Is Free-Thought a Mental Disease?

[Creed of Heresy]

Drake 7:24 pm
Yeah, he seemed smug about something but didn't say anything.

Drake 7:27 pm
He was TRYING to say you claimed to have the inability to rationalize. But the issue isn't a complete inability. It's more focused than that. Your reactions to certain stimuli are irrational. You are AWARE of that, but not until after the fact.

Drake 7:29 pm
depression or bipolar mean certain aspects of your life are ruled by that irrational part. Like obsessive compulsive people who have to wash their hands three times. They know it doesn't really matter... But if they don't do it they FEEL unclean.
Forcing themself not to do it might not stop the behavior...it might just make them feel disgustingly unclean all the time.
If you could 'just stop then more people would. Nobody WANTS to be ruled by needless compulsion or phobias. You just can't rationalize it away.

Drake 7:35 pm
If the disorder is really bad, you may not even be aware of the irrationality.

CreedofHeresy 7:36 pm
Like schizophrenia, which is what I was actually talking about when I was referring to irrationality; that schizophrenics, without medication, are mentally incapable of any kind of rationality that can be understood by anyone else, not even other schizophrenics, which is why medication is necessary. And if it's necessary for one mental disorder in order to return them to normality, or give them a semblance of it, then why is it not necessary for people who have other reactions?

Drake 7:39 pm
Right. He wants everything to be in a vague, black-and-white sort of thing, it looks like. He wants to group everything and everyone into a neat little group.

CreedofHeresy 7:51 pm
Well he's actually gone on record as saying he just enjoys judging other people. He's never actually contributed anything other than to pick at nits and cherry-pick his arguments.

Drake 7:52 pm
Sounds like a class act. And a troll.
---
Conversation between me and a person far smarter than Catturd discussing this thread yesterday.

So we have at least five people that I can think of off the top of my head, four of them on this forum (Me, Cthulhu, TGAC, LastPoet), who are in agreement that Catturd says nothing and never addresses any points and generally is a troll. Five people who say that Catturd's reasoning isn't very rational and doesn't really go anywhere. So I'm just gonna come right out and state that Catturd is an in-denial schizophrenic who should quit being a crybaby whining about how everyone is out to get him with their evil pills and just shut the fuck up and take his damn medicine.

[catfish]

LOL, still looking for acceptace and support I see.
And now I see outright lies in your signature. The last time I thanked you for that, it was for not lying about what I actually said.
Now? You're a fucking liar crybaby...

[Koolay]

You said, and I quoted, "I don't believe in mental illness." Mental illness is defined as the following:

"Psychosis (from the Greek ψυχή "psyche", for mind/soul, and -ωσις "-osis", for abnormal condition or derangement) refers to an abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"."

Mental illness does not and can never have an objective definition, historically people have always put their own definition as to what mental illness is.
-Don't support the monarchy? mentally ill!
-Don't support the communist party? mentally ill!

Logical thinking however can be objectively and mathematically measured.

You can measure someone's entire being with socratic principles.

-What are there principles?
-Do they ever intentionally violate those principles? (If yes; they are irrational).

I.e, if you tell your child that hitting others is wrong, but then you go and intentionally hit that child, then you are irrational. Whether you are 'ill' or not is irrelevant.

Irrational thinking can be corrected with thought exercises. Shit like schizophrenia cannot. You know what happens when you try to convince a schizophrenic that their thought processes are irrational? They become even MORE irrational. There is literally no way to reason with a schizophrenic, and you know why? Because their brains are fucked up.

All irrational thinking and acted out trauma can be corrected and healed to a degree.

Absolutely, you can never 'un learn' schizophrenia, but you can certainly heal to a degree, but never good as new. The brain similar to any other part of the body can be permanently damaged through trauma and abuse, if left untreated for too long it can fester and become worse like any part of the body to the point were recovery is virtually impossible.

I'm certainly no expert as you said, but I can understand the principle of how irrational thinking manifests and develops.

[Creed of Heresy]

Tell me of one instance you know of, as I have asked before [unsurprisingly without anything concrete], where someone was "healed" of schizophrenia without the use of medication. Tell me of one instance where someone with schizophrenia, with non-medical "correction." And it's important that you ensure that medication was not used, because if medication WAS used then you have to admit that it is an illness, an actual, tangible illness caused not by thinking but by body chemistry. If it is just a way of thinking that stems just from the beliefs of the individual in question, then it should be easily corrected without medication and can just be corrected through talk-therapy, or thought-processing. I would be very interested [and I don't mean this sarcastically, I actually mean it] in seeing an instance where this happened. But something tells me you're not going to find anything like that. It's just. Not. Possible.

