Letters to the Editor
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A clarification and caveat
Cary writes:
If you think you know what other people are thinking, that is your disease. Your disease is your delusion. You cannot know what people are thinking. You cannot read their thoughts on their faces. You cannot hear their thoughts.
You can believe that you can. You can say that you can. But that is your own mind telling you things.
This is only half true, and is a bit dangerous to tell to someone with a serious mental illness.
People obviously can read other people's faces. There are several reasons supporting this:
- There are neurological disorders in which people have difficulty reading faces, resulting in "mind blindness." This significantly diminishes their ability to interact meaningfully with others, to the extent they may not be able to learn emotions properly.
- People are much more likely to misunderstand each other without facial and/or vocal interaction. A Univ. of Chicago study showed that email, for example, are misunderstood more than 50% of the time; and the majority of the misunderstanding is negative.
- People base entire careers on their ability to emote through their faces, and we pay them large quantities of money to do so.
There are exceptions to all this, of course. Context has a great deal to do with the interpretation of facial expression, and the interpreter's state of mind can certainly adversely affect their ability to accurately gauge intent.
But don't tell a person already challenged in dealing with the world that what they understand from others is their disease. Part of healing and adapting to disorders of this nature is learning the balance between giving their interpretations a grain of salt (particularly if they seem highly negative), and learning to trust themselves. Mistrust of your own ability to navigate the world does not encourage you to try to do so. Making the leap of faith that you can heal, which to a great extent in mental illness means you can interact with society, is essential if healing is to begin.
If you can't trust something as basic as reading the next person's face, you're isolated to an extreme most people can't imagine. That's not only scary, it's just plain wrong in this case, with this disorder.
A note to those who do have mind blindness: This is incredibly difficult to grapple with, but there are ways of learning to read people's faces and interact in a socially acceptable manner. The social issues of Asperger's syndrome, for example, can be mitigated quite a bit by actively studying others and pursuing counseling to improve social interaction skills.