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[hunter]

23. There's clearly an autistic sort of *something* from one of my grandfathers...

... a dominant gene. It manifests itself as everything from a mild speech disorder to autism. My grandfather had a milder form, same with my dad, myself, and one of our kids. A few years of "speech therapy" in grade school is often a clinical indicator and modern anti-depressants are immensely useful.

My grandfather had two siblings who were not functional in normal society, my dad had cousins who were never fully functional, and I have a nephew and a niece who have great trouble, but not so much as they would have had when society was less accepting, when "mental illness" was something families hid from the outside world.

I'm 100% certain this genetic trait would have obvious manifestations in most human societies. The obsessive-compulsive aspects of it are sometimes beneficial, especially when these tendencies have practical application. I was a very valuable employee when I was working alone nights and weekends in a blood bank. Being alone at work didn't bother me at all, I'm a natural recluse, and I could map some of my OCD perfectionism, which is often one of my handicaps, onto the job I was doing.

My crazy grandmother (not the wife of the autistic spectrum rocket scientist, but the grandma who was eventually removed from her home as a danger to herself and others), nobody ever knew what she was about. It wasn't brain damage related to welding fumes or syphilis or any other probable cause because so far as anyone remembered, she was always that way, even as a little girl. I think she could only clearly relate to dogs, horses, and hot metal. In her retirement she became a hoarder. If she hadn't had a house that was paid for and a good pension she probably would have been a bag lady. She was a terrible grandmother, and not even a good mother by my mom's stories, but my siblings and I learned to accept her good moments as something rare and nice, and ignored her crazy stuff. She was not ever physically abusive but she could say crazy mean stuff, which was probably okay if you were a horse or a dog and she was taking care of you, but not so good for grandkids. So we, as kids, whenever we were in her care learned to respond to her meaness exactly as if we were horses or dogs. We simply didn't hear what she was saying.

I think the most important thing for any child is to feel safe and secure. My middle and high school experiences were hell on earth. If my home experience had been anything like that I doubt I would have survived. But I always had food at home and a safe place to read and sleep.

I'm absolutely certain the pressures to conform in this society, to be competitive, exacerbate certain mental states outside the norm, turning these mental states into full-blown mental illnesses. A person who is "bipolar" or "depressed" in our society, might not be so much in another.

I had a high school friend who committed suicide, probably because he was gay. I also had a very high drama relationship with a woman was using me to prove to herself and her family she wasn't a lesbian. (Our breakup almost killed me. I jumped out of her moving car, sliding and tumbling down a street in Berkeley...)

These horrors would not have happened in a society that simply accepted homosexuality as something well within the norms, even something special. In this same sort of way our society is capable of turning some minor mental eccentricity into a raging mental illnesses.

It's often the very structure of our society causing most of the suffering attributed to "mental illness."

On the other side of the coin, the denial of mental illness, covering it up, or even claiming it doesn't exist, causes extreme suffering too. If I stop taking my meds usually because I don't like the side effects, or I decide to try something supposedly milder, I always end up in a very dark place.