“It’s all in your head.”
Well — yes, it is.
That’s kind of what mental illness is about.
Brain scans have shown people with borderline personality disorder have amygdalas that are noticeably smaller than the general population, and may even have undergone atrophy. This means when people with BPD experience an emotion, they do so more intensely than the general population, and the ‘cooling down’ period takes much longer.
The hippocampus is in a state of continuous hyperarousal. Uncoordinated and dysfunctional, it consistently misinterprets threats, and relays faulty messages back to the amygdala.
Kevin Redmayne, Medium
I need to do more research on this, as Medium is not one of my regular resources.
But isn’t all mental illness quite literally an illness of the brain?