Mental illness always scares people and is perceived with wariness and negativity. But recent research has shown that things may soon change. It turned out that you can also benefit from such diseases. Sometimes people with mental disorders develop incredible mental abilities. We suggest reading about some of them and form your own opinion.
Dissociative Disorder Can Lead to No Pain Threshold
Any mental illness was provoked for some reason. Take multiple personality disorder, for example. The part of our brain that is responsible for the perception of events can partially atrophy after difficult experiences. For example, why would anyone want to be Mary when her husband left her for another woman? Better to be Susan, who has a joyful and good life, no problem with men. However, no logical reasoning will be able to translate a split personality into the category of a norm.
When a person has experienced psychological trauma, their brain refuses to remember the event. And the same Mary will be sure that her husband never left her, because at that time she was Susan on a yacht. Or another example: a girl was driving with her husband, when suddenly they got into a car accident, as a result of which the guy died, and she could not get out of a coma from her injuries for a long time. Having recovered, the girl suddenly decides that there was no accident. She is a new person, without a past, but with a bright future. Psychological pain in this case is closely related to physical pain. Therefore, some people experience the disappearance of the pain threshold.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder as a cause of super-memory development
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In a psychiatric hospital, a study was conducted in which patients were asked to memorize a list of 320 words. Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder showed the best results.
The phenomenal ability to remember is often associated with this syndrome, but this does not mean that all patients have it. The disease stimulates the improvement of memory in general, but its exceptional properties are manifested only in some patients.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder will awaken creativity
People with ADHD tend to be creative in any task. Even algebra is solved quite differently for them. "Why is 2 + 2 going to be 4?" - they will say and go to look for a way to prove that the answer will be different. Such patients are prone to writing novels and poems, drawing incredibly strange, but at the same time impressive pictures. Over their morning coffee, they come up with so many different ideas that not every average person could think of in a whole day!
Notable examples of such patients are Justin Timberlake, Kurt Cobain, Will Smith, or Lord Byron. We think you will agree that they are all brilliant.
Bipolar disorder develops strong empathy and a keen sense of smell
Patients with this condition have a very strong ability to empathize and empathize. Since they themselves see the world in somewhat different colors, these people feel more acutely not only their own, but also someone else's pain. The various phases of their condition ultimately lead to the fact that patients become more resistant to mental trauma. This is the reason for their high chances of recovery.
In addition to developing empathy, these patients have an increased sense of smell. One of the symptoms of bipolar disorder is, oddly enough, allergies. And besides, patients associate various events in their lives with smells. It doesn't have to be someone's perfume. Patients may, for example, recall childhood experiences by smelling cherry compote or freshly baked pie.
Depression stimulates creativity
Any mental disorder, of course, cannot be called good, but you must admit that if depression did not exist, many masterpieces of art might never have appeared. Writers who lock themselves in four walls to create another book are often depressed, musicians who, on the verge of despair, compose incredibly beautiful songs.
Or take Vincent Van Gogh. It was thanks to the depression in which he was that his paintings turned out to be so unusual and impressive. What about Munch's The Scream? Have you read how he described it? “The sun was setting - and suddenly the sky turned a blood red color. I felt a tremor run through my body, and it seemed to me that I heard a deafening scream that pierced the whole of nature."
Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath were also depressed … But the works of these authors are now included in the compulsory school curriculum!
We don't even know if art could have arisen at all without psychological disorders? And what do you think?
Elena Chernysheva