Is Your Mental Illness Like Catching a Virus?

Your mental illness is not like catching a virus in the sense of now you have it and now you don't. It exists along a blended continuum consisting of several behavior and experiential dimensions. Some things drive us to paranoia, others don't; with other people it's different. The causes are often hidden from us and just blend into our personality overtime. And again, are not necessarily even considered pathological until they go past certain thresholds and cause breakdowns.