You're getting ready to venture out into the jungle. What are your thoughts on borderline personality disorder (or NPD, HPD etc)? — csalisbury
If you were a psychiatrist trained in a system where you are taught that concentration camps are normal, and that mentally healthy people are well-adapted to concentration camps, if your career and social status depended on you accepting that concentration camps are normal, would you look at the concentration camp itself as an external factor that could contribute to a person's dysfunction, or would you see the concentration camp as an essential part of reality that the person ought to adapt to? Would you then look for other causes behind the person's dysfunction, such as hypothesized brain defects, and then attempt to treat them by making the person ingest some drugs? If these drugs made the person's behavior appear less dysfunctional in the concentration camp, would you then consider these drugs to be an effective medication to treat the mentally ill? — leo
There has been a push to refer to “mental illnesses” as “brain disorders/malfunctions” instead. — I like sushi
The term "disorder" is used throughout the classification, so as to avoid even greater problems inherent in the use of terms such as "disease" and "illness". "Disorder" is not an exact term, but it is used here to imply the existence of a clinically recognizable set of symptoms or behaviour associated in most cases with distress and with interference with personal functions. Social deviance or conflict alone, without personal dysfunction, should not be included in mental disorder as defined here. — ICD-10, Chapter V, Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders, Clinical descriptions and diagnostic guidelines, p.11.
By whom? — Galuchat
I disagree that that's why it was in quotes. The way one differentiates between mental and physical illness is simply to use the word "mental" or "physical." The reason mental illness was put in quotes was to question whether there really was such a thing. — Hanover
I have sympathy for your personal experiences, but this comment seems to admit to the two things I was arguing for (1) that there is such a thing as mental illness, and (2) psychologists can and do help. Your complaint seems to be that you were burdened with some really bad therapists, but if you're acknowledging there is such a thing as good therapy, then the failure is in systematizing it so that it can be predictably available to everyone. — Hanover
Well, there are definitely things that happens to people that are not good and are not primarily physical. I don't think anyone was denying that. But calling it 'mental illness' is to suggest that it is a certain kind of thing - like a physical illness, only mental. — csalisbury
Thing is, what this demonstrates is that there is no essential difference between mental illness and social stigma. — unenlightened
I can't buy into the argument, though, that Charles Manson was essentially fine and that I can't reliably tell him apart from the average man next door. — Hanover
Then don't make the argument. It's certainly not one that I make. — unenlightened
And no one would be so silly as to try and suggest that. So remove the stuffing from your straw man and put it on the compost heap. — unenlightened
Mine wasn't a straw man, it was a reductio ad absurdum. That is to say, if one holds that there is no essential difference between mental illness and social stigma, one implicitly holds that Charles Manson (or, another example, Jeffrey Dahmer who raped and ate his victims) is not mentally ill but just someone we have chosen to stigmatize. That there might be hard cases where it's hard to distinguish if the person is mentally ill or whether we just find the person's behavior violative of certain societal norms doesn't mean there aren't obvious cases of mental illness. — Hanover
The approval of amphetamine use in children was a huge boon for drug companies, but it doomed children like me to a life of unforeseen problems. — Chisholm
On the one hand it is less empirical, but on the other it is often more empirical since sociological studies can show correlation and cause related to external factors -poverty, sexual abuse, alcoholic parents, pretty much any trauma, sexuality, and more. IOW the brain based physicalism approach actually goes against much extremely well documented research. Pathologizing individual reactions to different kinds of traumatic and long term stress is a good business model, leads to terrible social policies - since the pharma/psychiatric model basically shuts off feedback about society both a the individual and the general levels - and create dependencies since it generally does not resolve resolvable patterns.Note: There has been a push to refer to “mental illnesses” as “brain disorders/malfunctions” instead. The physicalist implication of this - if we stretch it somewhat - could be such that conditions are treated physically with bias toward pharmaceutical medications over more nuanced and less empirical scientific research in the field of psychology. — I like sushi
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