If you have witnessed it, you know there is no other suffering like mental illness because the human mind has enormous capabilities. If these capabilities work in your favor, life becomes fantastic. If they work against you, there is no escape because the stimuli for suffering is not even coming from outside. If the stimuli for your suffering were coming from your neighbor, your mother-in-law or your boss, you could run away. Nobody can cause suffering to you, mentally.

They do things and you react to it in a certain way. But if you come to a place where, without anyone doing anything, suffering is simply happening, it is a psychological condition.

How does one come out of it? It depends on the level of damage. There are some who can come out of it, but in some pathological cases, it would have manifested in a physical form in the brain. Such conditions have to be supported chemically from outside. Sedating it is largely what people are doing, but you cannot just put down one aspect of your mind or brain – the whole system gets affected.

The line between sanity and insanity is very thin. Many of you enjoy crossing it.  Suppose you burst out on someone in anger and they got scared and did what you wanted. You will say, “You know what? I got really mad at him and he immediately squirmed and did what I wanted.” You got mad and you came back, so you seem to enjoy it. Suppose you got mad and did not come back, then it is a different matter.

You keep crossing the line with anger, hatred, jealousy, alcohol or drugs. You are crossing the line of sanity, enjoying the little bit of madness that you go through, and coming back. I want you to know that many of the people who have lost it were perfectly “normal” people like you. Just one day, it is gone. Something fused out and suddenly they are on the streets.

It is like how the physical body can get ailments. You could be fine today, but tomorrow morning your doctor tells you something. These things happen to people every day. Similar things can happen to the mind. At least if it happens to your body, you will get sympathy from everyone around you. When it happens to your mind, you do not get sympathy; no one wants to be anywhere around you because it is very difficult. You do not know when they are acting up or when it is for real – you cannot make a judgment. When they are acting up, you want to get tough on them, when it is real, you have to be compassionate with them. It is a tightrope walk; it is not easy. It is painful for that person and even more painful for people around them.

We need to build structures in society where the margin for mental illness is very low. Why I go back pining for the culture that existed in this land is because about 200 to 300 years ago, there were hardly any mentally ill people in this country simply because of certain structures in the society. Slowly, without awareness, we are pulling it down. Today, even in villages, there are psychologically broken people, which was never so in the past. If it happened, it was an extremely negligible percentage of people. The percentage is increasing. You can distinctly see that in so-called “affluent” societies, the percentage is becoming quite high. This is because a human being is a social animal unless he transcends certain things. Either we should work for transcendence or we should create a society which is supportive, which is not demanding. Right now, the social structures that we have created are horribly demanding.