The Human Condition - It's Broken?
 

I believe, at least, this is the correct forum. My mind is currently only half working, however, so I apologize in advance if this is in the wrong area. Moving on the actual question -


You've all heard about it. Many of you have experienced it or something like it. A "breakdown". No, I don't mean your car.

I'm talking about the mental/emotional breakdowns people experience. The one's you'll see from High Schoolers that just got dumped to the businessmen that just lost his job. Usually accompanied by hideous amounts of sobbing or yelling, although sometimes it is quiet, internal. This is the kind of breakdown I'm talking about. mental reversion to near-automatonicy.

The question I pose is - what is it? Really?

You could just say "it was just too much for him/her/it/them to take." But that's not what it is, but rather what may have caused it. What IS it? Is it a mental regression to a "safe haven", to avoid psychologic implosion? Or is it simply that whatever physical, mental, or emotional battering has simply razed any coherent, concious sensabilities and reduced us to emotional rubble?

Core of the question for those unable to follow my labyrinthine illogic at the moment - are emotional breakdowns self-wrought, a protective measure against outside forces? Or are they the product of said outside forces' constant attack on our mental, emotional, and physical selves?


Any sort of related material, feel free to discuss. I ask only because I was/am/will be suffering a breakdown at this moment. The discussion stems for a sort of morbid fascination with my own mental destruction. Enjoy.

I've seen grown men break down into messes for what seemed like no apparent reason. They had been in the same danger dozens of times before, but something this time just pushed them over. It's not because they are weak. It just happens. I would call it a freak occurrence or a fluke. We all have our let downs and our pick-me-ups. I believe someone breaks down when they are unable to put something out of their mind just for a second. When we disappoint ourselves, we reflect about it, but, if we think about it too much, we'll make ourselves sick about it. It's probably healthy to set it aside for a moment and take a mental break. Sometimes someone just can't do that.
I liken it to when I was playing high school football. I broke my foot in practice one time just running a route I had run hundreds of times before. No one hit me. I didn't trip. A little bone just cracked a little bit for no real reason. Maybe it was wear and tear; if you bend a paper clip back and forth enough times it will snap. It's not a stretch to say the same thing can happen with the psyche. Someone could have a series of highs and lows, highs and lows and BAM! He starts crying and can't stop.
I think it is a reflection of your luck more so than your character.

It's the culmination of a bunch of factors: your brain "doublethinking" depressing realities and facts away, and it simultaneously realising it wants something else: that's almost always the way it happens with someone who works in a stressful corporate job. "Mid-life crisis" = "my life is mundane and i never want it to be this way." Some people regress back and others break free. But it's rare to see some sudden free bird just from a breakdown.

Like crying, I guess it's needed sometimes. It's not anything ethereal--just mental.

It's a comibnation of mental factors and your ability to deal with them along iwth pressure from outside forces. I know becase I've had two.

Its actually a helpful thing, Breakdowns are often caused by a major change of some sort in a person's life, or the realization that a change has occured slowly over time. these breakdowms are almost always followed by depression, which in part is a regressing from the world around you. Research has been done that people emerging from depression are eager to go out and experience what is around them as being new. Thus, psychologically, they are not living in a changed reality, but have come to a new an whooly different one. Or at least that's what the professionals say.

I've just realized that this is probably confusing, so please excuse my rant.

Naw, that's what I felt like.

I've had a few breakdowns. Usually it's just that you've been threw the same shit, over and over again, and it feels as if your life is just a sequence of bad experiences. You forget about all the good for awhile, and mourn what a terrible life you have. Nothing seems good anymore, and you feel feelings of hatred toward yourself and others, while at the same time fighting off a torrent of tears and failing miserably, just wanting to ball up in the corner and wait for death.

I got better from them, I suppose. I won't say what caused them, but I will say that from what logic I do have several integral parts of my lifestyle are to blame. Not sex or drugs or anything like that, but rather an over-benevolence.

I can't say I'm cured, because while they do in fact bring me down from time to time, they also are what make me who I am, and I have no wish to become someone else to get away from my troubles. Learning to live with your flaws is a very hard thing to do, and many people aren't willing to do it. They either create fantasies and delusions, change entirely whenever they are unhappy, or they kill themselves.

I've yet to ever desire to kill myself, or to change myself in any way, but I can't quite say I don't delude my self. I figure we all do it to some extent to cover up our problems or to dream about a better life, so I figure what fantasies I have are the norm.

My advice for someone who feels as if the world has fallen apart would be to sit down and think about how you got to be who you are, and about all the people who depend and need you, and the people who helped shape who you are. You'll figure something out.

We have steel-framed hearts that they do not break at the description of pure and simple despair.

I can only offer suggestions from my own experiences. Being manic-depressive is fun in that these breakdowns happen quite often...and you get warnings much like the weather forecast!

"With a loss of such and such and the steady rise of school angst building in the west, there's a 40% chance of crashing in the next few days, leading into going ape-shit and trying to stab your best friend because they touched you when you asked to be alone. Now for the weekly forecast..."

The deadening of emotion and loss of any and all taste in anything might not be the same as what you are describing, but what I have read sure sounds similar. The best way I have likened it is to water. Fresh water has this amazing taste to it, but leave it around for a few days - even in the fridge, and the taste just dissapears. Like in the Stephen King movie/book (movie listed first because that's what I saw, never read the book) the Langoliers when they were behind time in that "dead" plane of existence, everything was fine and fresh, but it was missing something - vitality perhaps is a good word.

I have tried many different things to get over this, the only barrier I didn't cross was medication for - similar to you - I felt that drugging mysef into thinking that the problem was gone and getting a baseline bleh instead of dealing with the ups and downs was not the right way. Ultimately it came down to an understanding of Vaishnava philosophy: we are not this body and we are not even this mind. They are products of material nature and we are spiritual beings. One might cry escapism, but it actually has grounded me in many ways and helped me to understand that these seemingly random an intense ups and downs are not an inherent flaw in myself, but in this material body and mind and it's reactions to the environment. Now I can simply separate myself from such disturbances and continue my life - coping and adjusting for the current manic, depressed, or normal mood and calmly waiting for the ebb or flow to normalize.

matra-sparsas tu kaunteya
sitoshna-sukha-duhkha-dah
agamapayino 'nityas
tams titikshasva bharata

"O Son of Kunti, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of the winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perceptions only, O Scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed." Bhagavad-Gita 2.14

Exercise eat right have a positive attitude. No more break downs for me. two years and counting. :p

I'm sure people will disagree with me, but I actually do consider such breakdowns as a weakness. Letting the world get do you to the point where you react to it in exactly the way it wants you to is not something I'd consider sane.

Having said that, I'd like to point out that I got pretty close to a breakdown only a couple weeks ago when my computer got an incredibly nasty virus I couldn't seem to get rid of. Everyone has such breakdowns, so I just think it means we all have work ahead of us in improving ourselves.

Short version: everyone's crazy, but they're getting better (mostly).