We know. To most human beings on this planet, being alive is a smorgasbord of emotions and events – and only the least of it is ever truly peachy. Life on Earth isn’t perfect, or constantly great: it’s hard, it’s tough, it’s about taking punches, dodging kicks and doling out some of your own frustrations and determinism.
We live in an era where some people have the privilege to try and live a perfectly harmonic life, but to most of us, harmony is a far cry from the struggles we go through to make ends meet and live up to our responsibilities, especially when faced with the difficulties of impairment and mental disorder.
But at the same time, that’s the true raw beauty of life. No one should ever come up to you and tell you that your life stinks because it’s hard – or that life is terrible because of a few bad apples. Life is life. Life is amazing, it’s vibrant, it’s expressive, it’s rich, it’s not just a rollercoaster of emotions but an aquatic thrashing – instead of being strapped to a contraption and sent up and down a set track, life throws you into the deep end of the stormy Pacific and watches you ragdoll between violently crashing waves and merciful gasps of cold, crisp ocean air, with brief respites on sunny golden shores.
It’s a message that will resonate with most people, but for you – for our patients with mental diagnoses – embracing life can be tougher to do. We all have individual challenges laid out before us, and everyone’s experience of life is different, unique, and incomparable. But we here truly believe that so long as you’re alive, so long as you’re living, there’s a way for you to overcome the negativity and the limitations of whatever your condition may be, and strike a balance between struggle and enjoyment that will undoubtedly confirm to you that life is beautiful.
It’s hard work, and it begins with a commitment to yourself and your road to getting better. We here at Vantage Point offer treatment options for a large variety of mental disorders and diagnoses, from mood disorders to phobias, personality disorders, depression, anxiety, and more.
Whatever your condition is, it’s ultimately a unique case – we’ve been in the business long enough to know that there’s always something out there we’ve never seen before, and every case requires a careful, thought-out approach, no matter how “textbook” it might appear. That is why we advocate working together with you to help you not only understand your condition and how we’ve come to treat other patients with the same diagnosis, but understand your very own case, which requires your own judgment and your own decisions to ultimately get to that point where you can be in balance, totally functioning regardless of what your impairments may be.
IT’S COMPLICATED
While we at Vantage Point make it a point to leave the idea of religion and a higher power up to you, it’s important to us that no one truly knows what awaits us after our end. We believe it’s important to fully embrace that which we’re sure to have – a life on this Earth.
Life isn’t very structured, planned or explained. It’s one big unknown, a sea of possibilities and coincidences and events and connections, one fragment of a human experience within the social context of human history, laid bare over the surface of a planet that has existed for a long time before us, and will most likely continue to exist without us.
That can be very scary. But in a way, it wouldn’t be life if it weren’t so damn scary. It’s a journey, a full, extensive, wonderful journey, and pain and suffering and struggle is a part of life. It frames those moments of pure bliss and joy, moments where every second of your existence is completely worth it, moments where it doesn’t matter how bad things are or how bad they’ve gotten, they take you out of your worries and out of the past, and throw you into that moment, that blissful piece of time where you can just be happy.
But for people with severe impairments – mental conditions that can act as powerful traps of the mind, like schizoaffective disorders – seeing that silver lining, that happiness, can be hard. Life is hard as it is, but mental disorders only serve to amplify the difficulty.
We at Vantage Point want to make sure that you still get to see and experience the joys of life, no matter what your condition is. There’s something to be said for people with serious mental disorders: you have plenty of reason to enjoy life much more than most people could, seeing the bliss in what many might take for granted.
Happiness is a state of mind and all that, but when your mind is under attack, even the little things can be hard to appreciate. We offer intensive treatment options, from medication to group therapy and alternative treatments like brainspotting and meditation to help you break out of even the most oppressive mental diagnoses, and come to see the unknown not as something to fear, but as something to cherish – the excitement of always having the opportunity to make the best of things and improve your life can be exhilarating, and we’ll help you get there.