Mental disorders deserve their own thrad

[The Man]

Time to start one.

Fuck you, Tucker Carlson.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by The Man

Time to start one.

Fuck you, Tucker Carlson.

Stigma is the wrong word, but there needs to be an honest assessment of the potential of people with these disorders, when they are accurately identified.

[Dingfod]

The problem with having some sort of reporting mechanism for people like the shooter is that people in need of that kind of mental health treatment might forgo treatment because of it. And that would be way worse for society, I think.

[thedoc]

Society can't force a person into treatment unless some danger to that society can be demonstrated. And that is very difficult at best.

[lisarea]

There have been studies showing that people with certain types of schizophrenia (although note that the shooter has not been diagnosed with schizophrenia) can be somewhat prone to violence. Some subset. Certain types. Under certain conditions and circumstances.

So what's the cutoff to treat a demographic as a default criminal, and pre-identify them according to profile? Is there some hard number? Are certain types of violence more acceptable than others? Are certain classes more suitable to profile than others? If it's OK to profile people according to mental illness, is it also OK to profile them by race, religion, sex, IQ, income, or any other characteristic that might be associated with a higher chance of violent behavior?

[godfry n. glad]

I think that chronic misrepresentation of the truth on broadcast television should be stigmatized considerably more than it is presently.

Foxnews is a terrible and debilitating mental disorder.

[Qingdai]

It is not difficult to determine whether or not someone is a danger to themselves or others. It's difficult to get them treatment and a more thorough evaluation. Stigmatizing them (which is what? Making them bleed out of their extremities? Geezus. Nice vague threat there), isn't going to do jack. Having a functioning or available mental health system would help all sorts of people with all sorts of stuff.

It's very hard for parents of children with mental disorders to get any sort of comprehensive or appropriate help.

For example Doctors: Kinkel hid schizophrenia | Local & Regional | KATU.com - Portland News, Sports, Traffic Weather and Breaking News - Portland, Oregon

[Ari]

Ugh, perhaps people who scream at others who aren't really there (oh a "live video feed" you say?) and ramble about conspiracies while making huge jumps in logic and obviously fallacious statements, shouldn't throw government institutionalization around least we run with the idea and rebrand it the Fox News Institution of the conservatively unstable. Schizophrenia is a disease that affects Men more than Women, and most Fox News hosts are Men. Coincidence? Or conspiracy to take our Guns. At least that's what the guns told me!

More seriously I'll start off and say that the majority of medical definitions for mental illness are crap. Sure there are obvious cases like people who claim the government is eavesdropping on their tubes and putting giant microwave weapons on the top of cars but a lot of it is so arbitrary you might as well just ask the neighbors 4ft tall Parrot for another evaluation and call it real.

For most of the history of mental health, being mentally ill meant being ever so slightly different from societal norms, or a women (who were locked up or forcefully medicated/poisoned for the mental illness of not greeting her husband quickly enough and then overcooking his porkchop, among other mindblowingly childish things (some are hilarious until you realize they were serious about it)). At one point or another pretty much every societal abnormality you can think of was considered a mental illness, including disagreeing with doctors that you had a mental illness.

Some of the stereotypical violent mentally ill comes from the idea that criminality is a mental illness and a biological defect transferred down to future generations. A portion of 19-20th century eugenics were based around the idea that you could breed out the criminal nature of, you guessed it, blacks. Bits of this idea can still be seen in Conservative language treating being a criminal as something inherent to the person's makeup like a nervous tick they just can't help, and thus need to be locked away for the good of society/whites.

As mentioned, schizophrenics (the boogieman of mental illness) have practicaly no more lean towards violence than the average person and those that are clearly violent are often more of a danger to themselves than others. Which is good as while they are talked about like ghosts in the night, there are more people living plain normalish lives with schizophrenia than most think.

A great and kind of creepy demo of schizophrenia based on actual patient accounts. It was built in second life so it's quite blocky but I would love if educational museums built a real 'haunted house' style version to give people a more visceral feel for it.

virtual hallucinations - YouTube

Edit to Add: It's important to point out that these voices aren't "in the patients head" like a normal thought or memory of a song but sound like they are coming from the outside world, even so much as having a general direction or specific locality.

[But]

Thank you, that was going to be my point.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by Ari

More seriously I'll start off and say that the majority of medical definitions for mental illness are crap. Sure there are obvious cases like people who claim the government is eavesdropping on their tubes and putting giant microwave weapons on the top of cars but a lot of it is so arbitrary you might as well just ask the neighbors 4ft tall Parrot for another evaluation and call it real.

This is not just a joke: There is something pretty eerie about the predictive qualities of some common schizophrenic delusions. Surveillance is gimme, I suppose, but many common schizophrenic delusions have predicted technologies long before they existed, including wireless communications and modern computers.

