Face on Mars

Something that really ticks me off is hearing people say ‘Oh my God I’m so OCD’ because they like to have forks on the left hand side of a plate or prefer for things to be a certain way. Do you like to make sure that all the lights are switched off before leaving the room? Oh, you must have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder then. I’ve heard people say phrases along those lines and it just really annoys me. I don’t have OCD myself, nor do I know anyone who does, but I can’t imagine it’d go down too well if you said something similar to someone who did have the condition. It just trivialises it.

Another one that I find to be coming increasingly common is people advertising the fact that they’re depressed because their football team has just lost in a final or because their favourite TV series is no longer on air. Hate to break it to you, but you’re not actually depressed. And you might be just saying it in jest, but you probably shouldn’t be either. I feel like this trivialising of mental health can be grounded in a number of explanations – but a phenomenon (that I couldn’t remember the name of) came to mind. Asking Google what it was called when we see a face on burnt toast (my search was a bit more sophisticated), the first image I saw was the below photo of the face on Mars. Obviously, it’s not actually a face, but I remember when that image was a big deal on the internet. A lot of people (or a vocal minority) thought some rocks shown in a satellite photo of Mars resembled a face. Queue all the conspiracy theories. It’s not an isolated incident either. We’ve all seen a cloud that looks like a horse or a sliced apple that looks like an owl (maybe not?).

Turns out it’s called pareidolia, which is basically our brain thinking that it recognises a pattern where there isn’t one. As humans we seem to have a tendency to look for patterns, even if they don’t actually exist. You’ll recognise something familiar in the unfamiliar. We also like to exaggerate and attribute labels to things. And it seems to me like this is true for some people when it comes to mental health, me being one of them. At my school, Sixth Form students would have a weekly one hour class called ‘Union’ where they would invite speakers to enlighten 16-18 year olds. Ones that I can remember include the man who started the Big Issue, a representative from Stonewall, an ex-convict called T-Bone who turned into a motivational speaker and a woman who was duped into being a drug mule. I was definitely fortunate enough to have had these talks, diversifying my knowledge of and educating me about a spectrum of things.

One of the talks that stuck with me the most was from a music producer who had manic depression, or bi-polar disorder. He talked about the manic and depressive mood episodes, how it affected his career and personal life, and learning to live with it. I’d heard about bi- polar and manic depression before, but only then I knew that they were the same, and what they actually were, as opposed to preconceived notions where it seemed to me a Dr Jekyll/ Mr Hyde kind of thing.

At the end of the talk, all the students were given some leaflets to take away for more information on bi-polar, how to recognise if you have it and how to deal with it, or helping someone else deal with it. I focused too much on the ‘recognising if you have’ it part.

‘Oh my God I’m so bi-polar’, I thought to myself. I saw familiarity in the symptoms; some days I was a moody teenager and others I was (relatively) fun to hang around with. I convinced myself that I had manic depression.

I kept this little secret to myself, feeling at peace that my moods had some explanation and that me being a recluse on some days, feeling down on others or being generally a pain for my parents wasn’t all my fault. I had the leaflet to prove it. I had the music producer’s story fresh in my mind and there were some similarities in our experiences. There weren’t. But I told myself otherwise.

I finally built up the courage to ‘come out’ with my revelation to my mum. I hurriedly told her about the talk we had at school as she was about to rush off somewhere, and how my mood swings finally made sense.

Wrongly – but with the right intentions – she dismissed it as being in my head. Without mentioning the face on Mars, she basically tried to comfort me by pointing out that after you’re exposed to things like the talk and the leaflets, we have a tendency to seek comfort or a feeling of belonging through that. If you’ve just been spending a whole week with horses, you’re probably going to spot a stallion in the sky if a cloud vaguely resembles one. (But that might be more about the baader-meinhof phenomenon now that I think about it). I was just projecting my emotions onto this man’s experiences and impacted by the talk.

She was right. Luckily. Because while it’s only natural that you want to comfort someone you love and help them feel that everything is fine, that could obviously end up causing more harm than good. It might deter or demotivate you from seeking the right kind of help.

But she was right, and this only hit me recently after I’d forgotten about it all. I thought I had bi-polar when it was just mood swings in my particular case. Even though many of the symptoms listed in the leaflet weren’t true to me, I latched onto something that seemed to explain emotions I had no real explanation for. I latched onto something that made me feel unique or ‘special’. And that made me feel like I was part of a group or community.

I only now realise how much that trivialises mental health. My mood swings aren’t comparable to manic depression. And getting nervous when you see an old acquaintance in the street isn’t social anxiety. I was given knowledge about a medical condition that I hadn’t known much about, but that unfortunately only made me more ignorant. I reduced mental health to just an explanation of how I felt on certain days and what my frame of mind was like in a moment of time.

When I think about why that happened, it could have been because of what I mentioned above – I probably have a tendency to attach onto ideas and relate to them even if I shouldn’t be. I’d probably make a good feral child and believe that I was an ape if I was raised among a group of them. And there area actually cases of that, so maybe it’s a thing that we as humans do. I’m no psychologist, but my guess is that, like the toast face, it’s about seeking familiarity in the unfamiliar (among other things).

But maybe – and not to blame the music producer or my school – the way the topic was approached and the subject delivered, it encouraged me to falsely self-diagnose as having bi-polar. We were given the leaflets, but that was it really. There were no further conversations or dialogues or recognition of mental health beyond the talk (barring maybe being made aware of a school councillor). I was made aware of manic depression, and that was about it. I’m sure more direction would have been useful, but maybe the misdiagnosis I made was down to me only. Or maybe it was due to both internal and external factors, I can’t say for sure.

But rather than people dismissing mental health as something that will pass or as something that you’re just imagining in your head, feeling comfortable to talk about mental health and be open about each other’s experiences is crucial. My aim in this blog wasn’t to reduce mental health or to make it seem like something that people latch on to, but the opposite.

As well as having the right environment where you can openly talk about mental health with friends, colleagues or loved ones, it’s equally important to be able to do that with medical professionals. Mental health goes well beyond self-perception of any issues that you feel you might have, and talking to people who understand the symptoms and how to best take the next steps if you do show these signs can make such a difference. While for me, my first exposure of openly talking about mental health gave me the wrong idea that I had bi-polar and led to me inadvertently trivialise it, it still exposed to me something that is so real for so many people.