A Brief Excursion Into Mental Illness

Barbara Lipska is a neuroscientist who spent her career studying schizophrenia, "a devastating disease in which it can be difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is not." She's the one who discovered that the frontal lobe of the brain is an essential place for the illness's development. But this article is not about a new breakthrough in the field, or about the experience of other people suffering from mental disease. It's an account of her own oblivion slipping into insanity. 

She starts off by recalling one spring morning three years ago, when she jogged for hours around her neighbourhood, with freshly applied red Henna dye dripping all over her, as if she were a character in a gore movie. She couldn't remember where she lived. 

Just let that image sink in.

As she continues to describe the changes in her behaviour and perceptions and about her loss of grip on reality (paranoid thoughts about the world working against her and about getting infected by others with diseases), I thought to myself 'No way is she coming back from that!' The good news is she did, because it was cancer that was causing all these problems. She sums up perfectly what that period of her life meant to her and her close ones:

From time to time, I would make stupid jokes, pretending to lose my mind, faking that I didn’t know where I was. Mirek didn’t laugh. It was cruel, I realized, and I stopped doing it. After all, I’m the only one who didn’t witness what happened. I’m the one—in a way—who suffered least.