Thinking too long

[smokingboot]

Oh no. Another case of potential mental illness coming to the fore. Because this is someone else's issue, I cannot really go into it. I have listened , stayed quiet and open so they can express what they want and need. And I cannot say this to them so I say it here, in this space that's so good for me.

Were people always this ill? I don't mean Covid etc, though it and lockdown can't have helped, I mean head glitches and real world incongruities; more than incongruities. I have described here before how, when people talk to me about strange occurrences I try to find out if they often detect bizarre smells; and if I hear an affirmative, with descriptions of non organic smells like rust or burning tyres, I keep in the back of my mind some possibility of abnormal brain activity or neurological disorder. I should include high pitched 'frequencies' in that, but I hear of them rather less, and anyway, it's all very hard to shoehorn into an inocuous question.

Because this is everywhere. I'm not going to say it's more common than not, but it is far more prevalent than I remember. Maybe I just never noticed it.

If there's such a thing as reincarnatory karma, where you guess what you might have been via the recurring themes that haunt you in this life, I could speculate that perhaps I was one of those awful 'doctors' who chucked people in asylums and then charged the public to look at them. Or maybe I was actually terribly ill, with enough power to go undiagnosed and do great harm. Leaving aside such a grim fantasy, mental health issues have been so massive a part of my life that I often wonder if I should have taken the hint and gone into some area of psychiatric nursing/counselling. If I was suddenly jettisoned back along my timeline 40 years, that's where I would train. But I recall how clearly I wanted to run away from it at the time, my own need for a world of people just being happy.

But to the reality, if so fixed a word makes any sense in this context, I am noticing what we might loosely label aberrations of cognitive function. I don't include peculiar beliefs generally,cos everyone's got those. But increasingly I hear from people who are suffering from smells and pitches and voices and behaviour targetted to make them unhappy. Sure, Mum's problems probably oversensitised me to this kind of thing, but it is strange.

I guess if I (*sigh* here we go) accept the mind as some kind of tesseract meets klein bottle affair, where you may go out at the top left only to find yourself returning at bottom right, it is evident that these phenomena have a reality. It's just whether they are part of our shared reality that's the question. And what does it mean if they don't?

One of the most puzzling experiences I ever had with Mum's issues, was when she was trapped on the sofa because the floor was burning her. She would try to walk across the room, put one of her feet on the floor and scream in agony. I looked at her feet, there was no sign of burn marks, touch them, they weren't hot. I put my own feet on the floor repeatedly, walked around, half expecting to feel something other than a perfectly normal carpet. Nothing happened. But she was in pain, and in terror of that pain. What the hell was happening? Of course it was real for her. What was it, objectively?

I still don't know. It has been many years since that experience. Right now, I have never seen so much evidence of people going through these sensory difficulties and extrapolating hostile situations from them, or perhaps the other way around; going through the hostile situations which then trigger these sensory difficulties. Maybe it's always been this way and our advances in understanding neurocognitive difference and disturbance mean more awareness.

But it's very odd. There's nothing I can do except hear what I am being told, and listen some more. And then I come away thinking What is this?