Mental disorders deserve their own thrad

[Watser?]

Speaking of free handouts, where's our €200, you mooching moocher with your mooching ways?

[Dingfod]

Because everyone with a mental illness seeks government monies.



Not.

[S.Vashti]

I've been reading the this and that over trigger warnings, and while I don't find them "necessary" I actually like them and use them to avoid topics I don't want to think about at the moment. So I don't see what the harm in them is, nor do I think that people that don't use them are thoughtless cads. They are more like useful little tags about topics, that help winnow calls for my attention.

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by AynMisesLibertarian

"mental illness" are mostly excuse that people who are not productive enough under capitalism and a market economics to justify they existence

Are you still living in your parent's basement?
Working at your parent's business?
Standing by to inherit when they die?

Remind me:
What were you saying about mentally ill people not being productive enough to justify their own existence?

[The Man]

Toni Braxton: God gave my son autism because I once had an abortion

That's it, humanity. I'm done.

Cue Farnsworth meme

[Dingfod]

What a cruel god she worships.

[The Man]

Fuck you, PETA.

Not the Ducks! – PETA Flops on to the Autism Quackery Bandwagon » A Million Gods

[lisarea]

This is the fuckest fuck that ever fucked.

Should a Mental Illness Mean You Lose Your Kid? - ProPublica

[lpetrich]

Originally Posted by 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 "

What would you consider acceptable evidence to the contrary? Payment from a drug company that sells drugs for treating mental illnesses?

[Stormlight]

"nepotism" are mostly excuse that people who are not productive enough under capitalism and a market economics to justify mere survival standard uses to justify free handouts.

Good lord, it physically hurts to type that gobbledeegook.

[Watser?]

Originally Posted by lisarea

This is the fuckest fuck that ever fucked.

Should a Mental Illness Mean You Lose Your Kid? - ProPublica

So there is now a 'future crime' department I take it?

[lisarea]

When they make every effort to keep children with their parents even when there's been a actual crime. If you beat or neglect your child, the state will provide resources to address the issue and try to reunite the family. But if you have a mental illness, it's just a given that they take your kid away because you might decide to go off your meds at some point?

Also, you kind of have to wonder if they'd be so gung ho about removing kids who were older or otherwise difficult to place. They're taking (apparently) healthy babies, but what if those kids had been older when social services took notice?

[Angakuk]

Mental disorders deserve their own thrad?

That's just crazy.

[JoeP]

You are!

Oh, and welcome to the thread.

[lisarea]

This is a pretty good article, and I really like how it sort of addresses the whole nebulous nature of what we do and don't consider mental illness. People beg that question far too often.

My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

[The Man]

It's pretty cool how we just dump people with mental illnesses in prison where there isn't any way for them to actually get better.

This dude gets life in prison, while the dude he killed killed 160 people and got a movie made about him for it. What a country.

[The Man]

In case anyone was wondering, Chris Christie is still a terrible human being.

In a move that would cut the population of New Jersey's three publicly run psychiatric hospitals by 30 percent, the Christie administration has given community mental health providers an ultimatum: Find new places to live for 430 patients by March 16, or the state won't pay you.

[lisarea]

The Most Popular Antidepressants Are Based On An Outdated Theory [UPDATED]

[Ari]

Oow, the updated version is a bit better.

Unfortunately even the article simplifies it a bit. There's not a single serotonin level in the brain as there are multiple types of serotonin receptors, drugs can target specific sets or groups of these receptors and not every serotonin network does the same thing. A good example of this is that despite all of this talk about mood and emotions it might surprise you to know that the visual cortex has many serotonin receptors (or it might surprise you less if you've ever taken a tryptamine based psychedelic). Modern research into brain structure shows that there's a lot of interplay between excitation and inhibition. It's entirely possible that depression can be caused both by not enough serotonin in some areas and yet too much serotonin in others. An overactive inhibiting network could cause the same effect as an under active one. In fact shutting off an inhibitor seems to be part of the way psychedelics work, allowing other systems to go into an active feedback loop and go crazy. While the article was right that the chemical imbalance theory was just kinda guessed at and drugs made for it, it has solid evidence backing it up. Of course the other problem is that depression is most likely way more complicated than that with multiple causes and many drugs may be failing patients not because they don't work but because they aren't treating the right disease.

