There is dangerous behavior and then there is self-destructive behavior. There is commonly intervention on suicidal tendencies, anorexia, cutting, etc. That’s behavior resulting from mental illness.
Self-destruction is a difficult thing for a layman to accurately diagnose.
It’s really something that only a clinician should address; and even then, they can get it wrong.
My reason for that assertion is this: some of the greatest pieces of art have been accomplished during periods of time where the artist was drastically involved in what we would consider as self-destructive behavior.
Hell, today, the same is still evident in nearly every given day of the a considerable portion of the celebrity entertainment industry.
Some of Beethoven’s best pieces were written in his tragic downward self-destruction; indeed, some were the lashing out of it.
Edger Allen Poe is another similar example.
It’s impossible, really, to accurately create a catch-all and non-relative scale by which to measure when it’s a good idea to intervene with a person.
The best we can do is to feel uncomfortable about their behavior and report it to a clinician.
Beyond this, it is really beyond our scope as non-clinicians to really determine laws that intervene with people simply being human in my opinion.
But that’s drawing an arbitrary line as well. It’s just as self destructive to eat hamburgers everyday, smoke cigarettes, drink excessively, so on. Why is one category derived from mental illness and the other derived from personal choice when both outcomes are the same?
I fully agree with No-Body (dammit I love your name in sentence, lol).
In my opinion, the ideal human in ideal behavior…in application is a deadened humanity.
It’s decided based on the probability of a fatal(or damaging) result combined with how rapidly it will happen. Yes, it’s a fuzzy arbitrary line.
And isn’t that the crux of the problem?
Ergo the question of the thread?
And I think the honest answer for massive societies is going to be a very large, 
The smaller the society gets, the easier that question becomes.
I really think it is a fallacious idea to keep describing the line as arbitrary. Fuzzy, yes. It is always going to be difficult to determine which behaviour is acceptably rational and which is not. But the line is evidently not wholly arbitrary. Having parliments dedicated to this sort of this is exactly how society runs so successfully! Er, pardon that bit - how it runs. I got over excited there.
Anyway, when talking philosophically about the nature of rationality, it is easy to dismiss it (which is exactlly why I wanted to avoid this kind of talk in the first place). I was really trying to get your opinions on it in the context of society. If everybody treated it as wholly arbitrary, there just wouldn’t be a system for determining menntal illness - it just wouldn’t exist. The debate of the thread comees from the following -
That is a good question! Our task is finding out why. The fact that the line is fuzzy and the fact that it is evidently NOT arbitrary is what makes this discussion so hard in my eyes. There is all sorts of weird and pathetic mental illnesses, and yet we just describe it as a condition. Why is that? So, just to re-iterate the original question - at which point do we intervene?
This is why I kind of started off on my hypocrisy rant. I think that if you do establish a point of intervention (which of course has already been done in many situations) you immediately establish a state of hypocrisy.
If I decide to intervene on a friend of mine because he has taken up heroin and is not so slowly but quite surely killing himself, why have I not taken up the same efforts for my other friend who is quite overweight? If the terms of intervention are based on bodily harm and a timeframe, both of these conditions apply but we only intervene on one.
I agree that the line is not wholly arbitrary, but only because we’ve labeled everything in our lives so neatly and correctly and put everything in its perfect little place in order to give ourselves the illusion of control. But in reality, at least in my opinion of reality, the line is wholly arbitrary. We simply do not see it as such because of all the labels we’ve made for all the categories in our lives.
It makes no sense to intervene on a drug addict but not a chain smoker. It makes no sense to address someone’s weight issues and not address their alcohol use. If someone decides that they are going to jump off a bridge in an attempt to commit suicide, why is the guy who likes to drink and drive the one talking him down? Governments try to establish laws that prevent people from doing damaging things to themselves or their environment and then are protested against by the very people they are trying to protect for being overbearing, intrusive, oppressive, etc.
I guess in the end I can’t really answer your question, Cheegster. And again, I don’t mean to derail your thread at all, but I cannot state a point of when and where we should intervene because I cannot see beyond the hypocrisy that said decision creates. I’ll give a quick story as to why.
About 4 weeks ago I was watching a guy standing outside of his car, which was running, freezing his butt off. He had his jacket zipped up so the collar covered his neck, hands in his pockets, the whole nine yards. And a cigarette in his mouth. For awhile I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, why he was freezing outside of his running car instead of getting in and getting warm. Then it dawned on me, he doesn’t want the smoke to ruin the inside of his car (he was driving a nice looking Mercedes). Then everything really fell into place when I realized that he had no issue with pumping that same damaging smoke into his lungs, but the slightest bit of it getting into the car had to be avoided at all costs. Totally irrational behavior. Should I have intervened? I didn’t. I laughed a bit (on the outside, and cried a bit on the inside) and went about my business. Looking back I wish I would have intervened, only to see how the conversation would have turned out when I pointed out what he was really doing.