it is rather upsetting to me how most things in the psychology forums, and perhaps even in psychology in general, things are waay to vague and categorized to be of any use.
we are always speaking of “the line btwn insanity and sanity” and whether or not a mental ilness can become physical, but really, cant it be all in one?
no one person has anyone like him/her on the planet, and everything is tied in with each other (i.e. if you are nervous you shake, if you eat too much you becme depressed…).
can we really find a few categories or names for any one “disorder”. i do, however, beleive that “mental disorders” need to be cured, and that there is such a thing,
but since, as ive said, no two people are alike, can we really determine sanity or insanity? this really confuses me.
(In)sanity is to a certain extent in the eye of the beholder.
For example, the degree of a person’s ability to trust is customarily one of the parameters to determine degree of sanity, while rarely there’s any gauging of the trustworthiness of those around them to determine their degree of sanity.
It’s really all about social norms. In other countries they have mental problems that we don’t have in the west. It’s not genetic either because western people of the same racial group don’t get those problems.
Also, although people are kind of different I have been hearing the same stories over and over for 16 years. The interesting thing is that people seem to respond to negative events in much the same way. The sexually abused or rape victims generally have only a few ways that they will go with their reaction. Depressed people are usually depressed about a certain set of things and so forth.
The amazing thing is what makes people happy. That is very interesting to me. I can’t predict it in the same way that I can about what makes people sad. Happiness is a very complex and quirky thing.
So, on one hand sad or nervous people are easy to figure out (for me) but happy people always provide something new.
I’ve been thiking about somthing similar from a while.
Why do we ignore the fact of humans being an animal, evolved through unknown number of species, carrying the genes of all its ancestors. He complexity of one human being is beyound our understanding. All medical specialties should acknowledge and emphasize these facts.
There is no one right diet. There is no one excercise plan. There is no magical cure. And there is no american idol.
(In)sanity can be based on the things we daily do in our everyday life that the majority of the time. Like neenish17 said about bank cards, textures, etc… I personally read books on many various, diverse fields that include philosophy, psychology, theology, logic, baseball, science, etc… I also write my own personal notes or papers about these subjects and the volumes of books within them. None of my friends know this publically. I know I have a few friends that would go berserk: “what the heck? why do you waste your time doing this?” They would interpret me as insane.
It’s all perspective. I personally believe a theory stating that each person (as mentioned above, with a lil tweak) is different from the next, and 90% of the difference(s) are found in the extreme personal life: this is why sex and rooming together are two very difficult times. That person will do things you thought they’d never do. It doesn’t even have to be gross or completely out of proportion. You know what I’m talking about.
I hope this isn’t off topic but I’m really interested in the point. I have known a few people who have suffered with mental illness and the thing about trust has been an issue with all of them to some extent.
It is like the illness makes them less attractive to ‘normal’ people so they get paranoid about being accepted and this paranoia shows up in their behaviour and people let them down even more, and then isolation happens.
Thing is - would you trust if you were always being let down? probably not, so how can that be a definition of mental illness? It’s more a social point about how clannish and exclusive people can be.
E_X_A_C_T_L_Y
but thats what confuses me…perspective is such a broad …er…idea (?) that since it exists, nothing could ever be 100%.
argh! im forgetting my point…sry, im a little braindead right now…ill finish posting later…
…or from your perspective shes really confused
but never mind…ill never know what exactly your perspective is…
AAAAAAAH!..see!!!
That’s a claim that you cannot know so yeh, i’m pretty sure you could make thousands of claims similar to that and never could you be wrong simply because we know nothing. There is no “him” or “her” but only the “I”, that too is doubtful. Here is my point, for aslong as you cannot know what my conciousnous feels like then it is impossible for anybody to doubt what you are saying.What if i claim that we are all the same, the I that “I am” is the same “I” that you experience, is that claim true? Or is it only truth since we cannot actually know? You “personality” and desres do not make you different, they are attachments of the I and it is that I that needs to be unique in each body in order for us to be “dfferent” from anybody else, as you say.
This would be a great new religion.
Let all of us stand for whoever they are, no fear!
Becouse norm is not the majority when the majority is silent.
How many times it happened that you decide to admit some little secret of yours to find uot that others think or act the same way, or they admit something similar. Do not think outside the box, live outside a box, or better, destroy all boxes. Their only purpose is to control you. To let it would be insane.
yeah, i think that the expression “think outside the box” is good–except i no longer even know where the box is. this causes turmoil in my daily interaction with other human beings.
Dive into the suburbs for awhile and the box will take you to new heights and plains. You might even be drawn to wearing penny loafers and shirts with little polo players on them. Ugh.
Forget about sane/ insane. Screw those people. What do they know?
They can’t live your life for you, and you haven’t any other choice.
Let the external definitions go. Listen to your heart, confirm with your mind, and just be who you are. Introspection is part of the process of growing, but constant introspection take’s us away from living life as we find ourselves. We can only meta ourselves for so long, and the positive turns to negative. Peace and contentment? Live the day. Save introspection for that last 10 minutes of talking to your pillow as you fall asleep…
the philosopher is sane, the commoner is not. Those who are ‘awake’ are perfectly sane but those who believe they exist in a world where essence precedes existence are madly insane.
I agree. What a great tool for the government to have.
Example:
Jiminy John Brown sees something… perhaps in the gulf war?
What he saw actually happened.
He gets back, tells some people. Army has a ‘doctor’ ‘diagnose’ this man’s ‘illness’, because… he can’t be telling the truth. Why? Cause the guy in the white coat said so. The doctor represents the psychological median… the fact that he can say something and not have people say ‘well hey now… that makes little to no sense’ pretty much illustrates this.
Some of the most insane people I’ve seen have been high level execs, or lawyers or stuff like that… some of those sociopaths are truly messed up.
We can determine sanity (and insanity) normatively, according to habit and ritual. We can’t appeal to some first-order ontology from which we can derive our definitions, but we can say 'this person who isn’t even aware we’re watching him is sane, this guy shaking and repeating ‘it’s cold in Russia, Communism is cold’ over and over is insane.
Consider not that we’re talking about the particulars of any given individuals mental state but about general tags applied to kinds of behaviour, and that the application of those tags is subject to review all the time. I’m not relativising the valuations, just saying what they appear to entail.
Consider how popular it is for young people, particularly females, to claim to be ‘insane’ or to have done something ‘insane’ like stealing a wheelybin and racing someone in a shopping trolley. Just as some people conform to normative sanity some people willfully (i.e. as some sort of identity choice) conform to whatever the available alternative is (to normative sanity). Rebellion for its own sake, without a cause.
As to other people defining your mental states - get used to it, language is like that. It is based in some sort of compromise, some sort of habitual agreement you know you can emancipate yourself from if you wish.
The term, from psychological anthropology land, is “culture bound disorder”.
However, from a more holistic view, I’d have to say that in any situation where someone is categorically unable to function within the social norms they were raised in there is a “problem”.
we do such a good job of training kids to function (such as it is) properly that when we see someone who quite clearly can’t they really stand out.
