Mental illness is nothing more than a departure from mental clarity. Mental clarity, which is essential for being factual, objective and impartial to the highest degree possible, is the very best way to restore our sanity and to try to eliminate our prejudices.

If we believe that some people are mentally ill and that we are not, we create a situation where the stigma associated with alleged, mental illness is potentially more harmful than the disease itself.

Needless to say, the usefulness of these views do not apply to the treatment of organic brain damage, a term used to describe a dysfunction of the brain that was meant to exclude psychiatric disorders.

Given the fact that mental illness is a departure from mental clarity, everybody is mentally ill to one degree or another.

Consequently, the challenge we all share is to be as clear and as precise as possible when we speak, because by definition, the failure to be competent in this manner reflects a degree of mental illness.

If we all accept the fact that we are all mentally ill to one degree or another, we will all be better able to cope with mental illness in a more productive and effective manner because only self-awareness can make us focus on our flaws at the same time we seek to understand those of another person.

These views, I think, flow from the Confucius idiom that "we are all alike and that the only thing that separates one from the other is experience and education."

We have all encountered street people who talk to themselves as if somebody is listening to them have we not? These people are not lunatics. They are human beings who did not have the support and the care they needed to cope with life. Eventually, they lost their minds (so to speak) because they had no other way to cope. All of us are on the verge of becoming just like them if we run out of the support or resources we require to keep us in our current state of sanity or lack thereof.

No doubt, we think we are far superior to the people on the street who rant and rave like lunatics, but I prefer them to those who claim to be sane, don't you?

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