TOW #21 - Who Lost Her Mind (Argument)

"I had always done my work with great passion, but I don’t think I really understood what was at stake until my own brain stopped working… I understood for the first time what many of the patients I study go through — the fear and confusion of living in a world that doesn’t make sense."

     Mental health is a prominent conversation topic around the nation and around the world today, and deservedly so. In this article, Barbara Lipska writes of her struggle with a brain tumor. As a neuroscientist who had spent years investigating and dissecting other people's brains, it was terrifying and frustrating that suddenly her own brain was dysfunctional. Areas of vision went missing and memory floated out the window; yet her brain told her everything was perfectly fine. Even when she saw a brain scan that told her it was not all okay, the same kind of brain scan she had been studying for years, it didn't seem real or logical. She has now been through successful treatment and is sharing her story.

     It is a story in which the reader can feel her fear and frustration, a standout in a culture where people like to talk about problems but rarely stick around to make sure the message really gets through. Lipska, however, is able to provide an emotionally captivating glimpse into one instance of mental illness. Her whole story embodies the feeling that your knees suddenly give out but you don't even realize you're on the floor now, amplified a thousand-fold because it's your brain, the your central pillar of consciousness. She writes that though she is now healthy, she lives every day with the looming fear that her own brain may escape her again.

     When there are a million problems and a billion conversations about each, all of it starts sounding like babble, easy and best to ignore. The idea of mental illness does not escape this unfortunate phenomenon - and it is even worse off due to its tendency to seem abstract or difficult to understand. But as this article arrives contemporaneously with rising worries of insufficient treatment for mental health, of the coinciding of homelessness and mental illness troubles, we should be realizing just how much things need to change. We need more people who understand how to make others truly begin to understand. Lipska devoted her career to studying the complexities of the brain, but found she never truly understood mental illness until she experienced it herself. Hopefully, we can all start on a journey of understanding without needing to go through those experiences first.