Imagine someone with a knife cuts someone, say Jon, and Jon bleeds. Jon goes to hospital and is treated for his cuts.
Jon regularly goes to hospital with cuts.
In fact there are many people like Jon who go to hospital with bleeding cuts.
The health service thinks "there are many people coming to us with bleeding cuts. We need to help them stop being cut and help them heal quicker. We need to find better drugs and healing their cuts. When people are cut, there is blood coming out of their skin."
The health service never sees the person that cut all the victims. The health services 'customer' is the victim.
After a while the health service would be better at dealing with people with bleeding cuts, they're cuts would be fewer, theoretically, the cuts would heal quicker.
"Health service reduces number of people with bleeding cuts. Health service has noted that when people are cut, blood is coming of their skin" Would be in the headlines.
Then a recession would come, causing more people to cut people. More divorces would come, causing more people to cut people.
The health service would need more money to deal with an increase in "bleedingness".
This idea is proposterous isn't it?
But this is exactly what happens with certain aspects of mental health!
For many with mental health problems : they are the victims of other people's harm. But they tell the victims that their mental health is because they have a chemical imbalance in the brain. Just like blood comes out of your skin when you are cut, so do your chemicals in your brain alter when you are hurt emotionally by someone.
In a world where competition, the economy, being a worthy member of society, winning the vote of people is prized over relationships, love, truth, peace; mental health is a natural consequence. Mental health is not a natural condition, just as bleeding skin is not a natural condition.
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