When you are running a temperature, you tell people, “I am having a temperature” or “I am having fever”. You are not going to say, “I am a fever” or “I am asthma”. You are going to distinguish between yourself and the condition you have. Same way if in an accident your dad breaks a bone, you are going to say, “My dad has a fracture”. You are not going to say, “My dad is fractured” For all physical illnesses we distinguish the person from the disease.condition that they are having or going through. We don’t merge one into another and make the whole person sick. We acknowledge the sickness/condition is affecting part of their body and it is not whole body and it is not the person themselves.
Unfortunately when it comes to mental conditions and mental illnesses we rarely hear that the person is having a condition, we make it the person’s whole personality.
When we say, “I am depressed” and not “I am having depression” there is a whole lot of difference. In the first case we make it seem like the whole person is affected and they are depressed from top to toe, 24 hours and in every place. This is far from reality. A person having depression can still be functional for a large part of their lives. They could get depressed part of the day, in bouts and in certain situations but it is not the whole person all the time and in all the palaces. By saying, “I am depressed” or “She is bi-polar” we imply the whole personality is just that and nothing else.
By shifting the label from, “I am..” to “I have…” we make it a part of the person, we make it temporary (like a physical condition) and we make it easier to handle. "I have depression", "I have anxiety", "I have bi-polar symptoms" is vastly different then saying, "I am..." Words are very powerful and they have a huge effect on the person. By saying they are having a condition instead of they are the condition we create hope in the person to seek help and know they can be helped and to a great extent their lives can return to normal (like healing from a fracture) or that they can learn to cope with living with it (like diabetes) and don’t have to be condemned to an eternal hell because they have become the condition.
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