Mental illness

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mm I was going to mention Sociopaths.

If you assert that there is no right/wrong, no good/evil, then you must surely enjoy the company of sociopaths?

It's a label yeah, mental illness, but the main thing they're interested in labelling, and the only one that gets any 'support' is people who are a danger to themselves or others.

I also find it a useful categorisation.

The Palestinian's are being attacked because the thugs they elected to office are firing rockets at Israeli towns. Recall that Hamas was -elected- to power.

If thine enemy smite thee on thy cheek, decapitate him and urinate down his neck.

ruveyn.

A person who is both sane and evil is fully cognizant of the evil they do. As far as I know, Orwell, you have committed no evil.

mental illness is not a disease. The way it is classified here in the UK is a mental condition that cause you to differ from the 'normal' stereotype. Depression and schizophrenia are big mental conditions.

Mental illness refers to a disease or defect of the mind, does it not?

It can be caused by a chemical imbalance or damage to some area of the brain.

Illness is very clearly a synonym of "disease", so I would think that a mental illness would be the same as a mental disease, just looking at the language.

Those are rare, and they are a greater risk to be around than the average person.

It might be my microbiologist biases coming in here, but I normally think of "disease" as being something transmissible and infectious, and also caused by some pathogen.

Your biases I think:

dis-ease (di-zez)n. 1. A pathological condition of a part, an organ, or a system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms.

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Excerpted from American Heritage Talking Dictionary
Copyright © 1997 The Learning Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

You seem a reasonable and reasonably informed person. You should look into the situation a bit more deeply and minimize your prejudices.

Ruveyn, your own prejudices could use some minimizing.

I have to agree on this point, because you have given a good example of where removing or changing the circumstances would put an end to the symptoms. This is often the approach used in medical health. A person who has a benign tumor is not really ill. Their body is just suffering a natural response to the expanding tumor. Remove the tumor and the pain is gone. This all makes very good sense in medical health, because simply treating the symptom (pain) would not be effective.

In the mental health field, it is not always so easy to remove or change the circumstances causing the symptoms. Someone with suacidal depression due to a chemical imbalance could be helped by changing the circumstances which are causing the symptoms: removing the imbalance of chemicals in the brain, but someone suffering suacidal depression due to the loss of a child is a different story. Are they both ill? I would say yes because they pose a danger to themselves. They would likely receive similar pharmaceutical treatment with similar results, although one is treated for their circumstance and the other for their symptoms.

I expected you to say something like that, but I still like to hear it anyway. I like the way you think because you make me think twice about what I think. You have a way of talking in circles that makes everthing humans think appear to be senseless, yet somehow you manage to make so much sense.

Well, the issue is that I wouldn't judge illness by outcomes, which is part of the reason I wouldn't label all suicides as wrong. If we deem that suicide is wrong, then isn't this akin to saying that the conviction to die for a cause is a mental disturbance? Perhaps you can accept this, or perhaps a number of other people can accept that, but I would sooner call crazy a person who through some mental condition could never muster the energy to be a threat to himself or others, than one who was.


Hmm... interesting. Yeah, well, everything humans think is senseless. I mean, I suppose you can argue that there is an evolutionary sense to it, but since when has evolutionary motive mattered? I mean, very few people explicitly justify themselves with the thought "must make sure genetic line prospers", and for some people we see a difference from their actions and an implicit goal of that.

I would have to agree with you on these two points. Every situation is its own. I may be having a moment of mental illness. I have read this statement a few times but cannot seem to understand what it means. Would you mind rephrasing?

Basically the idea is that a person too inert to ever possibly be a threat is crazier than a person who actually could become a threat or is one.

To illustrate this position, I will quote John Stuart Mill



The idea I am putting forward is along the same lines as that one, just with "violence towards self or others" in the place of war. I view the phenomenon as human, sometimes negative, but it is hard to conceive of a person I would consider alright if their range of possible behavior couldn't include violent behavior.

That makes sense, although I have doubts if such a person exists unless they are somehow incapacitated, which would not necessarily be mental illness.