Mental illness

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How should mental illness be defined? Explain why you think your position is valid and can uphold the separate natures of the mentally ill and the non-mentally ill and why one should be considered ill and the other to be well.

The poll is flawed, but hopefully it is sufficient to get something done.

I chose other. I think mental illness should only be defined by behavior which is of physical danger to one's self or to others. Everything else is a defect. Edit: ...or perhaps a variation.

Well, the reason I wouldn't use that term is because cops and soldiers act in manners that pose a danger to other individuals as do individuals defending themselves, but we usually assume that they are psychologically healthy, and for the first 2 their careers place them in physical danger as well, and in fact there are a number of jobs that put one in physical danger, heck, being a professional football player is physically dangerous but most people would consider a person crazy for NOT doing it if they had the opportunity. Therefore, I wouldn't really use that as an effective criterion, because it seems apparent that there are proper times to act in a manner that threatens others or oneself with the times that are considered improper either being perverse or antisocial(psychopathy is also known as antisocial personality disorder), but perhaps you legitimately dissent from my own views on this.

Definition of mental illness should be up to the individual, something that they decide they are suffering from when they don't feel well and think they need to do something about it, like seek help/a solution.

And even then their behaviour should be treated as anti-social/self-destructive/dangerous/difficult etc, or not, in the same way as everybody's behaviour is.

Mental illness should be recognised as subjective.

While we are talking "shoulds", people committing crimes who argue that they are mentally ill should not be excused prison but be offered exclusion diets, meditation, medication if they ask for it, and other therapies to attempt to change their state while living out the usual sentence.

In fact I think prisons should put all prisoners on sugar, gluten, dairy, and corn exclusion diets automatically.

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Ask yourself the following: Can a person be both sane and evil?

ruveyn

I don't think there can be a clear black and white definition. Mental functioning exists on a spectrum. People have a mixture of positive and negative mental traits that affects their ability to survive and function in society.

To loosely quote a saying "You need an insane mind to live in an insane society".

Exactly. That is why the current supposedly objective definitions are not satisfactory, because they are applied so partially, cherry picking certain behaviours as illness only because they are socially unacceptable, or inconvenient.

If the currently supposed objective criteria were applied impartially to the population, most people could be declared mentally ill. So I propose that it be seen as a subjective matter.

Family and friends etc might say to someone, " You don't seem yourself", suggest solutions etc, and might make allowances for a while on that basis, but it would not constitute a label/diagnosis, just their personal opinion.

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Or mental illness should be defined as any state causing behaviour which is actually and repeatedly destructive to self or other, as Claire333 said.

Which would require a revolutionary shift in social norms/values, because not only are there, as AG pointed out, several careers which involve potential or actual harm to self and/or other, but so many activities central to our society which routinely do so.

Perhaps "destructive to self" should not be a criteria because that could be seen as an infringement of personal liberty, but certainly when it is to others.

Imagine the chaos which would ensue if such a definition was officially accepted and acted on. The same that would follow if everybody suddenly started obeying the New Testament version of the Ten Commandments.

Perhaps the main argument against such a definition of mental illness is the current absence of an effective treatment for it.

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Yes, that is a question worth asking, thanks!

Special diets to reform our criminals? Why not include acupuncture and aromatherapy, as well? Why not turn our prisons into luxury spas?

I believe mental illness can be defined as being unable to function psychologically "properly" or "normally". But that leads to the question of what normal is, I get that some conditions categorized as disorder are related to social and cultural norms, paraphilias can be an example of this.

Psychopathy can be regarded as illness for causing damage to others, seeing people as objects and being unable to empathize, feel compasion and remorse. But that is also tied to social and cultural norms.

Phobias, can make people unable to function as everybody else, being unable to take care of themselves or do things that they would like to do, (eg agoraphobia), that could be said to be mental illness for the impairment to function.

Last edited by greenblue on 04 Feb 2009, 3:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The nervous system has certain basic functional requirements to provide the service the body needs to function properly. A good many mental illnesses are the results of a malfunction of the nervous system. Beyond that there are certain accepted social norms in each society for correct behavior. Different societies have different norms so a person behaving according to the norms of a different society may be deemed defective by those who do not accept the alien norms. Different groups within a society also may not accept the norms of other groups within that society and sanity may be judged on that basis. Many of the behaviors accepted in the USA (I am a US citizen) strike me as outside sane behavior but that is personal judgment. So there are various standards.

Somewhere I have read a statement that insanity is a legal, not a medical term.

Without getting into any sticky issues of how it "should" be defined, mental illness is and has always been defined as behaviors that fall significantly outside social norms and are perceived by others as problematic.

Depends.

Would you consider me sane?

I think that illness is the absence of and a deviation from wellness. Now we need only define mental wellness and we're home and dry.

But it's easy to define wellness! It's the absence of and deviation from illness.