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LadyNTrainer -> RE: Are you mentally ill ? (5/26/2010 9:06:35 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Aneirin
I am beginning to notice quite a disturbing trend with fora, a situation where if a person has an unusual viewpoint, they can be accused of being mentaly ill, just what is this all about ?
Unusual viewpoint, probably not. Suggestions of self harm, criminal behavior or a history of diagnosis and treatment for mental illness are more likely to be at the top of the list. More subtle signs may include severe and persistent deficiencies in social ability, perception and interaction.
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As far as I am aware the only people who can diagnose mental illness are the psychiatry profession, not any other, despite what they think they know or have read, so what is it with people, is this accusation of mental illness a means of destabilising an other in a conversation or what ?
It may certainly be used as a social ploy to discredit someone with whom you disagree, whether or not you believe it to be the case in fact. The implications of casually using as such are indeed disturbing.
While I doubt that anyone is much inclined to post their resume on the site, we certainly do have members of that profession in our ranks. However, even a qualified medical professional cannot offer a reliable diagnosis let alone treatment on an Internet chat site, nor may a professional ethically make this attempt.
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Why is it, I ask of those who are keen to suggest mental illness in others, what do you get from it, is it a feeling of superiority by the dumbing down of another based upon a self belief, or is it you do genuinely care for that individual ?
If the solution to a problem is ethically complicated because the person creating that problem may not be fully aware of or able to control the behaviors that are at issue, then that needs to be taken into account so that right action may proceed. Information is good for problem solving. More information and more input is better.
I can't speak for anyone else, but my personal logic tends to be a cold one. Ethics and problem solving motivates me. Caring generally does not, particularly when strangers are involved. I'm not an emotional person, and it consistently confuses me when others around me assume either a positive or negative emotional motivation for what I say or do, or read some emotional subtext in my language or behavior that I'm not aware of either feeling or communicating. I am a literal creature, and if you try to read anything beyond face value into my words or actions, it's going to confuse me and probably end in a serious mismatch of communication. What you see is what you get. There is no more.
When I say something factual to convey and discuss information, and it is interpreted metaphorically or emotionally, I am occasionally tempted to pull out the infamous line from Pulp Fiction. "English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?" I generally try to be more courteous than that, but this is what it actually feels like to communicate with people on the neurotypical spectrum when you're on the autistic side. Which I am.
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But there is one good thing out of this drive to discover and label mental illness, for the more advanced the professionals become, no doubt the more labels will be created and with that a majority might form, a majority of those classed as mentally ill until such a point they hold up their hands and surrender with the ultimate understanding that every single one of us is either mentally ill, or just plain different and that is the be all and end all of it.
One of the nicer recent advances in neuropsychiatry is the prevalence of people with alternatively functioning brains, most notably scholars on the autistic spectrum, being the ones writing the definitions these days. Some forms of different brain wiring are not illness so much as evolutionary remnants of functional polymorphic strategies for human neural architecture, and can reasonably be classified as primarily eufunctional. Others cannot, because they do cause significant dysfunction in standard life skills. Some conditions are a tradeoff between eufunction and dysfunction, where social skills may be impacted but other skills are extremely high functioning.
I would absolutely not trade my differently wired brain for a "normal" brain despite some difficulty relating to and communicating with people who are neurotypical. I like my wiring. It serves me very well. I don't consider myself mentally ill. I do consider "mentally ill" to be a reasonable label for conditions that are significantly dysfunctional to the people who suffer from them, as defined by the DSM.
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