To repeat basically what I posted there, one of the reasons SSRIs were developed in the first place was because research was stopped on promising drugs like LSD, Psilocybin, etc. Which showed good results in therapy but unfortunately they also get you high and made you like jazz and the government hates jazz. Beyond the entertainment value I don't think it's a coincidence that multiple cultures around the world found their own variation on psychedelics that modified the amount of certain brain chemicals.

[The Man]

The controversy at Mount St. Mary’s goes national after professors are fired - The Washington Post

The campus newspaper, The Mountain Echo, wrote in January that Newman had pushed a plan to dismiss 20 to 25 freshmen early in the academic year — before the deadline for submitting enrollment data to the government in late September. That could theoretically lead to an improvement in a school’s federal retention data, because those who might have left school without graduating would not ever have been counted in the first place. In order to help identify struggling students, a survey was given to all freshmen.

In an email exchange, obtained by the Post, some professors expressed concern about the survey, and one shared with colleagues some questions he said were from the survey that troubled him, given that the survey was not confidential and would be used to judge students. It included questions such as:

“How often were each of the following things true in the last week?:

I felt depressed.
I felt that I could not shake the blues, even with the help of family and friends.
I thought my life had been a failure.
I felt that people disliked me.”

Two professors who objected to this were fired.

Be Very Quiet. They're Culling Rabbits. - Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money

Every time an institution takes advantage of its position of power to extract information about mental illness, and then uses that to hurt them, it teaches people with mental illness that it is dangerous to ask for help. Universities in particular have a duty of care to their students. Some incoming freshman are still legally minors who have left their home to reside in college dorms. It is just viciously irresponsible to teach teenagers that their university might be planning on using a disclosure of depression against them. Further, I am just a simple caveblogger, and not a lawyer, but this seems like an ADA violation to me.

And as one of the commenters points out:

In addition, it seems as if the university is asking this question of students in the middle of a particularly fraught transition. “Viciously irresponsible” might actually understate the case.

[JoeP]

That news makes me feel depressed. Strongly agree
That news makes me feel that those people in particular dislike me. Strongly agree
I feel like injuring someone in that administration. Prefer not to answer

[The Man]

Follow-up to my previous story: lol bye-bye asshole

[The Man]

I want to discuss briefly my own personal experiences with mental disorders and then at greater length discuss the president*.

I've been diagnosed at various points of my life with "components of obsessive-compulsive disorder", attention deficit hyperactive disorder, what was then described as Asperger syndrome (now revised to autism-spectrum disorder), acute stress disorder (which, as often occurs, metastasised into posttraumatic stress disorder), and depression. I would describe the latter two, very literally, as mental illnesses. They are cases of the brain simply not functioning correctly. This doesn't mean I was incapable of perceiving reality, nor that I had no control over my actions whatsoever. It does mean that my brain was not perceiving reality in an accurate fashion and it also means that I had reduced capacity to perform various everyday tasks.

I've spoken at length about autism spectrum disorder before. The neurodiversity movement overstates its case; there are certainly aspects of it that qualify as a disorder, starting with the difficulty most of its sufferers face in performing everyday tasks. However, the movement also raises valid points that many issues that are frequently blamed on people with the disorder are simply results of different ways of perceiving the world and are not, ultimately, cases of maladjustment to the external world; they are, at worst, cases of maladjustment to American society particularly. This is particularly true of issues such as introversion, differing body language and methods of communication, different social preferences, and so on.

