Deep-seated coldness: Mental Illness

Deep-seated coldness: Mental Illness


There is a behavior I want to define, have been asked to look at by a number of people from the mountains and valley region in Peru that is not what I’d call uncommon, and just why is it so prevalent? Being a license counselor, and working in this area for 20-years and now retired, and working for the Prison symptom for several years in Minnesota, prior to retiring, the issue was brought to my attention, because I have spent so much time in the Mantaro Valley region, which is surrounded by the Andes. But I must say, this curse of the people is not just of the valley area—as they thought it might be, it is all over Peru, and strong in Lima likewise, perhaps more so.
Actually I find it in at least 20% of the people I have talk to in different degrees while being in Peru these past eight-years, plus. For those who take this as an insult, I suggest you go study human behavior, and then go live and investigate for eight years, these symptoms, and come up with a better prognosis, scenario, than I, not just sit back in your easy chair and say he’s full of it. I find this often the case with those who differ with things they know nothing about, and someone else has looked at pretty closely. You need to read what I have said above, when you conclude what you think below.
Let me repeat, I’ve been to Peru, nine times in eight years, lived here within those ninetimes, perhaps four years, total, of that period, in the mountain regions, I have been in several location in the Andes, perhaps in months or days, I could count four years in the mountains. Although I am a retired counselor, my mind still functions, that is not the retired part of me.

Indifference, I want to look at this word. It is an emotion that lacks emotion; absence of compulsion toward one thing, or person, or event. This emotion in Peru is often referred to folks by other folks who feel they have or lack “No blood in the face,” meaning in North American English: why does it not intimidate, bother them to be confronted with their obnoxious behavior, their violations of what is considered normal. This action, or event, what they did, or didn’t do. The why of it is the puzzling thing? So we are stretching the word indifference are we not, but it is a good word everyone recognizes, and that is important here. But I must dig dipper into this root. Let me now use the word Apathy. But before I dig into the word apathy, I want to also present a pest that fosters this indifference in a person. In the valley region of Peru, Mantaro Valley, and in Lima, and all over there is a high degree of alcoholism, and drug use which deadens the emotional system, that brings the adult mind and freezes it to where it started its norm use, use on a normal bases, meaning, regular use. If you started drinking at age 16-years old, and you are 30-years old today, you are thinking as a 16-year old mind would think, in a 30-year old body. And there is a suppression level increasing inside of your system, called indifference. An example, Billy Carter, President Carter’s brother, no dead, went to the bathroom outside of a passenger jet once, and thought nothing of it, indifference; he was of course an alcoholic. My point being, Billy was numb to the norms of society, he was in his own world. So we see, any area with a high degree of alcohol use over a long period of time will have this kind of indifference impeded into it.
Apathy, absence of emotion, or suppression of it, along with suppression on concern and passion, again, a form of indifference in that we are taking the exciting or moving parts out of a person’s life almost. Example: it doesn’t bother the person to take advantage of, to say one thing and do another, to lie to and then ask for something, to rob this other person in a subtle way, to break an agreement, and go up to him or her, as if nothing has taken place, nothing has happened, and ask him for a hand out because he has more than you. Those who are reading this, and say: what is wrong with that, you need help because it is wrong, but it is not wrong for the person with a mental illness, like alcoholism, or drug use, or simple learned behavior because of family norms, in other words, it is not uncommon for the family, although it is for society. Many people in the mountains area uneducated, or plagued with alcoholism, or simply mentally illness, and we will get further into that in a moment.

What kind of behavior is this? It looks like indifference, and smells like apathy, whatever it is, it is a mental disorder, a connection exists, be it a thread or a rope, and it is connected to schizophrenia (expressing little interest in everything around them; a form of silent depression, if not coupled with some frozen anger). They feel numb to events occurring around them. For example, they are told to do this, or that, paid to do so, and a kind person may make an agreement with them, and they are persuaded to otherwise, and you confront them, and they stand there dumbfounded, as if they were in space, and you say: what is going on with this person, he doesn’t care and I’m addressing an issue, the very one we agreed upon that he or she has changed as if it never existed, and looking you in the eye as if you should have forgotten about the agreement because… of whatever.

One must ask them, what are we seeing here? A lack of wholeness in the physical, mental and emotional area has just taken place. It is not normal, and you know this, they may or may not know this, but it really doesn’t matter, you know this, they are beyond coping with stress, because it is not really stress they are coping with, otherwise you could pinpoint the transitions needed, the needed transition people use when stress is too much, this is not coping this is normal for the person at the time, but at this juncture you are addressing a different issue, which you know is not normal, not under the banner of stress.

Now let’s go onto a third or forth element here, or dimension, depending on how you see things, it is called attitude, which is how you deal with things, it can be a lackness in ones personality, again we have room here to put drugs and alcohol in this picture, if we want to. In the person we are talking about, or people, the conservative 20% figure I gave above, attitude is lacking, or needed to become more positive. If drugs or alcohol are part of the scenario here, it is hard to create a positive attitude unless you stop your usage. We must also remember, apathy is a form of schizophrenia, and drug use and alcohol use, only worsens the symptoms of the mental ill, and one of the linking connections here belongs to a word called dysthymia, a form of depression (and alcoholism is a depressant), often connected to neurotic depression, but I am speaking more in a general terms, not severe. Here we see sad moods, fatigue, insomnia, things like that, even poor food intake.

Some people are mental slow, and learn bad behaviors, and know what you are talking about, and they are doing, but justify it for personal reasons. These people are wicked and use their mental slowness to justify their actions; not the 20% I am talking about, but rather a small portion of that.

So how do I put all of this into a nutshell? I could call it simple learned unresponsiveness, fostered by chemical usage like alcohol, or drugs; and it could be called impeded lack of understanding or simply coldness, deep-seated coldness, that’s the nice terms. But which ever way you look it is really mental illness, and you need help, relearned normal behavior, and one of the first things you need in your life is God, Christ!