There is a very radical idea that around 3 thousand years ago, all people were schizophrenics. This idea is based on the analysis of manuscripts of different cultures: people in completely different parts of the world had absolutely no connection but behaved in similar ways — they heard voices and they followed orders thinking it was their gods or muses talking to them. Today, mental health problems have become a synonym for a disability, but in fact, people who have these problems can have normal lives among relatively healthy people. You might even be friends with people who have mental health issues and not even know it.

Bright Side offers you the chance to imagine being inside the minds of people with different psychological problems and understand what it means to have a mental illness. If you ever notice similar behavior among the people you know, you’ll be aware of the situations where you need to ask for help and potentially save someone’s life.

“If you don’t turn that shampoo bottle to face away from you, your mother will die in her sleep tonight and it will be your fault.”

“Turn the lights on and off 10 times or you’ll vomit tonight.” (I also have a phobia of vomiting.)

And “If you don’t move that knife to a certain area of the table a member of your family will knock it, get stabbed, and die, and it’ll be your fault.”

Every single mundane activity is suddenly a life or death situation, and you have to get it exactly right. Oh and if you don’t get it right the first time, you just repeat it over and over again until you do. So yes, you too could end up touching that laptop charger plug 80 times before you can move on with your day. Quora

It became very prevalent in my junior year of high school and then it just snowballed through college. In February of 2014, my freshman year of college, my life changed when I tried to take my own life through suicide. Because my life had become a nightmare and by this time, I had started hallucinating. I started seeing, hearing, and feeling things that weren’t there. Everywhere that I went, I was followed around by a clown that looked very similar to the Stephen King adaptation of “It.” Everywhere that I went, he would be giggling, taunting me, poking me, and sometimes even biting me. But it started becoming unbearable when I started hallucinating about this girl. She looked sort of like the girl in the movie “The Ring.” The thing with her was she was able to continue conversations with herself, and would know exactly what to say and when to say it to chip away at my insecurities. But the worst was, she would also carry a knife around with her and she would stab me, sometimes in the face. This made taking tests, quizzes, and doing homework in general extremely difficult to nearly impossible when I was in college. I’m just someone who cannot turn off my nightmares, even when I’m awake. It took me 8 months. 8 months after my suicide attempt I finally got the treatment that I needed. I didn’t even have the diagnosis of schizophrenia and because of that, what kept me from getting help were conversations like these. I remember very distinctively around that time being on the phone with my mother. I would tell my mom, “Mom I’m sick, I’m seeing things that aren’t there, I need medicine, I need to talk to a doctor.” Her response? “No, no, no, no. You can’t tell anyone about this. This can’t be on our medical history.” What I say to that now is “Don’t let anyone convince you to not get medical help. It’s not worth it! It is your choice and it is also your right.” Getting medical help was the best decision that I have ever made. I opened up about my schizophrenia through a blog, and I posted all my blog posts on Facebook. And I was amazed by how much support there was out there. I also realized that there are so many other people just like me. I was actually amazed! A few of my friends opened up to me that they had schizophrenia. Now I am dedicated to being a mental health advocate. I have schizophrenia and I am not a monster. TED

I do have OCD, but don’t tell anybody. I’m afraid that they will see me as an outcast or something similar and I feel that I can get through this by myself.

Anyway, here’s how I see it:

Every action that you do needs a counteraction. For example, if you take a red M&M with your right hand, then get one with your left. That’s RL (right, left). But that isn’t balanced because it has to be symmetrical. So I follow it up with LR to make RLLR. Symmetrical, but R starts and ends. It needs its counteractions, LRRL, to complete it. I do that, come to RLLRLRRL, which seems alright but is not symmetrical. So I repeat the process, again and again, until I give up on myself and try to blank the situation out of my mind because it isn’t perfect. Here’s another situation: Typing this right now, all the left keys are typed with my left forefinger, and the right keys with my right forefinger. The delete is my right ring finger and shift my left ring finger, all balanced, all perfect. However, I use both thumbs one at a time to hit the space bar. RL, then LR and LRRL, etc. on and on until I give up. Every. Single. Time. Quora

Have you ever noticed similar behavior among the people you know? Do you think that now you are more ready for a situation like this?

Illustrated by Daniil Shubin for BrightSide.me