51–60 of 62 posts
Perhaps something similar applies to the personality disorders. However those disorders tend to overlap; I can't imagine the geometry that might to represent it.
This is a really dangerous and misleading way to look at bipolar. The disease proper of bipolar disorder is progressive and degenerative. This progression is accompanied by structural changes in the brain [1] as well as biological changes in the body [2]. If someone had the syndromes of manic or depressed symptoms in response to a medication, that does not prove either way that the person actually has the progressive…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for that! I hadn't seen it before. I'm a little nervous about the idea of coming to conclusions about individual outcomes based on national surveys of self-reported diagnoses. It seems like there are vast opportunities for outside factors to mislead attempts at analysis. For example, the proportion of people who were misdiagnosed to start with; the increased openness over time when it comes to accepting or…
I think a large part of the problem lies in the difficulty of accurate diagnosis, coupled with people's personal experiences with misdiagnosis. I've been misdiagnosed as bipolar in the past, and the medication regime I was put on lead to schizoid delusions and incredibly unstable emotional state that only resolved once I stopped taking the medication (under the monitoring of the psychiatrist who initially prescribed…
I've had multiple friends with diagnosed bipolar disorder, and harrowing and heartbreaking stories of how this affected their lives well into their twenties or even early thirties.
All of them have found ways to 'manage' their condition, without medication, through a combination of lifestyle changes, (odd) environments, and, perhaps most importantly, a group of friends who can deal with it or provide support in various ways. Some of them have been on medication for periods, and much prefer their current, imperfect situation.
By no means would I advocate avoiding medication, and I'm absolutely not saying that this can work for everyone. I'm also not arguing that their lives are just peachy now. It's a serious disorder.
And I do agree that people making statements like "we're all a little bipolar/autistic/borderline/etc." are often not helping and often actively harming those who are any of that more than 'a little'.
I've been diagnosed with autism and it's maddening how often, when I open up about it, people will say stuff like "well isn't that 'just' " or "everyone has that". At this point I usually don't even bother trying to explain that there's a difference between, say, being punctual and curmudgeonly about it, and having a borderline-meltdown when plans change.
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Mental Illness as defined by the DSM as not thriving. You can have the symptoms of a disorder, but if you are thriving then you do not have the disorder. >It can seriously mess someone's life up. Treatment to try fix someone who is not thriving, is precisely because someone's life is already messed up. Yes treatment may make it worse, but it often makes it better and there are treatment algorithms where we use best p…
> Mental Illness as defined by the DSM as not thriving Isn’t that a two-system measure? The person. And their society. A gay man in Tehran won’t thrive, but the solution isn’t medicating him into submission.
> Definition of mental disorder
> A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above.
It's weird that we consider mental illness to be a disease, in my opinion -- none of the drugs have been linked to physical/chemical shortages in the brain or the like. We're able to mask symptoms but have absolutely no proof about underlying reasons, and so we create names of things and put it in the same classification of a medical disease... but that's very different. Bipolar cannot be identified by any physical m…
I remember talking to a doctor and saying pretty much the same thing.
He looked at me, chuckled, and told me that I have no idea how much there is about so many 'medical diseases' that doctors don't know the 'underlying reason' for, and how many of the typical treatments are really just a "hey it seems to work without (too many) negative side effects, but we don't know why. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯."
It's weird that we consider mental illness to be a disease, in my opinion -- none of the drugs have been linked to physical/chemical shortages in the brain or the like. We're able to mask symptoms but have absolutely no proof about underlying reasons, and so we create names of things and put it in the same classification of a medical disease... but that's very different. Bipolar cannot be identified by any physical m…
> I am very hesitant to use this when a drug can be prescribed (with knowing bad side effects) can be applied. It can seriously mess someone's life up. This is why it's so important to understand that psychiatric treatment must be a collaborative process. The prescribing physician is only making decisions with the consent of the patient, because the patient is the one who has to choose to actually take the medication…
This is in The Netherlands, where AFAIK we're not particularly known for overprescribing medication, and our health care provides caregivers with enough funds to not go for the 'easy' pill solution right away. I imagine it's quite a bit more an acute risk in the US.
It's weird that we consider mental illness to be a disease, in my opinion -- none of the drugs have been linked to physical/chemical shortages in the brain or the like. We're able to mask symptoms but have absolutely no proof about underlying reasons, and so we create names of things and put it in the same classification of a medical disease... but that's very different. Bipolar cannot be identified by any physical m…
I'd personally believe there are physical differences even if we can't see them yet, but there's no proof until we do see them one day. It depends if you subscribe to dualism or not I suppose. Until then we are finding fire through smoke. A spectrum will be based on a society so over time "normal" can shift. I wonder how many times that has happened? I've heard the USA as a population is typically very extroverted co…
I've always thought about mental illness in this context - we define it as illness because of negative consequences, but it's really just the deviation from a norm. I think Elon Musk is the best example of this - even ignoring some of his childish Twitter behavior, the guy's brain is waaaaaaaaay far off from the normal human brain. He thought he could start an electric car company from scratch and be successful. That…
I'm a huge DFW fan, but I'd hesitate to use him as an example, for various reasons.
First off, from what I understand he stabilized on particular meds but then quit them because he felt he'd be more creative without. Instead of being more creative, he slid back into depression and the medication didn't work anymore (apparently that's a thing? I'm not too familiar with anti-depressants).
While I won't make any judgment as an outsider, it's not unreasonable to argue that he made a really bad gamble. It's quite possible that the it wasn't the medication that kept him from producing his next great work, but rather just the difficulty of what he was trying to do after Infinite Jest. Reading about it, it reminded me of various artists who 'jumped off the wagon' to return to previous glory, only to rediscover what being off the wagon really meant.
Furthermore, his struggles with depression and suicidal ideation, as well as drawing his self-worth from his work seemed to be a running thread in his life.
That said, his brain clearly wasn't average and I'm sure it played a positive role in his work. I'm just arguing against the common 'trope' that to do his work he had to be 'mentally ill'. I don't know either way, I just hold hope that these two don't need to be mutually exclusive.
It's weird that we consider mental illness to be a disease, in my opinion -- none of the drugs have been linked to physical/chemical shortages in the brain or the like. We're able to mask symptoms but have absolutely no proof about underlying reasons, and so we create names of things and put it in the same classification of a medical disease... but that's very different. Bipolar cannot be identified by any physical m…
That's true for a ridiculously large amount of non mental illness diseases, too. In fact, I'd say the majority of non-microbial/cancerous diseases fall into this category. Off the top of my head, one example would be Alzheimer's, where recently what was thought to be the "underlying reason" for Alzheimer's (amyloid plaques) have been proven to be a later symptom, not the actual cause. [1]
Most autoimmune diseases also have similar problems. Turns out it's hard to figure out how the human body works.
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The DSM is based off the "top" Psychiatrists at the time voting on the illnesses (literally), without scientific backing. Treatment's don't fix anything, they might lessen one issue and often give a host of other problems that are often more severe. I think more studying of iatrogenics is in order and more data about what "making it better" means -- as often the patient and doctor have different meanings. Again, beca…
> The DSM is based off the "top" Psychiatrists at the time voting on the illnesses (literally), without scientific backing. What, precisely, would provide scientific backing here, if a vote by professional scientists doesn't count? A vote by academics? A committee of academics, appointed by a prior generation? A team at Harvard, because Harvard is the oldest? A committee appointed by the government?