Attention Seeking Nervosa

I remember the day I had my first real mental breakdown. It was at work and it was just a culmination of things: stress, anger, depression, and a feeling of just crushing emptiness in my life. Pain and my health was another factor. I was having a lot of issues with my physical health during the time and it did little to help.

Neither did the trip to the mental hospital when I followed my therapist's advice to seek out a hospital when something like this happened.

I was fully aware of what was happening, what I was thinking and what should have happened.

Instead, I got a doctor who took one look at me and put me in the wing of the mental hospital for 24 hours without so much as second look or the shoelaces on my shoes. I remember telling him that sometimes, I get these errant thoughts in my head that just pop in that drive me to the edge in so many words and his exact response was, in broken English, "Oh, you're schizophrenic. You're hearing voices."

I've never been more damned scared in my life. In one fell swoop, someone looked at me and was ready to commit me to a mental hospital on the basis of one sentence.

So, it boggles the mind when I see people put up blog posts online going 'LOL, couldnt get out of bed today, so depressed!' or 'Im so nervous, Im having a anxiety attack!'. The thought of them spending a day in the environment I did brings me joy when picturing the panicked look on their face when they realize they have no way of updating their status about how depressed they are and the conversations they would have with people who's minds are truly shattered.

If we treated people with mental illness the same we do physical illness, this phenomena would be the equivalent of stubbing your toe and going on to Twitter to say how you broke your leg. I've lived depression and anxiety. Yet there are people out there who like to wallow in the idea of mental disorders being cool and trendy.

I had a professor who taught Abnormal Psychology and he said that there's a theory going around that the reason why there are so many people claiming to have mental disorders is because of media.

Relating back to our studies of Freud, I think of it to be a desire of attention from the unconscious via Munchhausen's.

For those unaware, Munchhausen's Syndrome is a sort of mental disorder in which the patient fakes a illness or an injury in order to garner attention. And in today's massively attention seeking media outlets where some cliques compare value with the amount of Facebook likes you get, a pattern starts to emerge.

My professor, who's name eludes me sadly, said that the psychological community saw 2-3 cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder a year. When Hollywood and the mainstream media got a hold of 'Multiple Personality Disorder', the amount of cases sky-rocketed and almost all of them turned out to be factitious.

Freud and his views of the Ego might help shed some more light on this issue. If Freud is right, then the Ego would be the place to look for the trauma they might have experienced that pushed them down this attention seeking behavior. And if not trauma, possibly the root of their desires that reflect back on the Super Ego.

One can only imagine however, how bad this behavior would be in a world like Super Sad True Love Story, where attention seeking behavior is common place. It wouldn't be that difficult to imagine a new cast of people in that dystopia who receive love and affection out of a need to comfort someone who is 'suffering' from one malady or another. It's not their fault that they're suffering from an affliction of the mind and people might reach out to try and help and comfort them, like one would a sick and injured puppy.