares about it for months, you are mentally ill.

I'm gonna guess a hell of a lot of people read that just now and immediately had some thought along the lines of-

"What the fuck is wrong with you!? Anyone who witnessed something like that would have nightmares about it! That's a perfectly normal response!"

They would. It is.

Also a likely thought to cross your mind-

"WHAT!? If anyone is 'mentally ill' in that scenario it's the guy firing a shotgun at a toddler!"

And... I mean honestly that probably is true because the odds that he isn't also going to have nightmares for months thinking back to that

moment after the fact are pretty damn low, but as I continue to speculate on your thoughts here, my guess is that that statement was not in reference to the long term aftermath but asserting "only someone suffering from mental illness would be capable of this," which is not true.

The concept that the guy with the shotgun is not in any way mentally ill feels impossibly wrong to you because you have somehow picked up the notion that "mentally ill" is the appropriate label to slap on someone who is a fucked up piece of shit capable of doing horrible things.

And similarly the idea that being traumatized by seeing a really freaking traumatic thing happen means you are mentally ill is pretty repellent because you have this association between the phrase "mentally ill" and being a fucked up piece of shit and/or disconnected from reality

Thinking like this is very very common, because we live in a society where there are approximately 500,000,000 or so works of fiction written by people with absolutely no clue what they are talking about and who couldn't be bothered to think up a good motive for a villain so they

just said "he's crazy!" as an excuse not to think of one, and another 500,000,000 works, give or take, where some idiot thought it was a good idea to write "a mentally ill character" but couldn't be bothered to do any real research and just cribbed from someone else who was going

off a 38thhand account of someone's half-remembered version of an actual mental health professional doing a terrible job of trying to explain the symptoms of something he learned about through a poorly handled and since discredited study.

In the actual real world though, all

mental illness is is a catch-all term for any and all states wherein someone's brain is not in perfect health for any combination of being injured (say from getting hit in the head real hard), having some sort of chemical imbalance going on, or as with my intentionally shocking

example here, working through the aftermath of some really intense experience or other.

And yeah, you can extrapolate from that that it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone alive has never been mentally ill. Which is true. About as true as how it's very unlikely that anyone alive

has never been sick, or never been injured. It's a ubiquitously common universal experience that we all deal with occasionally if not readily or constantly.

And it's... generally not some big sensationalist thing to be dealing with, either. If you get a cold, you're gonna sneeze

and shiver and be tired for a while, maybe take some medicine to help, and otherwise you're fine. If you hurt your arm, it's gonna bleed, it's gonna be sore, and you might not be able to use it until it heals. If you have a really traumatic experience, like someone dies or breaks

up with you or comes like THAT close to accidentally taking your head clean off with a chainsaw but it missed, you're going to maybe cry for a while, forget what you're doing and leave the groceries in a the car all day, be unable to avoid thinking about it, have trust issues for

a while, or not be willing to walk past that particular playground again. Maybe take some pills to help get to sleep.

And yeah, usually this stuff is all short-lived, sometimes it's long term. Mostly it depends on what damaged your health and how bad it was, but the long term

stuff is generally the same as the short term stuff, just, you know, for longer, and maybe way more intense.

And I mean, there's plenty of other health stuff both the average person and the people in charge of making really important calls on things were/are totally clueless on.

I kinda figure mental health ignorance is just worse because mental illness doesn't have any nice convenient goo that leaks out.

Like, if you physically injure yourself, you tend to bleed all over. It's easier for people to work out that you're hurt and if treatments are making

it better or worse if the focus on all the red goo leaking all over the floor. And if you're sick, dealing with no good microbes and such, hey between all the dead white blood cells and microbes doing stuff to spread to new hosts, you've got gross mucus just pouring out your nose

and/or your mouth, and again, that's very convenient for third parties observing you.

So if there was like, some kinda blue stuff that leaked out your ears or something when you were dealing with trauma, yeah, people would probably have a much clearer handle on when someone is

experiencing mental health issues and what sort of things do or don't help with getting better. But instead we just have to go off of like, body language and crying and lapses in conversation, so this whole period where medicine was still sketchy but mostly on the right track was

still just taking blind stabs in the dark with mental stuff like "hey maybe this woman is curled into a ball and weeping because invisble spirits keep poking her" instead of making the connection that oh her kid drowned exactly a year ago and everyone's planning a pool party here

So when everyone started reading books all the time (then seeing movies, then watching TV) there was a real serious lack of anyone with a clue what they were talking about to pipe up when random idiots started blurting out wacky nonsense about people with 50 different minds all

vying for control of a single body and you never know when the one who just wants to start stabbing everyone might swap in and whatever the hell else, everyone just shrugged and went "sure, sounds legit," and... yeah that got enough inertia that it's still circling around even

long after the point where there are whole fields of expertise where you can just double check real quick if that's actually a thing and get a nice firm no.

Or a big wordy spiel because hey, experts love to give the really long answers about things when they have the chance.

Anyway, point is:

The construction of "mental illness" in your mind- A total boogieman with no basis at all in reality. "Crazy guys" who just randomly kill people if not locked away are not a real thing.

Actual mental illness- Pretty boring. Largely interchangeable with "upset"

No danger posed to other people unless like getting lost in thought for a bit while operating heavy machinery is a concern or something. You have (had) some.

BONUS ROUND- A lot of the blurred lines between the boogieman and real versions were blurred on purpose by nazis. They

destroyed a bunch of actual serious research and invented like a dozen branches of ridiculous pseudo-science because their entire fundamental deal is coming up with lies that let them rationalize imprisoning and/or murdering whoever they want to. They still do it. It's not subtle

They in fact quite explicitly use accusations of people being "MENTALLY ILL!" as a dogwhistle for calls to violence. Mainly targeting trans people.

Who, like the guy with the shotgun, DO largely tend to be mentally ill because wow do we have to deal with a lot of awful crap, but

no, being trans itself is neither a symptom nor a cause of mental illness. That just comes in from all the hate crimes and stalking and being forced into homelessness.

And again, mostly just kind of amounts to crying a lot and not trusting people. Quite understandably.