And I don't mean the talk therapy that makes the patients overcome the emotional stigmata (I am aware of treatments that exists for that; in fact it's worth noting that talk-therapy, henceforth known as psychology, helps with the emotional aspects involved with all mental illnesses). I mean therapy that gets rid of the hallucinations and delusions and paranoia; the "positive" symptoms, which is what the medications treat.

Mental illnesses are particularly rough because their effects are like a coin; two different sides but both part of the same issue. One side is the cognitive functioning, the other side is the emotional output. You must treat both for treatment to be truly effective. Talk therapy is effective for schizophrenics (albeit extraordinarily difficult, expensive, and requires a long duration of time) in mitigating the "negative" symptoms; the way the patient feels, which is often brought about by the hallucinations, the delusions, the inability to focus, all that "fun" stuff that expresses itself in the "positive" form (and I don't say positive to mean good).

An not-entirely-accurate analogy but a decent enough one for our purposes is the way in which you treat an illness. You dunno how to cure the illness, so you treat it. Say the illness causes massive burns or something. Well, there's the treatment that gets rid of the burns that manifest, and prevent them from showing up later on in the future, as long as treatment is constant and ongoing. That'd be the psychiatric aspect in this analogy. But the burns also cause pain. So you also give painkillers while the burns are showing up. That is the psychological aspect of the treatment. And say that the burns will last quite some time even while the treatment is progressing. Well, even if the cause of the discomfort is being treated and it's going away, it's still gonna cause pain. And the memories of that pain might linger, and induce fear in the patient that the pain will begin again. But if you treat with painkillers as well, the pain goes away, and the illness becomes less debilitating.

Again, it's not a perfect analogy but it's the best I can think of right now. See what I'm getting at? Mental illness is a disease that can't be cured because the actual study of it is still ongoing. It's perhaps the most complex form of disease we can suffer from, made even more so because of how complex the human mind is. It's not even just the brain itself; it's the sheer number of chemicals and chemical processes and how they affect different regions in different ways depending on their different levels. But it's something that can be treated. And treatment is very complex. It requires a medical approach AND a therapeutic approach to be truly effective.

You may deny it's a disease all you'd like, but again, just consider the thing with schizophrenia. Or, hell, Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is perhaps the best [and worst] example of mental illness. You sure as fuck aren't going to be able to just talk someone out of Alzheimer's. Hell, they've only just recently been able to start producing treatments of any kind that have any sort of effect. And even then the most the treatments can do is slow its progression. Reversing it...we're not even sure if it's possible to do so.

[Walking Void]

---

You said, and I quoted, "I don't believe in mental illness." Mental illness is defined as the following:

"Psychosis (from the Greek ψυχή "psyche", for mind/soul, and -ωσις "-osis", for abnormal condition or derangement) refers to an abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"."

Mental illness does not and can never have an objective definition, historically people have always put their own definition as to what mental illness is.
-Don't support the monarchy? mentally ill!
-Don't support the communist party? mentally ill!

Logical thinking however can be objectively and mathematically measured.

You can measure someone's entire being with socratic principles.

-What are there principles?
-Do they ever intentionally violate those principles? (If yes; they are irrational).

I.e, if you tell your child that hitting others is wrong, but then you go and intentionally hit that child, then you are irrational. Whether you are 'ill' or not is irrelevant.

Irrational thinking can be corrected with thought exercises. Shit like schizophrenia cannot. You know what happens when you try to convince a schizophrenic that their thought processes are irrational? They become even MORE irrational. There is literally no way to reason with a schizophrenic, and you know why? Because their brains are fucked up.

All irrational thinking and acted out trauma can be corrected and healed to a degree.

Absolutely, you can never 'un learn' schizophrenia, but you can certainly heal to a degree, but never good as new. The brain similar to any other part of the body can be permanently damaged through trauma and abuse, if left untreated for too long it can fester and become worse like any part of the body to the point were recovery is virtually impossible.

I'm certainly no expert as you said, but I can understand the principle of how irrational thinking manifests and develops.

---

Ugh. Please, just stop quoting your life diary. Turn it into a novel and try selling it as a non-fiction book.

[Faith No More]

Creed, Alzheimer's disease is a neurological disease like Parkinson's or a stroke, not a mental illness.