I'm still not 100% certain what the "components of obsessive-compulsive disorder" diagnosis actually means, and the last time I underwent brain scans for a professional diagnosis, it wasn't brought back up. Sometimes I honestly suspect that they had figured out that I had autism-spectrum disorder and simply didn't want to use that exact term to describe me because it might have a greater stigma, so they wanted to give me a euphemistic diagnosis. In any case, I apparently didn't find out about the autism-spectrum disorder diagnosis until long after it was made, because someone "didn't want to burden me with too many labels". Given that autism-spectrum disorder has caused me by far the most trouble of any of these conditions (and that at least my depression was in no small part a direct result of autism-spectrum disorder), I'm still a bit hacked off about that.

I don't know if I'd qualify ADHD as a mental disorder. To be honest, it's caused me almost no suffering over the course of my life; once I was medicated, I faced very little difficulty from it. I suspect that, had I not been diagnosed with the disorder and been given medication, I would have suffered much greater difficulty from it.

But that's enough about me. Unmedicated ADHD often results in a person having difficulty staying focused (particularly on tasks one finds unpleasant), flitting from thought to thought, behaving inappropriately for one's age, and cause problems in at least two personal settings. The president* seems a textbook case of undiagnosed ADHD.

Dr. Allen Frances, the author of the diagnosis for narcissistic personality disorder, has discussed the president* at length. Frances' conclusion is that the president* exhibits most of the symptoms of NPD and is completely unsuited for the office he occupies, but is not a case of NPD himself. He is "absolutely a world-class narcissist," but does not meet the diagnostic criteria for the disorder because "you have to have... significant distress or impairment".

I would push back against this specific objection. The president* is a miserable, angry human being. He rages that he lost the popular vote by three million. He rages that Obama's inauguration crowd size was larger than his. He rages that he has a low approval rating. He rages that he's been incapable of generating a single significant legislative accomplishment. He rages that he doesn't get unanimous praise for his disastrous responses to natural disasters. He rages that Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert make fun of him. He rages at CNN. He rages at NBC. He rages over slights on Twitter. He is a consistently angry person who doesn't appear to derive enjoyment from much of his life; apart from rallies, he doesn't actually seem to like any part of his existence.

So I can't agree with the argument that he's not suffering emotionally - in fact, the fact that he is has been one of the few things giving me comfort about his presidency*. And the thing is, most of this is a direct consequence of his own actions. He doesn't have any legislative accomplishments because he's a boorish bully who thinks that empty threats and bluster will buy off legislators. He has a low approval rating (and lost the popular vote) because he's a sexual predator who is temperamentally unfit for the office he occupies and whose policies are directly harmful to his constituents. He gets made fun of for those reasons plus the fact that his skin is thinner than his hands are small and it's hilarious. And so on.

And then there's the second aspect, the professional damage. At first glance he would seem to have done pretty well for himself; he's seemingly wealthy, and he got "elected", for a certain definition of the term, president*. But is he all that wealthy? We haven't seen his tax returns, so we don't know for sure. There has been speculation that he's in hock to the Russians up to his eyeballs for debt he owes them. Certainly, he's a much greater failure as a businessman than he wants people to believe. He's been responsible for a vast number of products - Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Magazine, Trump Mortgages, and so on - that were abysmal failures, some of which display spectacularly poor judgement (starting a mortgage company in, IIRC, 2006 suggests an almost unbelievable misreading of the economic tea leaves). He managed to bankrupt not one but four casinos. And so on.

Some financial reporters have suggested that the reason he's done so much business with Russia has been that no one else will give him loans because they don't see him as a worthy credit risk. That certainly sounds feasible. The Steele dossier, which I have reported on in the dedicated president* thread, suggests that Russia also has blackmail material in the form of sexually explicit video footage; the intelligence community appears to have a consensus that more than one such videotape exists.

