A new mental illness? Or a very old one?

Post Reply New Topic

Is not being open to rational argument a mental illness?

I know some people in real life who can never admit they are wrong even about commonly acknowledged facts. They feel that arguments are primarily emotional battles and tend to think being angry is the same thing as being "right".

This upsets me to some degree as I cannot understand the attitude that "I am right so you have to be wrong".

The only explanation I can think of for this behaviour is mental illness.

I think it falls under the term...cognitive dissonance . People have a gestalt that makes "their world" make sense and anything that contradicts their gestalt will be attacked because of a desire to protect a fragile ego. The more fragile their sense of self...the more threatened they feel when their gestalt is challenged. I wouldn't exactly say that it isn't "insane" but such a common mental illness is seen as "the norm", especially since many of the people who decide what a mental illness is are crazy as heck themselves. Greed and sadism, (bullying for fun, status and profit), are also common mental illnesses that seem to get over looked unless a chainsaw is involved.

The inability to think rationally or follow logic are not considered mental illness or even the more obvious learning disability because it is "the norm".

That's an excellent post. Thanks for responding so intelligently.

Is gestalt the same thing as world-view (weltanschung)? I'm afraid I don't know any German.

Yes, excellently said, Krex (as usual).

No, it's a personality difference. Some people operate on logic and others operate on emotion. It can be frustrating, I know.

This indicates a high degree of disagreeableness, which is a dimension of personality according to the Big Five theory. Extremes of personality often (if negative) indicate a personality disorder. The quintessential disorder for this, though, would be narcissistic personality disorder because the pathological narcissist is most heavily vested in being perceived by others (and thus reflecting back his or her desired self-image) as perfect, infallible, knowledgeable—you get the idea. Other personality disorders correlate with disagreeableness too, though, and reasoning for such emotional arguing could be slightly different at the psychodynamic level. For example, the archetypal patient with paranoid personality disorder often becomes hostile when others disagree with him or her. In this case, it's less of his or her being exposed to unwanted knowledge of his or her imperfection (as with the narcissist) but instead more of an easily triggered suspicious about others' motives: The paranoiac may think that another person's correcting him or her is an attempt to humiliate or some other projected manifestation of hostility.