(July 13, 2013 at 12:54 am)Attie Wrote: (July 12, 2013 at 10:22 pm)genkaus Wrote: Isn't that what you would expect? People with any knowledge about it wouldn't be stupid enough to question its validity. Its not a trend on this forum, its a trend of the world.
That's why some of the nonsense found on the Internet is such a joke. I'm not a psychologist but I do realize that a real mental disease is very different to thinking thoughts that sounds like one. A common mistake is to see logic as being a disease.
Reading about a mental disease is one thing but meeting someone in an asylum with the real thing is an eye opener and could be a surprise.
Hence my thing about the schizophrenic room-mate being mentioned. See, rational thinking in a healthy mind comes natural. It is a process, a train of thought, that is easily communicable to others who are like-mindedly healthy of the mind. The most telling aspect about mental illness, say, schizophrenia, is not just so much the discord between someone with a healthy mind and a person with a mental illness, but how two individuals who share that same illness will ALSO have discordance in their own rationality. Put two schizophrenics into a room together. Add as many as you need. An agreement between any will NEVER come up. Why? Because it's not a matter of merely having the means and failing to use them for the sake of rationality; it's the absolute incapability of the individual to do so. They are, I repeat for anyone on this forum who doesn't get it yet *glares at Catty* NOT. CAPABLE. OF RATIONAL THINKING. This where the idea of mental illness comes from; the inability to function within reason or logic, regardless of outside influence. The inability to share ideas meaningfully and tangibly, and the inability to understand the ideas of others meaningfully and tangibly.
One might point out the discord between atheist and theist; the sharing of ideas do not seem compatible. But they ARE. They are being shared in concepts that are understood, and whether or not we think them LOGICAL, we can still grasp what the meaning is.
There is a difference between "there is a god - there is no god" and "I am being watched by 500,000,000 people - No you aren't - YES I AM." Personally I would like to venture that religion is a mental illness but I don't see it as such. I see religion as a coping mechanism, one that has existed for a very long time in humanity, as a means of being self-aware of not just one's experiences, but also of the mortality of the self and those around the self. This manifests most clearly in how the earliest signs of religion tend to be found in ancient burial sites, and how even to this day, funerary services are largely conducted with a pastor or monk or what have you at the helm of the service. The biggest motivator of religion is the absolute terror of death, the only absolute unknowable of the experience of non-experience.
Whereas in, say, paranoid schizophrenia, the fear comes from no particular source except extremes of different kinds of fears and concerns that to the majority of the human population are oftentimes trivial at worst and easily dismissed. For example; "I am being watched by 500 million people," as my room-mate is so very convinced, is obviously not true. He's not nearly important enough to warrant this. He believes nearly everyone in the world is out to get him. By which I mean, he believes people want him dead. Anyone who disagrees with him, who doesn't understand his irrational, disorganized thought processes is someone in on the conspiracy to kill him. It has a reasonable [but not rational or logical; this is important, know the difference] basis of sorts, of course; a drunk picked a fight with him a few years back, a fight that resulted in my room-mate shooting the other guy, and ended up getting off with a self-defense plea by a jury. The thing is, this ceases to be rational when you hear the whole story, which goes that the drunk eventually walked away midway through the fight. Danny, my room-mate, were he a reasonable individual, would have left well enough alone. The other guy was clearly drunk and didn't even know what he was doing, and was off his ass. He disengaged, and began to leave. Danny FOLLOWED AFTER HIM and continued to engage him because his irrational paranoia had him convinced that the guy was still a threat, even though to anyone else, it would have been clear that this dude was just drunk and was leaving. The guy got pissed off again after Danny kept at him, and attacked Danny, this time with a knife. Danny then pulled a gun, and shot the guy in the chest, and the guy died a few minutes later. Danny is now convinced of this massive conspiracy, based on this one fact, and thinks 500,000,000 people are after him, at all times because, as he puts it, "because I have powers." He does not specify what these powers are. I have only lightly pressed him once on it. Just for this light pressing, for a week he was constantly watching me and walking around the house with a knife strapped to his side. He eventually forgot about it when I offered him some weed later that week [something I would normally not offer to a schizophrenic but it was either that or deal with his paranoia; lesser of two evils] and is back to the understanding that I intend him no harm. Which, if I ever question his strange thought processes, can and likely will change to him being suspicious all over again.
