People can be confused or frightened. They may use sense experience to say what they could not otherwise bear to hear. Their bodies may carry the pain of their minds, and when reality is overwhelming they may retreat to a safer place within, a place we call madness. All people can do all of these things. All can be hurt or afraid, and if some sometimes do so to a greater degree, does it make them sick? It does only if we insist that it does, and then perhaps because we fear they could be us.
Not all of us will be lepers, nor will we develop cancer. But all could be what we call mentally ill, and so we distance ourselves. It is them, we say. They are the different ones. They are sick, and need hospital care and medication. They need to be where we won't see them, or our own reflection in them.
Sometimes they are sick, and sometimes they may benefit from a particular care, but for all they are, they are also us. Their confusion is not so different from our own. To turn their fear into disease is to hope it will stop being what we have felt. We can pretend and we can assign names, but it is only pretense. Our fear of the fear points, rather than to a distinction, to our weakness, our humanity, that most common of bonds.
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