@sam Hain – I’ve always thought that most of us were a little “funny.” And I don’t believe it always needs to be medicated. I think that there’s a baseline of normal for everybody and that those baselines are all different. If your brain works a little differently, it’s still your brain. You must learn to work with it. You must find the good parts about your hypomania or your ADHD or whatever and try to overcome the problems that come along with it. Not everything requires a medication. One of my kids was diagnosed with all sorts of things they wanted to medicate. I dug in my heels and refused. She ended up getting all sorts of scholarships and finished school early. She just had to learn to work with the brain she had.
This, of course, is not to say that there aren’t some people who require medication. I know that there definitely are people who cannot function in society without it.
You make a fantastic point that a great deal of the problems are not actually mental illnesses, but situational issues that could be changed and improved upon. But I guess there’s just no motivation for most people. It seems that it’s more celebrated to be a “victim of mental illness” than it is to overcome a bad situation and become successful.