is weeping at unfortunate objects sign of mental illness?

Post Reply New Topic

(warning, 1/2 hour long video) seeing the fate of this poor neglected automobile made me bawl like a baby anybody else here have this *quasi-stendahl's syndrome thing going on in their heads when they see stuff like this? neglect is sad. people and animals are neglected also and that is even sadder. anybody else here experience these intense feelings on a regular basis? are we mentally ill?

*stendahl's syndrome is a psychological disorder where people experience exaggerated quasi-psycho-somatic responses to superficially neutral stimuli such as seeing magnanimous behavior of living things to one another, or witnessing beautiful [or psychologically resonant] natural/environmental phenomena, great art and music.

p.s. that poor car eventually blew a key bearing and ended up in the car graveyard.

The other day I was suddenly confronted with unexpected and terrible animal abuse suddenly shown on tv which affected my ability to sleep for a week and made me burst into tears. Also I had to stop assisting a website for lost stolen and abused animals because of the severe impacts on my own well being. I don't think it's mental illness per se though I have reached a critical mass point and cannot bear these exposures anymore. They make me want to leave the planet.

it is like this world, this earth, is a harsh hellworld and we are not sufficiently calloused to it.

I think it depends on if it's related to an underlying disorder like depression.

Doesn't really seem like mental illness to me...

I've cried over things I've broke and such like plenty of times...one time in my later teen years I was home sick from school and laying on a couch trying to drink a cup of tea. Well I accidentally lost my grip on the tea and spilled it on myself...and sure it isn't a staining liquid and easy to clean up, and get another cup but nonetheless I cried and was upset for like a half hour because it just seemed so cruel that would happen when I was trying to enjoy some soothing tea while sick.

(Hiya Auntblabby - I've been otherwise diverted for a couple of months, but back now).

The most powerful this got for me was as a kid. On buses in the days when we had conductors to collect fares, the conductors would sometimes give kids rolls of unprinted tickets (this is back in the early 60's, and I wonder if the conductors themselves might have been on the scale, as the blank ticket rolls were given with a certain knowing je ne sais qua which may have had that common bus enthusiasm in it).

Anyway, further to the excitement of having a blank ticket roll, on the back of this particular bus company's tickets was a graph pattern, and I think we all know where that can lead.

Suffice it to say that soon my usual habit of putting my used ticket in the bin at the destination bus stop was overwhelmed in waves of sick sudden morbid sorrow at the poor ticket's fate. I ended up with a collection of them, then this passed.

Funerals for dead birds was another thing of mine - I may have been a mad child.

I do this. I have been wondering if it is related to being treated badly as a child. Sort of a projection of how I feel about myself onto the objects/living things.

In my case can't see past the wondering to any evidence of neglect / mistreatment or if it was a childhood schizoid state.

I have read of asperger's / HFA having been described as "mad child disease" by a doctor in the past, and also vaguely recall that at one point it was dx'd as Childhood Schizophrenia.

Personally, and I do tend to look on the dark side of things, I think it best not to recoil from these old fashioned terms but rather attempt to reconstruct what they may have meant at the time.

Quickly flying to the edges of my lack of expertise, I believe several different things can cause aspergeroid symptoms, and whilst I have little idea what influence neglect / mistreatment has on the mental state of kids (if any at all), I do know full well what variety of ballocks Brutal Bastardheim purveyed and react against it with every fibre of my being.