Our Heads Are Full of Stew

Mental Health diagnoses

I am about to compare mental health with cooking, but you do not need any specialized knowledge about food preparation to follow my storyline. Everyone eats, after all.

Are you or have you ever been accused of being a “foodie”? Some will qualify, I bet. Not too long ago I would rate my interest in cooking very high, but it was authentic cuisine of other cultures that temporarily put me under the foodie umbrella.

Learning about a culture’s food traditions is a great way to become acquainted with most aspects of its history and preferences. On the Food Network, I like when an elder with knowledge of the local flavors makes a time-consuming, smoky cauldron of stew or something similar. I can smell it with my mind. The work, the smiles on the people’s faces, and the slow-cooking method gives me feelings of warmth and security.

A mental health diagnosis is similar to that meal simmering in a huge pot. First, it would be easy for me to say, “But it does not taste half as good.” Thankfully, I will not say that, but please allow me to explain.

A stew is very malleable to taste and culture. Really, the word stew equals to something edible cooked in liquid. The way people interpret what makes food in a liquid a stew depends on what food is available locally, local tastes, and sometimes one’s beliefs or religion.

What is happening there among all the ingredients, with the fire, and perhaps a person stirring, will always remain a bit of a mystery. When old-school cooks are asked why the finished dish is so yummy, they often respond with “I put a lot of love in there.”

Love represents the unknown wonderful quality of something that marks it as distinct from some store-bought version of that particular thing. Love is there somewhere within the process but is not a tangible step in some recipe.

Stews are made differently each time. There are the prerogatives of the cooks, the time of year, what happens to be fresh, the weather, and who knows what else. No two are exactly the same even when the ingredients are. People are individuals too, and Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, or anything else, will not look the same in every man or woman.

One thing is true without question, I believe, and that is that stews share lots in common no matter what popular name they are given. Then, there is this too: I have always been curious about the order of vegetables that make an appearance and then are thrown into the mix. Each kind of vegetable does not represent homogeneity, because nature produces diversities of size and taste within a single vegetable variant that we sometimes mistake as imperfections.

If tomatoes are added, then we now have a pot that is distinguishable from another one without them. All meals in the stew family have onions, carrots, celery, or at least two out of three, right? Maybe.

Potatoes send us down a different road simply by dropping a few in our medley of common grub. Cream in some form? We haven’t even talked about meat at all.

The point is this: A stew begins and follows a familiar course, then we can introduce one or more things that change it, but you still have stew. One might call the same meal by different names. For example, one recipe might be called potato stew, potato chowder, vegetable soup, or something else.

One addition of an ingredient makes it one thing instead of another, and each individual makes a choice to term the assortment of different foods as one final something.

In the mental health world, I notice that people resist labels and even avoid seeing a doctor due to fear of misdiagnosis. Or, their friend went through a bad time with a psychiatrist, took medicine that hurt more than helped, and now they are hesitant to seek treatment.

At the same time, doctors are trying to put a name to each “stew” that looks much like any other, only this one accentuates potatoes and that one tomatoes. I might be depressed with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but another has OCD with elements of Depression.

If it is not clear, the stew symbolizes a person’s mind and the variety of disorders, diseases, and traumas that compose the challenges each person faces. The final dish that ends up in the bowl is like what is written on my and many others’ medical charts.

Eventually someone has to name what has been created, but many of us with mental illness have symptoms alike. No, not in every case, but we sometimes are potatoes, or leaks, or beans, or carrots etc., away from a mental menagerie of issues that appear almost the same as the next guy. It is up to a doctor to decide in what direction to go among options like Major Depression, Bipolar, Personality Disorders, Anxiety Disorder, and the Schizophrenia Spectrum.

Each mental illness manifests in a way that can look like almost any other. Know what I mean? Please do not take all my rambling as cheapening mental illness. Nope, that is not my intention at all. Also, none of my thoughts are anti-doctors or anti-medicine.

But, diagnosing someone must be very hard. Mistakes are going to be made. The brain is complicated. Mental illness in general is not fully understood—and this is an understatement.

After the doctor visits, therapy, and a round or three of medication, every person must define who they are including whatever mental health labels that he or she has acquired. This is why self-knowledge is the master key, the “one ring,” and the holy grail of mental health. Yes, because we can live with a label without it encapsulating every molecule of our being. Yes again, we are more than a diagnosis.

I belabored that last point because it is not fair to argue we must either disavow the medication/doctor world or live as a walking and breathing problem with no identity except a clinical one. There is a middle ground where real people live.

I believe the confusion as to what to call our meal leads to harm because folks “throw away the baby with the bath water.” Some conclude that we should not talk about mental illness as an illness at all, or that it is next to impossible to do so, because doctors cannot even agree on who has what. The cooks are always erasing the menu and starting over after new information is learned and applied.

So, we have minds of stew. That is fine by the way, as there is always something flavorful in those smoking pots made with lots of love. Maybe we should be fine without every symptom having a corresponding cause that mental health neatly delineates. As long as we are doing the best we can and hold others in our orbit to the same standard, we will be fine.

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