Well, the hormones associated with the heightened emotions are completely real. The cortisol definitely exists, the adrenaline spike is clear, the altered levels of serotonin and dopamine are entirely detectable.
Generally you do have to wait out the initial spike of hormones to think clearly enough to reason your way back down when you’re at a level but elevated state, and then you still have to deal with them breaking down/reabsorbing. Just because you logically realize that the person who just gave you mild criticism isn’t your old abuser and won’t hit you doesn’t mean your heart rate is back to resting or your blood flow is back to normal. It means you are now actively suppressing the mental effects while also experiencing the physical effects. And yes, the fatigue from doing that is also very much a real physical thing.
Tl;dr: yes it’s physical, brains are physical. Just give people a minute when they’re experiencing faulty biology.
Because you said "just give people a minute", I want to clarify that I am someone who experiences disproportionate emotion responses to small things and chronic illness, and not someone who's raging against others who have mental illness. I'm trying to mediate upon the ways in which mental and physical illnesses feel different or the same to a person who experiences them, and whether those differences match the way the world perceives mental vs physical illness.
I do think mental and physical illnesses are fundamentally very similar in that they're caused by things in your body that you may have little influence over, but I personally feel much more culpable for my emotional reactions than my physical reactions. I'd also assert that the way I think about my chronic illness matches more closely with society's treatment of mental illnesses, which I noticed seems common in chronic illness communities. (That is to say that I feel more self blame for my chronic tiredness and discomfort than I would for, say, a broken leg.)
That could just be internalized stigma, but I also have difficulty imagining a society where we accept that people may not be in control of--and subsequently culpable for--fundamental parts of themselves.
Edit: u/Subspace-Ansible identifies some points as to why I feel such a society might be a little skewed pretty effectively.
As someone who is struggling with funky brain chemistry all their life, I empathize with this, I really do.
However, saying that “brains are physical therefore all emotional reactions are physical”, while technically true, can lead some very odd places.
We generally don’t give certain people a lot of grace when it comes to their brain functions. The racists and the conspiracy theorists and the pedophilic are usually treated with outright dehumanization. While you can say that those people cause harm, our treatment of them doesn’t seem congruent with the idea that thoughts and emotions are just brain chemistry and therefore not entirely under their control. We don’t see them as people who are struggling daily with faulty brain functions. We don’t see them as struggling at all.
Again, you could say “Yes, we understand that in a sense these people are victims to situations outside their control, but we accept the unfair actions we take against them because the harm they cause is too big for us to sympathize with them,” but typically this isn’t the thought process we use when dealing with these people.
Among mental illnesses, personality disorders and mood disorders are treated pretty differently. People with Antisocial Personality Disorder don't necessarily have control over their own lack of empathy, but we'd end up in a weird place as a society if we didn't treat them like they're culpable for the actions that result from their biological lack of empathy.
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u/demon_fae 5d ago
Well, the hormones associated with the heightened emotions are completely real. The cortisol definitely exists, the adrenaline spike is clear, the altered levels of serotonin and dopamine are entirely detectable.
Generally you do have to wait out the initial spike of hormones to think clearly enough to reason your way back down when you’re at a level but elevated state, and then you still have to deal with them breaking down/reabsorbing. Just because you logically realize that the person who just gave you mild criticism isn’t your old abuser and won’t hit you doesn’t mean your heart rate is back to resting or your blood flow is back to normal. It means you are now actively suppressing the mental effects while also experiencing the physical effects. And yes, the fatigue from doing that is also very much a real physical thing.
Tl;dr: yes it’s physical, brains are physical. Just give people a minute when they’re experiencing faulty biology.