I agree with the basic premise; there's nothing any more wrong (or right, or true) with any one of us that isn't ultimately true for all of us. (I am we as you are me and you are he and we are all together etc. ~John Lennon; I shouted out, who killed the Kennedys, when after all, it was you and me etc. ~The Rolling Stones.) I suppose I think of all mental orientations as existing on a spectrum, some less stable than others and some admittedly more dangerous than others.. but as these are all outgrowths either of human biology or of the social evolution we humans are responsible for manifesting, all points on the spectrum are simply differences normal to the situation, and from which no one is wholly exempt.

Not saying that we shouldn't provide people with help in adjusting to the world we live in, but the game of whose supposed normalcy is superior to whomever else's is not one I care to play. (If they started referring to "disorders" as "orientations" though, it would call into question the need to pathologize and treat such things, especially to the unwilling or unwitting. Follow the money.)

We're all oddballs, just of different feathers. I don't find these differences to be demeaning though, but uniting. Regardless of whatever mental struggles may be particular to me (and there are many), I know that my life has no less value than anyone else's, that I represent as significant a section of the collective human life force as anyone else. I don't believe in normal, only in differences.


Perhaps if our pathologies weren't all the hostage commodities of the pharmaceutical complex, the psychiatric industry might have a better shot at helping the future of humanity. I tend to think its foundation is just too corrupt though.

The truth is that I'd rather occasionally feel suicidal, which I find to have been a completely normal reaction to some of the horrendous situations that have come through my life, than to forever feel less alive, less sad and less happy and less anything, by ravaging my body being a lab rat for a litany of unnatural drugs. (I respect others' choices to take them, but those drugs have only ever hurt me, and not unsignificantly.)

My late husband suicided. Yes, a part of me wishes he would have kept taking the g0dd@mn lithium and led whatever anesthetized style of life would have kept him alive, but in truth I remain a believer in the right to die even today, and respect his choice knowing the nature of the despairs that plagued him and for so very many years, and which he became convinced he could no longer fight. Who can judge another's pain and choices? I do wish he was still here, I wish it every day, but I don't judge him; nor myself.