I'm not saying that we all need to subscribe to the newsletter, but I am kind of saying that.

Schizophrenia is the boogeyman, though, yeah. People just see it as 'reallyreally crazy' or something, regardless of whether someone is actually exhibiting any of the common symptoms.

No good can possibly come of perpetuating that sort of ignorance and demonizing or stigmatizing mental illness in general, or schizophrenia specifically.

Auditory hallucinations of varying types are a common symptom of schizophrenia. Everyone knows that. But they're also super-common among people with other types of mental illness, and a lot of people with no diagnosable mental illness at all. It's actually really, really common for children in particular to hear voices, like according to some, 14% common. Some think it may be a normal stage of development, as kids learn to internalize their internal thinking voices.

So really, rather than just dumping people with mental illnesses into buckets and treating them as though they're some kind of aliens, maybe we should be thinking of mental illnesses more as deviances from a spectrum. Which they are, just like BMIs and IQ scores. People with mental illnesses are human beings whose normal thought processes are pronounced to the point that they're pathological, and that othering them and treating them as some sort of different species or something is not only dangerous and cruel in that it shames people and makes them less likely to seek help (even setting aside the systemic travesty where there is no real help to be gotten) but it's also just plain wrong as in factually incorrect.

Mental illness in general and schizophrenia in particular are not as accurate predictors of violent behavior as a whole whole lot of other things are, and the subset of mentally ill people who do commit violent crimes tends to intersect pretty heavily with other predictors, such as previous violent behaviors and substance abuse. And the big one, of course, is maleness. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men, the vast majority of whom are not schizophrenic.

So if you're going to take a straight predictive model, you'd really need to address the far more accurate predictors before you go lumping everyone with mental illnesses into pre-criminal categories. Show me an argument for stigmatizing people with schizophrenia that I cannot turn into an argument for stigmatizing maleness with a simple search and replace.

[Janet]

Ages ago, someone posted an article on her from a mother saying her son was going to turn into a mass shooter and the only way she could get help for him was to have him arrested. I think it came out after the Aurora shooting.

My best friend was just telling me that his girlfriend's sister kept getting arrested under the Brady Law because it was the only way they could do anything about her mental illness. After seeing her several times the judge said he was sick of it and committed here. Now they are trying to get her into a nicer facility. There really needs to be a way to be able to get people care without arresting them.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by lisarea

This is not just a joke: There is something pretty eerie about the predictive qualities of some common schizophrenic delusions. Surveillance is gimme, I suppose, but many common schizophrenic delusions have predicted technologies long before they existed, including wireless communications and modern computers.

I'm not saying that we all need to subscribe to the newsletter, but I am kind of saying that.

Schizophrenia is the boogeyman, though, yeah. People just see it as 'reallyreally crazy' or something, regardless of whether someone is actually exhibiting any of the common symptoms.

No good can possibly come of perpetuating that sort of ignorance and demonizing or stigmatizing mental illness in general, or schizophrenia specifically.

Auditory hallucinations of varying types are a common symptom of schizophrenia. Everyone knows that. But they're also super-common among people with other types of mental illness, and a lot of people with no diagnosable mental illness at all. It's actually really, really common for children in particular to hear voices, like according to some, 14% common. Some think it may be a normal stage of development, as kids learn to internalize their internal thinking voices.

So really, rather than just dumping people with mental illnesses into buckets and treating them as though they're some kind of aliens, maybe we should be thinking of mental illnesses more as deviances from a spectrum. Which they are, just like BMIs and IQ scores. People with mental illnesses are human beings whose normal thought processes are pronounced to the point that they're pathological, and that othering them and treating them as some sort of different species or something is not only dangerous and cruel in that it shames people and makes them less likely to seek help (even setting aside the systemic travesty where there is no real help to be gotten) but it's also just plain wrong as in factually incorrect.

Mental illness in general and schizophrenia in particular are not as accurate predictors of violent behavior as a whole whole lot of other things are, and the subset of mentally ill people who do commit violent crimes tends to intersect pretty heavily with other predictors, such as previous violent behaviors and substance abuse. And the big one, of course, is maleness. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men, the vast majority of whom are not schizophrenic.

So if you're going to take a straight predictive model, you'd really need to address the far more accurate predictors before you go lumping everyone with mental illnesses into pre-criminal categories. Show me an argument for stigmatizing people with schizophrenia that I cannot turn into an argument for stigmatizing maleness with a simple search and replace.

At the risk of being sincere, I fucking love you.

[Ari]

Our medical understanding of the brain in the last 5-10 years has easily eclipsed the last 5,000 years of guesswork and drugged up psycho-analysis and is starting to show some real progress in understanding these problems.

