Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
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Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#2Well yes. But that shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone, humanity isn't made of absolutes or boxes or borders.
A spectrum you can be 'on', as the word suggests, is just a range or a degree within a classification so we have a common concept when communicating about things. If we had to develop a new word for every unique combination of attributes it would become very hard to talk about things.
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#3I'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's... crazy. And yet, because he's been successful at it, we don't label him as mentally ill.
The really interesting cases are people like artists - David Foster Wallace committed suicide because of his depression, but only after creating one of the great works of American literature. We label him as mentally ill for his depression, but we don't really have a label for the positive side of the fact that his brain was far from an average brain.
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#4I'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 would suggest a meaningful interpretation of the word normal is kind of like 'a reliably orthogonal measurement of the thing being reacted to'.
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#5I'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…
> He thought he could start an electric car company from scratch
Except he didn't. He invested in one that was already started with several employees, and had himself given founder status by fiat as part of the deal.
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#6It'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 means. Different doctors will tell you different things. I agree that gradient approaches are useful in most contexts, but 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.
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#7I'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…
From what I have heard, Musk bought the electric car company and not built it with his bare hands in his garage in college. But to your point, everyone is on the spectrum sure.
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#8Not only are we all somewhere on a spectrum, we’re on a linear combination of different spectra.
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#9I'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 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's... crazy.
Tons of people have started successful mega-companies from scratch. What's crazy, as opposed to ambitious and with slim chances of success due to practical reasons, about it?
Re: Aren't we all somewhere on the spectrum of disease?
#10There is a good video done by Philosophy Tube about this subject (it also talks about Jordan Peterson.)
Some words are inherently subjective, like we can't define what "healthy" is without using so many words that are beyond description. (About 10 minutes in this metaphor appears, when Philosophy Tube references Richard Boyd.)