They have an internship where you get to work with the severely mentally ill. I know a lot of people who would really freak out if they had to do that, but I think I would find it really interesting. Not in a clinical way, like the way my friend Jo drills holes into rats' heads and injects them with q-dots to label neurons and then ties their hands and feet to the table and makes a slit in their bellies to cut their aortas and replace their blood with formaldehyde before cutting out their brains.... (now that's a job that is very interesting to hear about but I couldn't have)... but in a really soul-searching/life philosophy kind of interesting way.
Severely mental ill people raise an interesting question: Is all of who you are (your personality, your character) wrapped up in the neuron pathways of the brain, and thus liable to change as your brain becomes damaged? Or is there a separate entity of You, your soul, which remains unchanged behind all the malfunctioning and the hallucenating and personality changes: someone unmistakably and unmutably You, however far you may have wandered?
I have a lot of compassion for the mentally ill, I think many people in this world are affected to various degrees. I wish people could think of these various degrees of mental illness like the difference between having a broken toe (about which nothing can really be done but it hurts anyway, makes life a little tiny bit harder) to chronic arthritis (it reoccurs and limits you but your life isn't over) to highly contagious or life-threatening (those who are a danger to themselves or others).
But people don't think of it that way. They get freaked out.

I wonder if that is because they also want to believe that there is a part of being, a soul, that cannot change. That your whole personality isn't governed by electronic impulses and imbalances of chemistry, but something completely above and unaffected by these mundane processes of science. When they see someone who has changed, who is acting differently, I think they start to question that belief.

But this is what I believe: I believe that somewhere inside you is your Soul. Your soul is not only you, but it a place you share with God. Your Soul is the You that God knows you to be, despite your pretenses and your mistakes and the airs you put on for others around you. When mental illness strikes, that part is not affected. The bodily you, she or he who lives right behind your eyes in your brain, may be having a hard time contacting the Soul You, who lives inside your ribcage around your heart like a glowing orb, (who knows where it is, it is more of a metaphysical entity), but the Soul You is still there. Without You, your personality may change, but it is really only the outward manifestations of your personality that others can see that are changing. It's like your brain is trying to contact your soul, but its radio is failing. Sometimes all it hears is static. Sometimes it hears other voices, voices of other stations. At first it knows these voices are strangers, it doesn't sound very much like they soul they know they have. But then after a while, the static is frightening. They don't like switching the dial, back and forth, looking for what they know, only sometimes finding it. It is incredibly frustrating. Some are consumed by their frustrations. Sometimes it is because they can't stand being out of touch with their souls.

Other times it is because they keep telling others that something is wrong and nobody is listening. Some don't want to tell others at all because they know the others don't want to hear it. They are ashamed. They are in pain and they are frightened but they can't get help because they are ashamed.

Some take the alternate route... if their connection with their soul is full of static, they will listen to a clearer station, those other voices. How could this station be bad, or even a true stranger, when nobody but the soul with its good and familiar intentions has ever contacted them on this radio before?

But the message that the station is broadcasting may not be a good thing at all.

So no, I don't think mental illness is just like having cancer or just like having a broken hand. It could be as simple as that and soon get better, like certain kinds of depression. I do think that advances in modern medicine and psychiatry, leading to better understanding of the brain (facilitated by Jo and her rats) can give people some of the help they need to rebuild their "radio". But I think it is much more scary than those other illnesses, because while you love and need and continuously use your body, even more often do you channel your soul through your mind. To be without use of your body is frightening, but you have many people there to help you. You have no need to be ashamed. But to have a malfunction in your mind- that struggle is dark, frightening,and plagued with guilt and shame.

On that path, people are most often traveling alone.

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