In the case of schizophrenia the idea that they might have their "wires crossed" seems to be part of the case as MRI scans have shown areas of the brain that process hearing also light up during bouts of voices. There's also some evidence that suggests the brain makes lots of connected relationships with memories/ideas and then prunes out what isn't needed. While I haven't read any evidence that points to schizophrenics as having problems with this, I could easily see it being one. Where their brain connects everything to everything else in a jumble which sucks for living a normal life but has massive predictive potential. In the past many cultures seemed to incorporate these differences into society and while it wasn't all sunshine and lolipops I do wonder how many seers, priests and oracles would have been jailed and lobotomized by 19th century medicine.

Originally Posted by lisarea

But they're also super-common among people with other types of mental illness, and a lot of people with no diagnosable mental illness at all. It's actually really, really common for children in particular to hear voices, like according to some, 14% common.

I would guess this as more like 25% or higher as the stigma associated with hearing voices keeps most people silent, and for good reason since stating "I hear voices" is the quickest way to get rubber stamped as insane and dangerous, many manuals rate this as the only thing required to label someone as schitzo and lock them up.

I've heard voices both as a kid and an adult. They were overall fleeting and nothing like what schizophrenics report. The content of the voices seem to be much more important a diagnostic than their existence. Schizophrenia produces negative voices with a large emotional component that speaks directly to the suffer, where as unrelated voice hearing seems much more arbitrary and to have little significance.

While it's rather dry, Oliver Sack's book "Hallucinations" (which I mentioned in the reading thread) is a rather interesting catalog of all types of naturally occurring hallucinations as reported by his patients. It seemed that how society might treat them was 10x scarier to most of his patients than the actual hallucinations.

[Qingdai]

I've been treating a fair number of people with various mental health issues over the last several years at the various free/homeless clinics I work at, I can't imagine wanting to make them feel any more socially undesirable. Most of the problems or exacerbations of their symptoms are caused by stress, social and internal. Many of them have issues because of stigmatization of their sexuality or just plain being not typical.

As my son tells everyone who calls him weird, "normal is just the state you are."

[Ari]

Lead to this by the Seizure music but I thought it fit better here,
Hearing Voices - Music and The Brain - Stanford
The 2013 Music and Brain Symposium - April 12-13, 2013, Stanford University
And they recorded the presentations!
I just started watching them but so far it's fascinating.

[maddog]

One of the things I really disliked about the film, "A Beautiful Mind," is that it never seemed authentic to me ... NOT how schizophrenic people actually experience the world. truth in advertising: I don't have long-term or chronic exposure to schizophrenic people, but I have had slight personal and quite a bit of vicarious contact with schizophrenics as clients and as people who came into the criminal justice system. I've read a lot of medical reports. I also know someone who had a schizophrenic brother who committed suicide. It's hard to explain to others when it's never depicted correctly.

#2951

[The Man]

Bumped for this insightful Cracked piece. Some of the comments are worth reading too (I recommend looking at the top-voted ones).

Warning: it's Cracked - you may spend several hours sucked into their site if you don't watch it.

[Qingdai]

That's pretty on for voluntary admissions. In my case, I committed my mother twice because she was threatening my father and I (her illness started becoming markedly worse when I was 6, by the time I was 13 it stopped, which is weird). Her memory of being committed and my memory of visiting her was markedly different.
Even weirder, she completely denies having been mentally ill, and calls it "a vacation." Meanwhile I have memories of her hallucinations, catatonia, and chasing me out of the house with a fire iron.

[The Man]

The Way We Live Now: ‘Policing’ the Mentally Ill

I certainly don't see any way this could backfire

[lisarea]

Nothing Is Wrong: Women, Mental Illness, and Medication

I think this goes nicely with this reading assignment I posted a couple days ago THAT ALL OF YOU HURT MY FEELINGS REALLY BAD BY NOT READING even though it was very, very good:

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain | VQR Online

Now if you'll all excuse me, I'm going to go bump a bunch of old thrads with zingers about what dumbasses you are.

[The Man]

10 Comics That Can Help You Understand Mental Illness

I haven't read any of the others, but the Hyperbole and a Half one is a classic. I'll probably look at most/all of the others later.

[The Man]

It's bad in the U.K. too: 40% of jobless people have had symptoms of mental illness as a direct result of unemployment. Trigger warning for self-harm and suicidal urges etc.

[Nullifidian]

And speaking of trigger warnings, these have been the topic du jour for about the last month. Trigger warnings are infantilizing students, corrupting the university system, and eroding academic freedom if you believe the reactionary ranters from the National Review to the New York Times. The response has been so wildly out of proportion that something else is clearly going on, and XOJane tells us what it is.

[AynMisesLibertarian]

"mental illness" are mostly excuse that people who are not productive enough under capitalism and a market economics to justify they existence beyond mere survival standard uses to justify free handouts or "I want socialism since capitalism oppress me "

[Crumb]

Same for "physical illness".