What's Bugging You?

It's a quiet Friday again, which means that I could start blogging early before the weekend begins. Tomorrow I'll try to ease back into my Saturday routine of reading and writing. 

I've been doing a lot thinking on how to help people with mental health issues. Each one of us has a mind and we assume that other people's mind work the same way. If something is obvious to you, it has to be obvious to others too--or does it?  How do you enter the mind of a depressed person, when you yourself are "normal"?

I put the word normal under scare quotes because, we think we are normal, or at least what we assume what others feel when they are also "normal" is similar to our own. But it is unlikely so. We know from the reaction of people to different things, for example food or music. We attribute that to taste. But taste itself is a reflection on how we react to the stimuli of the world. We react differently because we all have a different default brain states. 

Our so-called "mood" influence our reactions to other people's words and actions. Mood is also part of our default brain state. The mood of a depressed person is obviously very different from a so-called normal person. We can react with anger or laughter to the same situation, depending on mood.

For a depressed person, the chemical balance could be off, causing a person to be constantly plunged in a quiescent state that is dark and oppressive. Just like a body that is walking on a tightrope, when balance is maintained, you could walk forward; but when you are off-balanced, you could end up falling. There's a point of no-return, when no frantic waving or shifting of the body will allow you to remain standing. 

One could try to change one's default state with medication or by changing one's lifestyle. However the company of different people could either irritate or cheer up a depressed person; so that has to be arranged carefully. Family members are often the source and trigger of a person's depressive episodes.  A complete change of environment, far from surroundings which reminds the person of stressful situations could be helpful.

Some people are naturally irritable, grumpy and suspicious. But they are different from people who are depressed. These are behavioural characteristics. Depressed people are often outwardly nice and sunny but inside, they see a dark world.

A nice user-interface could conceal a buggy piece of software. The software of our minds are partly genetic and partly programmed by our education, culture and experience. There's no clear dividing line as to when nature ends and nurture begins. We have to see the human system holistically.  Like bad software, the mind could also be caught in infinite loops, memory leaks and stack overflows. The system crashes or hangs. 

We need to be able to debug ourselves constantly and fix whatever we can through self-detection. That's a tough thing to do. But do take advantage of feedback from your 'users'--the people you interact with everyday. Often they reveal the presence of bugs in you and also in them. Like it or not, we are all imperfect, buggy systems that require constant maintenance.