(December 3, 2014 at 1:27 am)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: It very well could. From a personal perspective, when I was symptomatic (I have type 1 bipolar disorder, asymptomatic for about 3.5 years now), I did some dreadful things. A great many dreadful things, things I am not proud of, things I would not care to recount.
Was I a bad person? I suppose so, depending on how you measure it. Am I a different person now? Yes and no. I'm fundamentally the same person, with the same values - when I was ill, I didn't act consistently according to my values (and when I was sick, I acted without remorse, though I had periods of lucidity where I certainly did feel remorse greatly).
I'm the same person, but I'm not - the person who did those things no longer exists in one sense.
I suppose you could say I was a bad person with a good person inside screaming to be free.
To add to the above - one of the ways my mental illness manifested itself was a dulled sense of empathy. That was a result of past trauma, and it took a lot of therapy to overcome - but that capacity for empathy was always there, just suppressed, and not intentionally.
Would that have made me bad? I don't know. My actions were, and I take full responsibility for them. Psychology is a slippery fucker.
You see it's things like this that give me pause every time someone does something that seems wrong to me. Who am I to call a person bad? Especially when I have no insight into their mind. I having an overwhelming urge to vomit and cry when people touch me. I can't help it. I don't want to feel that way, but I just do. I would hate for someone to think badly of me for something that I have no control over. I hate to think badly of people. I am so much more inclined to watch them and listen to them for hours and hours trying to understand who they are and what makes them act that way.