Does this sound rational at all, logical at all? Or does this sound like a completely alien, foreign thought process that you guys would never experience? Something tells me that the latter is going to be the answer I am going to get the most. Why? Because of us here are not capable of this train of thought. This train of thought, even if we understand the potential reasons for it, inevitably boils down to "the end result happened because he was irrational." We can only come to accept that his thought processes are not in step with ours, and that's the only time you can actually accept it as valid, but that doesn't make it reasonable or logical. Understanding a reason does not mean ACCEPTING a reason.
Those with mental health issues are NOT CAPABLE of actually coming to terms with their illness. Their minds are NOT CAPABLE of reasoning that is compatible with anyone else. And not just in one or two things, like religion or whatever, but in ALL things. I might disagree with a Christian friend over religion but then we start talking about food and TV shows and music and we have all sorts of things in common. I talk with Danny about the same things and his thoughts are all over the place, have no pattern, and while I bullshit and pretend to understand and agree, it's only because I know there's no actual reasoning with the guy because he can't help but be incapable of reasoning!
This, here, is for anyone who continues to argue that mental illness is "not valid." I defy you to try to prove me wrong, and I BEG you to show me a single case where an unmedicated schizophrenic merely thought his way out of his delusions, psychoses, and hallucinations without the aid of any psychotropic medication! Do it! I would LOVE to hear about it!
Or perhaps any stories about people who thought their way out of having a manic episode. Or an episode of clinical depression. Or ANY of the mental disorders that affect people to the point of requiring constant medical treatment. Give me ONE FUCKING EXAMPLE where talk-therapy and/or self-rationalization led out of it and kept it from ever recurring.
Spoiler alert...
I don't want this, what I am saying, to be true. I really don't. I know from the utter vehemence with which I state it that it might seem like I really want this to be true. Like I am arguing for the sake of trying to say I'm right with conviction and joy in the knowledge of being right. But I don't want it to be true.
For anyone not suffering from some form of mental illness that affects their daily lives, allow me to explain just what this being true actually means. For me, and anyone like me, for that matter. Anyone suffering from chronic depression, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, schizotypal disorder, any kind of psychopathy in general...what does this being true mean for us?
It means we are fucked.
It means we are stuck buying medications every month, going to see doctors on a semi-regular basis, reporting it as a pre-existing condition to our insurance agencies, and paying the glorious premiums that that entails. It means having a constant financial drain. It means being powerless, and succumbing to the realization that because of nothing more than a throw of the galactic dice, you are not only incapable of affecting everything, but you are incapable of affecting even yourself to the fullest extent. The alternative, if I am right, is to go on feeling affected FOREVER, getting worse and worse, slipping out of control of ourselves, pushed away by our friends, maybe even our families, or we push them away out of our irrational behaviors influenced by these
diseases. It means struggling to make friends. It means getting looked at weird any time you apply for a job and a mental health history check is required for it. Or any time a mental health history check is required. It means feeling like shit, being scared of everything and everyone for anything and everything. It means buying five grand pianos on a whim and taking out a loan you'll never be able to afford to repay to do so and quitting your job the next day and then telling your friends to go fuck themselves the day after that and then crashing
and realizing just what the fuck you've done and wondering why the fuck you did it and wondering who the fuck you were for a week, and spending three weeks after that in a state of borderline suicidal depression where you can't do anything, you can't even try to look for work and the bills keep piling up and the rent keeps piling up and your friends who are cool enough to stick by you keep holding you up and you keep holding them down, and you owe them thousands of dollars and you have no plan, no means, no hope of ever repaying them and you know, deep down inside yourself, that you are a fucking parasite leeching them of their money, their happiness, their lives and that they only stick by you because they're the kind of friend that you think only exists in fairy tales and movies but somehow you managed to find that one friend, or small group of friends, who mean it when they say they'll be there for you but you can't fucking change no matter how
fucking DESPERATELY YOU WANT TO, no matter how desperately you rage you at yourself, no matter who you talk to, no matter what you say, or try to do...you can't fucking CHANGE... Because somewhere in that mass of nerve endings in your head, in the strange, still-being-explored-and-understood regions of the brain, the parts as unnoticed and unrecognized as the ones responsible for making sure you keep breathing and that your heart keeps pumping and that your optic nerves keep translating information and that gets your immune system to fight the infections and bacteria and viruses that continually try to assault your body, is another part, or collection or parts, and areas, just as unnoticed, unaware, that will not let you. They will not. They
cannot. They are not even aware of it. It is the subconscious, the chemicals, the glands, the connections of nerve endings, they are not functioning properly, and there is NOTHING that will ever fix that.
The truth...means this is what we have to look forward to. For the rest of our lives. Because these are diseases with no cures. Only treatments. We are stuck with them for the rest of our lives.
Now...do tell me...do you really think I WANT this to be true?
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