Mood Disorder or Mood Normalcy? Who IS Mentally Ill, Afterall?

During my last visit with my primary care provider, an internist and a medical doctor, I told her that from time to time I have anxiety attacks to which she wanted to know whether I thought that I had a mood disorder.

I replied that I didn’t think so since my responses seem totally reasonable, rational and normal given the factors that disturb me. Then I went on to add that it seems perfectly sensible to feel upset if one is an empathetic, altruistic, moral and sensitive person while noting that medics (doctors like herself), children, volunteer cooks from around the world and other civilians are being deliberately and painstakingly murdered. Meanwhile, that sort of cold-blooded slaying  is not the only vicious violence taking place all at the same time in the world and, after all, what kind of narcissistic psychotic person is it that’s not somehow moved by any sort of extreme intentional butchery in warlike circumstances?

I went on to add that it seems to me that a mood disorder is when people are in a state of anomie while coldhearted and indifferent about others’ welfare, especially when youngsters, feeble elders and other non-warriors are involved in being tortured to death.

Certainly, the unhealthy and disordered state is not the one wherein one cares about kindness and ethics, the deliberately excruciatingly painful slaughter of others, ruin of land and water, forced starvation, bombing of whole families and similar high levels of extreme atrocities. On account, I would think that the psychological abnormalities would belong to the people who are licking their chops like Trump who fantasizes and would love to build a money-making luxury resort on stolen Gaza land. So clearly, it’s not the ones who shudder and get upset at the severe obscene monstrosity of genocide and any war regardless of where it takes place on our planet and regardless of whom is purposefully brutalizing and exterminating whom else.

Sally Dugman lives in MA, USA — a goodly state but in a violent, often warmongering country much to her sorrow and occasional stress.