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The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

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Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#91

Post by machinawhite »

faeriechangling wrote: post #71
bruce343434 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Financial entitlements

???

> various medical services

I pay hundreds of euros each month for health insurance I expect something in return

> higher welfare rates

Anecdotally none of my neurodivergent friends are on welfare. But I imagine people with more severe types of autism cannot really function in a work environment. That's why it qualifies as a disability.

> Accommodations, such as extra time on tests

Never got it

> a more comfortable working environment

Ahahahahahaha

> more attention and time having school staff attend to them

You're tripping

> Affirmative action schemes.

???

> Exclusion from military drafts.

I don't know anything about military

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

You spelled extra bullying wrong

> second order effects

What the fuck are you even yapping about?

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#92

Post by crtified »

faeriechangling wrote: post #66
veltas wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But autism isn't defined by intelligence or age. You might as well say 'isn't alcoholism such a broad definition, when everyone from world leaders to young people to a perennial loner 80+ year old finally discovering that their traits are shared with many others.

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…

I'm dismayed at your large-scale, arbitrary diagnosis of fraud.

It is not at all the intent of my original comments, in which I only meant to imply that autism is currently a common term for a number of potentially separable conditions. In the sense that a 'spectrum' is quite literally 'a diverse set'.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#93

Post by bitwize »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #83
bitwize wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mental illness" alone is not a defense. The defense is insanity , which term in law means that your mental condition was such that you had no way of knowing what you did was wrong. If you're schizophrenic, say, and you kill someone, but you are compos mentis enough to understand that you killed a person and that is wrong, you don't get to plead insanity. If, on the other hand, you were under the delusion that you we…

I think a lot of people have a hysterically warped perspective on the insanity defense because of American legal/police media. People don't understand how near impossible it is to deploy successfully in trial, in the US.

Indeed. As I understand it (ianal), insanity is a positive defense, meaning that you have to prove to the judge/jury in court that you were insane, i.e., that you were functionally incapable of distinguishing right from wrong at the moment you committed the crime. This is because a mens rea, or guilty mind, is necessary to establish guilt and thus criminal culpability, in addition to the actus reus or the criminal deed itself; you have to be in a state where you know, or could/should have known, not to do what you did. Proving a negative, especially when it comes to this, is extremely difficult. You will have to undergo an extensive psychiatric evaluation by a psychiatrist and they have to come to the very strong conclusion that you were well and truly out of your mind at the time of the commission of the crime. Otherwise, just the evidence that you did the crime is enough to establish guilt.

Oh, and if you somehow successfully plead insanity, you will spend quite possibly the rest of your life in a mental institution instead of prison, which isn't much better.

And yes, it's good to remember that police procedurals are to criminal justice what Hackers (1995) is to hacking: a lot of stuff is distorted to make good cinema/television. In the UK, judges on cop shows use gavels (that is strictly an American custom); how can we expect them to get the details of rare events like an insanity defense right?

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#94

Post by euroclear »

emptyfile wrote: post #70
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…

>Autism simply got tied up with entitlements and the diagnosis has been grossly abused as a lever to get access to said entitlements I just love when narrowminded Americans (I would wager 1000$ that the poster is from that country) assume the thing that happens in their city/state/country is a worldwide phenomenon with the rest of us 8 billion people. And even better writing in this snarky obfuscating style so the re…

>I would wager 1000$ that the poster is from that country

According to their comments, they are Canadian. If you'd still like to wager, I'll happily collect the money.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#95

Post by matrix87 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #74
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 ge…

> And while computer engineers are not repair technicians, they usually know better than the average person on how to fix a computer.

Computers are a relatively narrow domain.

How broad do you have to make the subject in order to fit life advice and treating the insane? In what way is the one applicable to the other?

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#96

Post by da39a3ee » 

  No escape from the mass mind rape
  Play it again Jack and then rewind the tape
  And then play it again and again and again
  Until your mind is locked in
  Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya
  Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya
  They say, "Jump" and you say, "How high?"
  You brain-dead, you got a fuckin' bullet in your head

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#97

Post by GuB-42 »

matrix87 wrote: post #95
GuB-42 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

> And while computer engineers are not repair technicians, they usually know better than the average person on how to fix a computer. Computers are a relatively narrow domain. How broad do you have to make the subject in order to fit life advice and treating the insane? In what way is the one applicable to the other?

We are all a little bit insane. "Life advice" is just mild treatment for the mildly insane.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#98

Post by Myrmornis »

raincom wrote: post #33

Even today, we don’t have a definition of “species”, a definition acceptable to biologists working in this domain. What is needed is a theory, and further development of that theory. Those who quibble about definitions should develop theories and test them, amend them, replace them. All these activities help understand the phenomenon in the question. When people engage in definitional disputes, it shows that intuitio…

Incidentally, the species debate is fairly simply summarized / resolved, at least for typical sexual organisms: There is nothing whatsoever in first-principles evolutionary biology that says that these can always be partitioned into discrete categories that one might call "species". What evolutionary biology says is

  1. When two populations overlap in space and time and have the opportunity to interbreed, they might do so.
  2. In the absence of interbreeding, populations evolve, divergently w.r.t. most markers other than the occasional selection-mediated convergence.
So, divergence might be the result of lack of opportunity to interbreed (this allows genetic and phenotypic diversity to accrue, but does not itself represent a biologically real division), or it might be the result of inability to interbreed (biologically meaningful, but impossible to discern if opportunity to interbreed is absent). And that's it, for sexual organisms that is the gist. In general there's nothing to say that our systems of related populations spread through space and time can always be divided into "species". On the other hand any cursory look around a single locality shows that many discrete biological entities do exist; there's nothing wrong with giving them the name "species" as long as we acknowledge that for closely related allopatric populations the question of whether they are the same "species" is not defined.

There are various problems. One is that some humans are attached to the idea that entities exist for which the word "species" is apt; or put another way they are convinced that "species" must mean _something_ and they ask what (e.g. because they like their neatly divided up bird lists).

Another is that if scientists go around saying "animals can't always be divided into things which it makes sense to call 'species'" then it significantly weakens certain arguments for the protection of populations in conservation biology / legal contexts, since these invariably name the species-level taxa they are intended to protect. Since the modern trend is towards splitting subspecies (i.e. geographical races) into species (as opposed to lumping), many conservation initiatives are based on protecting "species" for which the species designation is subjective. That doesn't mean they are flawed of course -- they are nearly always protecting valuable ecosystems. It's just that as we split geographical races, we (by definition) create rarer and more vulnerable taxa, and so conservation initiatives arise around these.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#99

Post by matrix87 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #97
matrix87 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And while computer engineers are not repair technicians, they usually know better than the average person on how to fix a computer. Computers are a relatively narrow domain. How broad do you have to make the subject in order to fit life advice and treating the insane? In what way is the one applicable to the other?

We are all a little bit insane. "Life advice" is just mild treatment for the mildly insane.

Well in theory yes, but legally no

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#100

Post by fakeart »

Unlisted6446 wrote: post #31
fakeart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How familiar are you with factor analysis? I worry that because the best mathematical minds are often not attracted to psychology as a field, that psychologists as a group are somewhat blind to implications of statistical choices and assumptions that they inherit or make.

What would you like to say about factor analysis? Lay it on me

It’s poorly understood by many who use the DSM, and without understanding how arbitrary and or subjective it can be it may be difficult to avoid “overfitting” in the clinical setting.
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