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RE: religion VS mental illness
April 13, 2013 at 10:13 am
I couldn't tell you if the super religious are mentally ill. What I CAN say is that a sudden, huge spike in religious views coincides with certain mental illnesses. My mother works with brain injured men, many if not all of them have a mental disorder or two or three on top of their condition. The staff is told to look for certain signs that could indicate there is a problem - one of them is an enormous increase in religious beliefs.
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RE: religion VS mental illness
April 13, 2013 at 10:15 am
So is sudden hyper-sexuality and a whole other host of behaviours. The post reeks of confirmation bias.
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RE: religion VS mental illness
April 13, 2013 at 10:18 am
(This post was last modified: April 13, 2013 at 10:46 am by Psykhronic.)
I'm just saying it's ONE of the signs. Pacing is another sign - which sometimes indicates nothing more than thinking in both mentally ill and non mentally ill folks. It's not a perfect system of analyzing a person's state of mind.
To make this clear I do not think being ridiculously religious automatically means mental illness. It COULD mean that, but I do not think so.
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RE: religion VS mental illness
April 13, 2013 at 11:37 am
"super" is the word we should key in on. What's the difference between hobby and OCD? yes, the line gets blurred. Are "super" fans mentally ill? "super" clean yards mean the person is mentally ill? the answer is maybe, on all accounts. But to equate "believing" with mental illness is wrong.
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RE: religion VS mental illness
April 13, 2013 at 11:51 am
As far as I know, "mental illness" encompasses a pretty wide range of issues. Are people who are diagnosed with mental illness exclusively or primarily describing religious delusions? I'd never heard of that. The old stereotype of the deluded mental patient was that he thought he was Napoleon, not John the Baptist.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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RE: religion VS mental illness
April 13, 2013 at 3:28 pm
(This post was last modified: April 13, 2013 at 4:04 pm by catfish.)
The sure sign of mental illness is believing in mental illness.
I'll believe in mental illness when there is a blood test or something similar to diagnose the so-called "illness".
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POWIMS / Poor Old Woe Is Me Syndrome.
Newly discovered mental illness has symptoms which entail other illnesses. OCD, ADHD, Chronic depression and others all combine to create a mental state where the subject feels incapable of doing anything so they collect disability, stay inside and cry about their problems all day.
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RE: religion VS mental illness
April 13, 2013 at 4:20 pm
(April 13, 2013 at 9:19 am)Adventuremrkt Wrote: I just read an article about mental illness in religion and started wondering if highly religious people might be considered as mentally ill.
I think you have the 'cart before the horse', so to speak.
SOME mental illnesses predispose the inflicted person with obsessions. Some of these mentally ill people may become obsessed with a public figure, some my become obsessed with religious beliefs, etc.
The mental illness comes first. Simply being highly religious does not mean someone is mentally ill.
But I do have to interject a Sam Harris quote here:
“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.”
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
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RE: religion VS mental illness
April 13, 2013 at 5:44 pm
It's not a disease if more than 50% of the people suffer from it.... it's normal, unfortunately.
Seems to stem from a predisposition to gullibility of young people towards the claims of their elders.