None of this by itself is sufficient for a NPD diagnosis, and to be clear, I don't think mere NPD has sufficient explanatory power for the president*. My reading is malignant narcissism, which is essentially what you get when you cross NPD, antisocial personality disorder, paranoia, and aggressive sadism. (This isn't an official diagnosis in the current DSM, but it's been around as an unofficial one since at least the '60s, having been coined by Erich Fromm.) This is where you get, for example, the vindictive knee-jerk reactions against anything Obama was responsible for; to my understanding, simple NPD doesn't explain that.

That said, Frances says something else that I largely agree with:

To lump Trump with the mentally ill is a tremendous insult to them. It stigmatizes them. Most people who are mentally ill are well meaning and well behaved, and really fine people. Trump is none of those. So that when we confuse mental illness with bad behavior, we, first of all, insult the mentally ill, and secondly, we underestimate just how evil Trump is and how dangerous.

But, at the same time, again, there's mental illness and there's mental illness. Trump may be suffering from a mental illness, but it isn't any mental illness. In the same way that the vast majority of mental disorders actually make a person less likely to perpetrate a violent crime and likelier to be the victim of one, but a few specific mental disorders prove exceptions, malignant narcissism is destructive to those around a sufferer of the disorder in ways the vast majority of mental illnesses are not.

At the same time, a mental disorder is not an excuse, because people are not merely their diagnoses. There are mental disorders, and there's simply being an asshole. In the particular case of malignant narcissism, it's not actually clear how much is one and how much is the other. Trump is not merely a textbook malignant narcissist; he's a serial sexual predator who displays habitual indifference to whether he tells the truth, who seems to place most of his effort into ruining the lives of those he thinks have slighted him. He's intellectually incurious, thinks he's far more capable than he is, thinks other people are far less capable than they are, hasn't read a book in at least twenty years, might not even be functionally literate, spends an inordinate amount of his time watching at the TV and yelling at it or golfing. Like many other prominent GOP politicians, he's a textbook case of psychological projection; nearly everything he accuses political opponents of doing is either something he's already done or something he would do given the opportunity.

And all this is also complicated by the fact that he's not merely an apparently textbook case of malignant narcissism. He's also showing signs of dementia. His verbal decline over the past twenty years has been well documented elsewhere and I don't feel the need to rehash it here; if anything, it's gotten visibly worse since he took the office of the presidency. Beyond that, he also displays many symptoms of a drug abuser. Several people have speculated that he might be a cocaine user, and while I won't rule this out, I do think diet pills are a likelier culprit; they have similar side effects, and one of his past doctors was noted for overprescribing them (and, in fact, was reported as having prescribed them to Trump). Unsourced rumours have suggested he's on phentermine.

Frances does raise one further point: some great leaders have indeed had mental illnesses. I'm ambivalent about Churchill; I'm grateful for his leadership during WWII but he was responsible for plenty of colonial atrocities. But the example of Lincoln is difficult to dispute. Lincoln suffered depression, and he was also unquestionably the greatest American president. But - again - depression is a completely different variety of mental illness from malignant narcissism.

All of this is to say that the president* shouldn't be written off as a case of mental illness, and attributing all his behaviour to mental illness is grossly unfair to the mentally ill - but at the same time, ruling mental illness out as a possible contributing factor to at least some of his behaviour also seems like it's not engaging objectively with reality. The president* can be called a lot of things. A mentally stable, well-adjusted individual is not one of them. As a person who themselves has experienced several mental illnesses and is still dealing off and on with a couple of them, the last thing I want is for the mentally ill to suffer more stigma in society as a result of association with such a fundamentally repulsive excuse for a human being. But at the same time, if we end up suffering a nuclear apocalypse over a Twitter insult, all our concerns about stigma will end up fairly insignificant in the long run. If the president* is mentally ill in a way that damages the office, the country, or the world, we need to engage honestly with that.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by The Man

So I can't agree with the argument that he's not suffering emotionally - in fact, the fact that he is has been one of the few things giving me comfort about his presidency*.

Yes.

And the thing is, most of this is a direct consequence of his own actions. He doesn't have any legislative accomplishments because he's a boorish bully who thinks that empty threats and bluster will buy off legislators.

