The utmost importance of seeing what you're up to
People get mentally ill because they can't make use of the idea of doing better. So, they get stuck in their own failures and stuck in the fear and self-hatred their failures cause them. There are many ways of being unhappy; that's the one that makes people mentally ill.
And the reason people can't use the idea of doing better is that it’s very difficult to manage the idea of our own mistakes. We'll justify or excuse what we do to avoid confronting our own weakness, we'll rationalise, we'll try to persuade ourselves it's all for the best and we are actually happy, or we'll tear everything up and sabotage ourselves or abandon the situations we're involved, in rather than confront what we're doing. People will be prepared to do anything rather than accept that they've got it wrong and need to do better.
But inside, we do know it's us and when people get mentally ill it's because they're constantly having to fight the idea of their own weakness and fear and shame, and they're deeply dissatisfied with themselves because of it. It's the self-hatred that gets you.
And nothing fundamental can really change unless you can learn to do better. People can go on a whole life without it: they can be professionally soothed in their distress, they can have ups and downs, they can stumble into better ways of thinking and behaving (though that gets harder as you get older) but it's a shame to live on the edge like that. So much pain and trouble can be saved if people can find the honesty required to get better at seeing what they’re up to.
It helps on a practical level - you can catch yourself; you can apologise you can behave better; relationships improve and so does your life. But, more importantly, it helps directly at an emotional level - the idea of doing better is consolation, it relieves some of the shame and guilt around failures. It’s not the end of the world precisely because you can do better. It makes it easier to live with what you already knew about yourself.
So, in the end, mental illness is a kind of character flaw. It's a failure of honesty, a failure of courage to look at what you already know about yourself, to see what you're up to and own it - own it enough so that you automatically want to do better.
That sounds harsh, but it's not meant to be. It's a character flaw we all share. It's not people’s 'fault' in the sense that it's shaped by what's happened to them (experience in childhood will leave it easier or harder to do in different situations - and that's as often about being indulged as abuse or neglect). And it's also about the hardest thing in the world - it's like performing surgery on your own cancer without anaesthetic or antibiotics.
But if you don't want to spend your life with the risk of getting too close to the edge, you need to find the courage to be able to look at what you've done, see what you're doing, stare at what you're most frightened of, what it's made you do, what you're really unhappy with about yourself.
Therapy should be about helping people do that but too often it’s about soothing evasion. Most people who come for therapy find what they were looking for, which is permission to carry on seeing things the way they want and doing what they want (even though it's causing them trouble and making them unhappy or ill). And very often they feel better (because the law of regression to the mean applies and the crisis that bought them there abates or works itself through) till the next time.
Whatever you’ve done, it's not the end of the world. It can be OK, there are always other chances (to think differently and see things differently). Whatever’s happened, if you can really see it, clearly, consistently, that means you can see what doing better looks like - and you'll want to. In the end, everything else is evasion.