If I were to tell you that my social skills lean towards the schizoaffective side and that if I were a dog I’d only be good at wagging my tail, not barking, would you say I have low self esteem or true panache for admitting it?
When a person, or dog for that matter, has mental health issues such as anxiety or depression other people can see the symptoms transpire before their eyes. A person with those symptoms can verbally communicate what they are feeling while a dog may certainly try. When a person has ptsd or ocd most other people can’t tell but the individual suffering can certainly explain their symptoms and what they are feeling; a dog certainly can not. When a person is psychotic or manic everybody can tell but the person usually can’t or won’t explain the symptoms so a professional has to intervene and measure the severity.
A dog can’t be schizophrenic or bipolar because they don’t know better when seeing what is not there and they can’t get to a cognitive level that is beside themselves. Meaning they don’t formulate delusions nor can they choose mania over depression when the argument rears its ugly head. I should be careful in stating that dogs do not see in a full spectrum of color and the reason dogs do not have severe mental illness has everything to do with them not being human. The fact that a dog’s two cones are different from a human’s three cones could be linked to their potentially not being equipped to hallucinate a seven story clock or characters from the Lost Boys. Most likely they can’t hallucinate in that way because they don’t tell time or watch television.
If humans were dogs we would all be midsized and brown, screwing unfettered for centuries other dogs that cross our path five feet in front of us and eventually a thousand miles away. There would be less humans over a longer period of time because of the dog years phenomenon. We would maybe see a greater prevalence of mental illness, or would our simpler social structures and instincts help to prevent such conditions from arising? Would we be nicer to one another? Bite more or bite less?
What was it like long ago during tribunals for those with mental illness when they were even more misunderstood and misdiagnosed? There must’ve been stories of werewolves in the night before mental illness was to blame for violence, after the moon was cause for lunacy.
Using mental illness as an excuse for why people hurt people is akin to saying the moon is at fault or saying dogs bite other dogs because of the color of the victims fur, even if they were all brown. Because they don’t see color they can’t possibly make that decision, though in fact dogs do see and howl at the moon. It is instead vibrations and pheromones that pose a threat. The speed of sound is just as quick as the speed of light for the psychotic person. They certainly don’t strike by reacting to vibrations but may respond to commands they can’t see. The smell of fear is more reactionary than actually causing fear. Causing fear is considered flagrant. Our social interactions are not always ruled by the physiology of other human beings but rather the behavior and physicality we intercept from the essence of their being is how we respond; with love or malice.
There is no vibration great enough to make a person bite like a dog when all they can do is wag their tail.
Francis Erich McElroy 