That's part of it, but not the biggest part.

The biggest reasons he doesn't have any legislative accomplishments are:
1. he reflexively opposes everything Obama did, which prevents him from considering some courses of action and legislation that would be popular (particularly when a white man is doing them)
2. he doesn't care about the details of policy or what people's needs are, which means he is willing to delegate the totality of the policy decisions to someone else
3. The Congressional GOP is the only thing protecting him from much more brutal investigations. Collusion with Russia is not the only thing you could investigate him for, it's simply the one that has the most traction and the GOP has the least ability to protect him from. Due to some of the stunning revelations that demand action, many of which are due to media investigations. They could force him to release his taxes. The media has a harder time getting ahold of those because the IRS apparently is quite good at keeping them under wraps (and his accountants I guess must be pretty loyal or whatever). They could investigate him for violating the emoluments clause. They could investigate him for sexual harassment if they really wanted to. I'm not sure how aware of this Trump is, how completely they could ruin him if they so chose. It might be that he picked a team and he sticks with his team. But he's not very loyal, so I dunno.

Anyway, the result of #1 is that he cares more about repealing Obamacare than passing good legislation. This wouldn't be a big problem if he concluded that he could pass a relatively popular set of policies and claim that they're enough change that Obamacare is dead. It would take some work, but he might be able to put together a majority if he wasn't that concerned with which party the votes came from. But because of #2, he has no interest to figure out or, frankly, ability to discern what good policies are. So he delegates it to someone else. This wouldn't be fatal if he, say, delegated the writing of the replacement to Chuck Schumer, or Nancy Pelosi, or Bernie Sanders, or even to some extent someone like Susan Collins. Instead, because of #3, he delegated to Paul Ryan - the cold-eyed granny-starving Ayn Rand acolyte who would rather poor children starve than rich people pay 1% more in taxes - and to Mitch McConnell, a cynical political operator who cares less about the content of policy than Ryan, but is still in thrall to wealthy right-wing ideologues and so was unwilling to do anything bipartisan. And the result was a despised bill that was politically toxic and probably lowered Trump's approval rating significantly.

They almost succeeded in spite of how unpopular the bill was, and Trump's bullying might have cost him Murkowski's and/or McCain's vote. But if he had proposed a good bill, or simply said we should work on other issues first, it might have not mattered.

Anyway, on immigration and taxes, we will likely see some similar dynamics play out. Trump said some things during the campaign that might be the reason he won. Saying no cuts to Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security might have swung enough votes. But he's going to let Paul Ryan try to fulfill his dream of poor children dying of preventable disease and destitute elderly living off cat food, and he doesn't give a shit about those promises.

The results may again be politically toxic bills that can't pass.

Now, #3 means that the GOP might really fuck him up if he proposes big tax increases on the rich. But he could probably force them to go along with somewhat better policy if he had the interest (and ability to identify good policy). He could limit the tax cuts, and push for them to benefit the poor and middle class more. He could probably bring the party along on some form of immigration reform, because his racist bonafides are not in question.

But, at the same time, again, there's mental illness and there's mental illness. Trump may be suffering from a mental illness, but it isn't any mental illness. In the same way that the vast majority of mental disorders actually make a person less likely to perpetrate a violent crime and likelier to be the victim of one, but a few specific mental disorders prove exceptions, malignant narcissism is destructive to those around a sufferer of the disorder in ways the vast majority of mental illnesses are not.

Right, it seems like it's accurate to describe Trump has having disordered and delusional thinking, and that seems like a type of mental disorder.

It seems more like there's a problem in our language, that we can't talk about that kind of distorted perception of reality when it primarily harms others, and not the person who has it. Serial killers might be happy with themselves, but obviously there's something wrong with them. People call them crazy as a result. But it's obviously not the same as schizophrenia or something like that.

[Qingdai]

George Orwell had a great essay about politics and language. I'm just going to leave it here
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible."