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The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

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Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#71

Post by faeriechangling »

bruce343434 wrote: post #68
faeriechangling wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two extremes don't have the same traits in common whatsoever. One will clearly be unable to communicate. The other will clearly communicate but allude to an internal torment. One will struggle with the activities of daily living. The other will have a family, a full time job, commitments in the community. The two people supposedly lack the same abilities. In truth, Autism simply got tied up with entitlements and…

Entitlements? What are you talking about?

Financial entitlements, such as to various medical services, higher welfare rates, reduced tax rates. (I've heard a psychologist flat out admit to giving people a diagnosis based wholly on the medical services they wanted them to receive, not based on if they actually qualified for the diagnosis)

Accommodations, such as extra time on tests, a more comfortable working environment, more attention and time having school staff attend to them.

Affirmative action schemes.

Exclusion from military drafts.

Extra leeway in social situations in general - in specific ways.

Entitlements. The fact of having a right to something. Privledges. Special treatment. A benefit granted by law or custom.

Now I am not suggesting that being diagnosed with a disability in fact makes your life better and easier on merit of having all these wonderful entitlements. If you talk to disabled people a lot you will notice what a lot of them stress how they don't want special treatment and make a point of independence. There's reason for that. Nevertheless, people often THINK these sort of entitlements would be very helpful for a person, since superficially entitlements seem awesome when you aren't yet thinking of second order effects.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#72

Post by drewcoo »

matrix87 wrote: post #53

It's kind of strange that psychology has this dual role of both giving advice to the sane and managing the insane. The same division was a thing in psychoanalysis too with neurotics vs psychotics Why does it do both? Why do people use it as a go-to source for life advice? People will go to a psychologist for marriage troubles, and they'll also go to a psychologist for psychosis. Seems like a weird place to go to marr…

> It's kind of strange that psychology has this dual role of both giving advice to the [healthy] and managing the [unhealthy]

That's medicine!

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#73

Post by [deleted] »

triumphblr wrote: post #19
deanresin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you understand the systems that manifest a mental illness then you can treat it more directly with medicine, you can test for the mental illness directly with physical sampling. We've already seen this shift from psychology to medicine with the invention of anti-depressants. Less people are seeking counsel from psychologists and instead just getting a prescription from their doctor. While the systems and even anti…

Sure, people are prescribed psychotropic medication for depression. But as more stringent scrutiny has been paid to those, the effect sizes have gone down over time and with more adjustment for publication bias. There's no shortage of demand for psychotherapy services, and head-to-head they are comparable and both in combination fare best. There is no blood test for depression, and if there is, no one uses it in prac…

[deleted]

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#74

Post by GuB-42 »

matrix87 wrote: post #53

It's kind of strange that psychology has this dual role of both giving advice to the sane and managing the insane. The same division was a thing in psychoanalysis too with neurotics vs psychotics Why does it do both? Why do people use it as a go-to source for life advice? People will go to a psychologist for marriage troubles, and they'll also go to a psychologist for psychosis. Seems like a weird place to go to marr…

Not strange.

You can go to the doctor to get advise on how to prepare for a sports event, you can also go to the doctor if you are sick. You can also go to the mechanic to tune the performance of your car and also to replace a broken head gasket. And while computer engineers are not repair technicians, they usually know better than the average person on how to fix a computer.

When you know about a subject, you are generally in a good position to both give advise and deal with problems, though you can specialize in one or the other.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#75

Post by Karellen »

rtb wrote: post #2

EDIT: this was an attempt to get past the paywall, but looks like it's javascript driven, so this archived version breaks after a moment, unless you disable js https://web.archive.org/web/20240324050221/https://www.wired...

Reader mode works fine for me.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#76

Post by gunchly »

swores wrote: post #42
cutoffyrdck wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The anti-trans arguments are the same as the anti-gay arguments from 40 years ago. High suicide numbers in a group of people constantly harassed in the media and in real life doesn't prove that their healthcare caused it. It's just sad bigotry.

[flagged]

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#77

Post by swores »

gunchly wrote: post #76
swores wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-trans arguments are the same as the anti-gay arguments from 40 years ago. High suicide numbers in a group of people constantly harassed in the media and in real life doesn't prove that their healthcare caused it. It's just sad bigotry.

[flagged]

40 years ago you'd have been telling me that seeing homosexual couples hold hands and kiss is unnatural and requires the whole of society to believe an unnatural lie that they aren't just horrible perverts.

In both cases, a minority of people have non-mainstream feelings/understanding of their own gender or sexuality, and therefore wish to do things that affect their own body and either nobody else's (trans) or that only affect other people who feel the same way (gay). In both cases, people have argued that it's immoral, that it's about grooming children, and that the external visibility of being gay/trans - either seeing two people of the same gender holding hands, or kissing, or choosing to live their life together openly, or seeing someone who you once thought was one gender but has asked to be called the other gender and to be allowed to dress and act as culture considers "normal" for that gender.

In both cases, it turns out that actually, no, these gay or trans (or any combination of the LGBTQ - many trans people identify as trans AND gay, it's not a case of gay people choosing to be trans to become straight as I've seen claimed) people roaming the streets doesn't make your life worse, it doesn't trick kids into thinking about sex too early any more than a married straight couple bringing a new baby into the world does, and telling kids that it's OK to be gay, and that it's OK to be trans, doesn't lead to more kids "deciding" to be gay or trans it just leads to more people admitting it rather than staying in the closet. Trans kids and gay kids aren't making a decision, any more than you never made a decision to be your birth gender, nor did you make a decision to be gay or not.

Trans rights are human rights, and while I'm not trans if I decided tomorrow to get surgery to remove my penis and ask everyone to call me "she/her", how exactly does that affect you or anybody else any more than if I continue to have the gay sex I so often enjoy?

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#78

Post by jalapenos »

deanresin wrote: post #6

This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. But a healthy species, evolutionary speaking, requires these outliers. These deviations from the "norm"…

It's definitely a growing profession.

It only came into existence fairly recently, and it continues to innovate and develop new approaches.

Good psychologists can provide enourmous value to their clients, and contrary to what the drug pushers want people to believe, mental illness isn't a physiological problem but a complex problem involving much more than that.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#79

Post by gunchly »

swores wrote: post #77
gunchly wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

40 years ago you'd have been telling me that seeing homosexual couples hold hands and kiss is unnatural and requires the whole of society to believe an unnatural lie that they aren't just horrible perverts. In both cases, a minority of people have non-mainstream feelings/understanding of their own gender or sexuality, and therefore wish to do things that affect their own body and either nobody else's (trans) or that…

[flagged]

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#80

Post by swores »

gunchly wrote: post #79
swores wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40 years ago you'd have been telling me that seeing homosexual couples hold hands and kiss is unnatural and requires the whole of society to believe an unnatural lie that they aren't just horrible perverts. In both cases, a minority of people have non-mainstream feelings/understanding of their own gender or sexuality, and therefore wish to do things that affect their own body and either nobody else's (trans) or that…

[flagged]

> People have been fired from their jobs, harassed by trans activists

You could say the exact same thing about people being fired for racism or homophobia and being "harassed" (I wouldn't use that word for fighting bigotry, personally) for being racist or homophobic. Is that evidence that racism should be allowed everywhere?

> The reason was that heterosexual males (who called themselves women) had attended previous such events, despite lesbian women of course not being interested in them, and were being creepy.

There is literally no evidence of this being a common thing, while there is quite a bit of evidence of nutty anti-trans people accusing cis women of being trans because they "looked manly", even though they were just women born looking like that. Meanwhile, the idea that male sex offenders would rather pretend to be female to gain access to private spaces (where if they start doing anything creepy, they can be kicked out by the majority regardless of whether the majority can tell what their birth gender is or not) as opposed to doing what actual sexual abusers do, which is using strength and or manipulation in one on one situations, not joining women-only groups for the opportunity.

It's all just fear mongering lies by a minority of bigots who hate gays just as much as trans people, which are then believed by another minority of people who believe the bigots really do have women's interests at heart. Statistics don't show that people who claim to be trans are more likely than people who don't to sexually offend, and in fact the vast majority of sexual offenses are committed by straight, cis men who aren't trans nor are pretending to be trans. And that fear of "men" can translate into fear of women who were born as men, even though statistically they're less likely to be sexual abusers.

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