It is an unfortunate part of our society that it is exceedingly rare for any person to be “cured” of any kind of mental illness. What happens far more frequently in our world is that a person’s condition is merely treated for the duration of the individual’s life. While one could easily argue some sort of conspiracy theory, and claim that the mentally ill population of our culture are merely the assets of the pharmaceutical companies who ostensibly serve them, this is not about supposed conspiracies. This is about getting over a mental illness. While it is always tempting to simply believe that you can “act normal” and be just fine, this is almost never the case.
After all, the treatment of a mental illness is not a matter of theatrics. Very often, there is a serious chemical problem going on in a person’s brain, and there is no “acting” your way out of something like that. You have to live with it, work around it when you can, and treat it through medicines when your workarounds are not enough. As great as it would be for our species to finally be able to cure mental illnesses (even relatively minor ones), we might be generations away from being able to do something like that.
The active point to remember is that there is no cure for a mental illness, and expecting someone to just “get better” is both unrealistic and cruel. What you can do is help them to work around their problems, just as we all do. There are no perfect people, after all. And until you are completely devoid of problems (which is a state that will never happen), criticizing other people for their problems is pretty ridiculous. While we can fix the external problems that mental illness can produce, through helping one another, there is no cure for what is wrong inside.
