Columns

When we are depressed or unhappy, or if life doesn't seem to be treating us well, maybe we ought to look at how we're thinking about things. That may sound a bit trite, but sometimes it is applicable, especially when we've taken the medication route as far as it will go.

And maybe we could question the subject matter in the mind. One expert on mental illness believes that the things that go wrong with the human mind are limited, and that the human brain is fairly limited in what it does. Let me explain...

The human mind is like a browser. A browser can bring us content from all parts of the world, can bring us incredible material, can show us unlimited types of subject matter. While some of this inevitably will be garbage, some of it will be produced by greatness. 

Yet the browser itself doesn't do a whole lot. It shows us the material, and it has multiple capabilities beyond that, such as e-commerce or playing a video, but in the big picture, the browser only does so much. 

This psychiatrist went on to say the things that go wrong with people's minds are relatively well-defined and limited in scope. The mind can be psychotic, it can be depressed, it can have mood swings, or it could have other damage traceable to a head injury. The last part I'm adding even though I don't recall reading that as part of the psychiatrist's article. 

I'm sorry that I can't bring you his or her name and can't identify who expressed this opinion so that I could give them proper credit--I didn't think to write down their name at the time that I read or heard the opinion. If the author of that research or hypothesis reads this, please send me a message through the editor. 

That brings me to the method I'm going to suggest, and it could help you when you are down or upset: Just change the content of your thinking. And while this may not seem easy or readily done, it may take less effort than you think. 

When I was age thirty, I had all four wisdom teeth out at once. It required oral surgery because the teeth were impacted beneath the gums and could not grow in. I wanted all four teeth done at once, and under local anesthesia, not laughing gas. They gave me exactly that. I was able to observe that the two male surgeons were working as fast as they could. I had commented that I do meditation. This had been prompted by a remark that I could tolerate pain. The response to this was a jab of the anesthesia needle into my cheek unnecessarily hard, and this was probably the cause of a bubble in my cheek that was present afterward--it might've been some kind of embolism. The company was Contra Costa Dental, and they have since changed their name or gone out of business. 

I was taken home in their van with a prescription for pain medication that I had no way of filling over the weekend. At the time I lived at Riverhouse, and I lacked economic resources. I couldn't even pay for food to eat over the weekend. 

But the above is tangential. My point is that of the value of distraction. When I was in a common area of the hotel, the security man told me stories of what it was like when he worked in various security jobs. He managed to tell some interesting tales. This got my mind off the track of my indescribable pain, and this was a source of relief. 

When you are in pain, whether physical or mental, distraction from the pain works. 

To use the above as a deliberate technique, we have some options. I will describe one of them. I tell myself; I am about to change the content of my thinking. Then I visualize a shift in the body of thought, as though I had a picture of the thinking area and could change it. Then I choose some other content. The new content could consist of a task that I'd like to get done, or it could be something I find enjoyable. I focus on that. And--that's it. If the above method doesn't work for you, it is fine to arrive at your own. 

For people with life-changing mental illness, we should have more tools in our arsenal other than just pills and talking to counselors. 

When we shift the content of our thinking away from the painful and toward either the practical or the unrelated, it brings relief. It won't solve your problems. Yet it could allow you some comfort when you need it. 

Jack Bragen is author of "Instructions for Dealing with Schizophrenia: A Self-Help Manual," and "Jack Bragen's 2021 Fiction Collection."