Masking your mental illness takes efforts and causes a lot of harm. That sort of suppression and compliance to ableist norms can leave persons with invisible disabilities feeling lonely, worthless and stuck. But speaking about it and being open about it brings challenges of its own. The everyday discrimination and stereotyping aside, people will always continue operating with their own assumptions of your disability in their head.

These assumptions are of a wide variety. a common one that I want to talk about in this serialized essay is that "mental illness is the illness of mind". Meaning it is in your head. That is to say - yes, you need medication and psychotherapy but ultimately this illness is located in your "mind" (its absurd how easy it is for people to say this considering the complexity of the questions relating to the nature of mind but I digress) and hence you can do things to cure it by simply thinking. People like to call this being "mindful". And while "mindfulness" is a helpful tool for people dealing with neurobiological disorders, its hardly enough. As a matter of fact its almost nothing. But a popular belief seems to be that once you have been diagnosed and put on medication for a mental illness, you can simply think yourself out of it. This, of course, couldn't be farther from the truth. Mental illness is a product of complex neurobiological characteristics and environmental factors.

Recently, I was talking to my father about my mental illness, and though he is supportive and understanding in this respect than most fathers are, he said something that reminded me of the aforementioned commonly held notion relating to mental illnesses. He said, "My heart disease cannot be willed away because its a disease of the body, yours however can to an extent, because it is a disease of the mind". And this had me thinking - but, what is mind? Isn't my mind ultimately composed of my body? To be concise, what I am getting at, is trying to look at the mind-body problem from a psychopathological perspective through my experience as a person with mental illness. And thus, attempting to locate the "pain" of it both inside and outside the body (when i say outside the body I mean both, external stimuli and environment, and the ableist systems of oppression.) By locating the pain, perhaps, we might be able to locate what are the places that we should seek to find cures.

I am aware that the subject matter I'm dealing with here, is well beyond my capabilities and therefore I intend to rely on a lot of pre-existing work, and if possible opinions of experts and other people with mental illnesses. It is also going to be a lot of work. But I really believe this might be a helpful exercise in understanding invisible disability caused by neurobiological disorders. I would be very helpful if you, dear reader, could support me in writing it by donating money through the support link below. I ardently wish to work on this but it is impossible to work on something so intense without a possibility of remuneration. Because after all, there are people who are better at me with handling this subject matter could and have in past taken this up, this is just going to be a record of my perspective - which I could form simply by gathering information and processing it. The reason for publishing it is not only that I think it would be beneficial if I could get some community engagement, but also that I would like to earn some money for working on a time intensive project instead of which I might have worked on something that pays. So if you believe that this project is worth it, please consider donating a small amount through the support button at the end of this page.

p.s. as a measure of protection from burning out doing something that ultimately results in nothing, I have decided that I will only begin writing the successive chapters as and when I reach certain monetary goals.