this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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me_irl
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It completely threw me off when the official statistic was 25% for those with any diagnosable mental illness. 75% of people just don’t have a problem with interacting with the world around them.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness
The key word is "diagnosable" though, isn't it. What is the normal levels of feeling down, temporary depression, undiagnosed, etc.? That number seems low, especially since there are so many mental illnesses.
The better questions would be, are you personally having a good day? If not, are you on your way to having better days or finding a way to having better days? If that's not possible, is there a way to make your day as good as it can be?
TL;DR: The world wasn’t made for the minority that classify as having a mental illness.
My answer to this question comes with the inherent bias of not being in a minority myself, but I have personally found myself at the bottom for the majority of my life due to my own actions. Things only got better when I changed.
That is not to say change is easy or accessible for everyone or even most. I know many people in my life that I don’t know what to recommend for them in the current state of affairs other than to prepare for it to get worse. But on the flipside, I know far more that whine and complain about their current situation and have every opportunity to change it. Those are the people that I feel fit calmly in the 75%.
I have a crackpot theory with only vague experience to back it up, but here it is: Have you ever been to Vegas? Or really any major city mall? When you go there, if it’s a good mall, the only ones still around are fashion malls. And you’ll see hundreds of people walking around with bags upon bags worth of stuff. There’s just all this money moving all around. Every. Single. Day. Who are these people? When you start paying attention, the vast majority just seem to blend in with the rest, taking on almost a general image of what might be “a person”.
But then there’s almost a separate crowd from them. Just like you reading this now. You can pick them out. I can’t give you words, but they are clearly people who have been through THE SHIT. There’s those of us who have and those of us who haven’t. Almost everyone I’ve encountered on Lemmy has been through THE SHIT. We all know what it is. And the moment you find yourself I an accidental conversation with someone who hasn’t, it’s immediately noticeable.
The 75% may potentially have a mental illness as we would think about it. But they’ve never had something bring it far enough to the surface for anyone to cast them out for it. I truly feel that a lot of what Hollywood portrays in the terrible characters they create comes down to a reflection of real people. Without THE SHIT, you don’t have a nearly as much of a chance of truly empathizing with those that have.
Feel free to find a massive flaw in my theory. I’m not a sociologist in the slightest.
Edit: hit save too soon
To circle back, it was only after coming out of it and realizing that I had to change and that the system never would that I managed to bring myself out of my 10-year depression. Not is just in the form of masking and managing my emotions more effectively. Not everyone gets that opportunity due to the oppressiveness of the society around them.
Honestly, the fact that so many people are just... normal... is a huge contributor to my derealization.
Like, what the fuck?
All the people in my little bubble, whether they're friends, family or biological family, have been through shit. The result is that we have a lot of weird quirks and neurosis that we either end up working through or incorporating into who we are. Everyone else though... it's like we're in color while the rest of the world is in black and white. It's bizarre and weird and unsettling and makes me wonder sometimes how many of those people are real.
Are we getting Truman Show'd or something?
Then, god forbid you interact with them because then they act like they have no personality and it makes the feeling of derealization worse. And they can't empathize with you because they haven't been through shit. And when you try to tell them, "dude, I have experience going through shit, I know what it's like" they think you're being hyperbolic. The worst thing that's ever happened to them is a car wreck which made them feel so upset they considered suicide, but then they took a deep breath, realized they could just call the insurance company, and that ultimately, it really wasn't that bad. So when you try to tell them that you experienced 10 yrs of suicidal depression as the result of untreated gender dysphoria they just kinda think that you must be exaggerating.
Sorry, this went from "normal people make me question reality" to venting about how normal people can't empathize. It's just... Weird.
I’ve felt the same way. I truly believe that these are two almost entirely separate groups of society that don’t interact. Because every time I find myself in a conversation with one of these people, they can’t seem to find a single interesting thing to talk about other than consumptive experiences.
They’ll talk about theme parks and restaurants and TV shows and all these other things, but when you ask them “What do you do?”, often the only thing they can think to respond with is their source of income. They don’t make art or seek out unique corners of creativity because they don’t yearn to convey a message and relate. They already relate with everything in the world around them.