Catharsis

There is no getting around the fact that accusations that there is somehow something wrong with my mental health will colour much of what is expressed in this book as it has my life since my early twenties.

But my realization is that no one’s mental health can truly be stable up against what we are now up against.

Again, there is no comparing myself to any celebrity or well known person, let alone the global icon Greta Thunberg has become of course, but I do find one overarching commonality, that is: the ability through idealistic action, mostly protest in her case, mostly writing in mine, to overcome otherwise deep seated disturbances in mental health stemming from very real-world unhappinesses and ill-at-ease feelings with the status-quo.

As I will explore, I was diagnosed with, or labelled, with a mental health disorder in my early years at college but didn’t start taking medication consistently until twenty years later. I have always questioned this diagnosis, and have done a lot of my own discovery on the matter, culminating in my current obsession with evolutionary psychiatry as a way to explain how these quote unquote abnormal behaviours, or superpowers as Greta deems them, are actually the result of some evolutionary adaptive behaviour and thus were once useful, if not quite now, but perhaps will be again.

Was it “mental health” that would send me down the rabbit hole of a plenitude of quit technical writing jobs, to wildly angry email outbursts, running away to some far off corners of the earth culminating in destitution and homelessness?

Or was it, just maybe, something a little different?

Maybe, the crises we all now face are simply not all in our heads, and our superpowers or evolved behaviours, or whatever, are being tested like never before in this brave new world beyond the demarcation line.