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I think it's really hard to listen to and believe all of this talk about treatment for mental illnesses when we don't even really know what a mental illness is. We talked about the borders between someone's personality quirks versus mental illness, and how the line is often blurred. Who are we to say, unless there is a serious threat of harm to the public, that someone else needs help? While we're finding different types of treatments that can reduce "symptoms" of mental illnesses, it seems almost artificial in a way. I'm inclined to think that when we refer to someone as mentally ill, that there's something beyond the surface, beyond the symptoms, that can never really be cured- that it's a large part of the person affected, that we can maybe numb what we see and make ourselves feel better and feel safer, but not the deepest part of what the person feels.  A professor once asked me why anyone had to be defined as "crazy", or mentally ill. She was suggesting that it was a label we gave to people that we didn't understand. I think that concept is interesting- we find ways to label people in different ways- fat or thin, poor or rich, smart or dumb, crazy and sane, etc. Is mental illness nothing more than a label? However, this is easy for me to say, and I recognize that- when schizophrenics say they "hear voices", and that's why they commit crimes and hurt people, of course, then, who can say that those people don't need some kind of help or need to be kept away from society. It's a hard line to talk about. I want to believe that there are no real "crazy" people in this world- that the people who hurt other people are people who were treated badly or hurt themselves, or had others hurt, and that's why they ended up the way they are- vengeful, but not essentially born "crazy". As for other, perhaps less severe symptoms we call "mental illness", maybe these "symptoms" are our reactions, just the result of living through difficult things, in different combinations, that ultimately we have to find ways to make peace with and get through on our own. Maybe the ultimate treatment is realizing that we're what we have, and that we have to find ways to be okay ourselves.