Yes, and that definition leads to a field that’s not productive at solving the problem.
Plenty of criticism surfaced in the wake of the DSM-5 which currently contains the official definitions for mental illnesses.
I’m aware. I do study psychology, although my personal passion is microbiology. The question Lumifer raised was if mental illness is really that common. It’s pretty hard to find any evidence saying it’s uncommon, and a LOT of evidence saying it’s common. I’m curious- from your comments here, you seem to have a differing point of view than I do. Could you explain what you think mental illness is, and your related opinions? I think that would lead to a more productive discussion.
I’m not sure that the term “mental illness” is pretty useful if your goal is to do change work. Part of the societal role of the term is to distinguish mental phenomena where it’s legal to take drugs to solve them from mental phenomena where it isn’t. To decide what insurance will pay for and where it won’t pay. Those concerns dictate how wide or narrow we have our net as to what constitutes “mental illness”.
If we talk about anxiety I’m not sure that “mental illness” is a good framing. Every healthy human being sometimes has anxiety. There might be some brain damage that prevents certain people from having anxiety, but it’s part of normal human functioning.
That means it’s useful to learn how to deal with anxiety in a productive fashion. There are a bunch of emotional management skills that are useful for everyone.
I know little about schizophrenia but my general impression is that it’s something that’s qualitatively very different from a phobia.
Anxiety transcends a normal thing and enters mental illness when it becomes pervasive and unreasonable. My anxiety about having used a wrong word in a conversation I had last year is unreasonable. My constant feeling of dread is unreasonable because I’m not constantly in a situation that should inspire dread. Mental illness is really hard to define properly- there always seems to be something left out, or something that’s implied to be illness when it isn’t.
Honestly, I feel like the discussion has been derailed a bit- we’re focusing on defining a very vague thing that we don’t understand yet. I can’t offer answers at to how we should define mental illness because that’s a question that would take years to answer. And it seems like one of those questions no one will ever agree on, either. As a utilitarian, I think mental illness is a thinking pattern that causes unhappiness or harm over a period of time, or that blocks someone from being able to view the world realistically. Someone else might have a different set of values that has an entirely different set of “bad thinking patterns.”
But people ARE suffering, we know that there ARE diseased thinking patterns, and we know that people want help. Maybe “mental illness” is a bad frame, but at the moment, do we really have another to work with? I don’t think so, which is why I think that this is an important question. All of the answers we’re getting are mysterious, and thus not answers.
Yes, I want to do change work, and I think that it’s impossible to do anything if we refuse to start helping because we don’t have a good frame yet. Sometimes you have to explore a problem for a while to even start to figure it out. We have an extremely flawed and basic understanding, and saying, “well, what can we do then?” is like throwing out a hypothesis because of one inconclusive experiment.
Anxiety transcends a normal thing and enters mental illness when it becomes pervasive and unreasonable.
If the thought of asking out a woman for a date raises anxiety in me I don’t care at all whether or not that’s “reasonable” or “normal”. It’s a trigger that I don’t want to have regardless of whether it’s classified as a mental illness.
Maybe “mental illness” is a bad frame, but at the moment, do we really have another to work with?
Yes. I have multiple different one’s.
In Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy an answer might be: “You have problems with anxiety and worry about what you said last year because you constantly feel that you have to prove that you exist. If you would have a strong feeling of existence, your issues with anxiety would simply clear.”
In NLP it might be: “There are a bunch of situation where you are ineffective triggers that produce unproductive emotions. Let’s do the Fast Phobia Cure on all of them and get done with the problem.”
Lefkoe Method would say: “You might have 40 limiting beliefs that produce that problem like “I’m not lovable”, let’s go and clear those beliefs by spending 30 minutes on each of them with the Lefkoe Method.”
I haven’t been at a CFAR workshop so I don’t know their exact answer, but part of it seems to be: “Let’s get clear about how our emotional desires differ from our intellectual one’s and train comfort zone extension.”
That’s no complete list.
But when we go back to how to discuss the issue on LW, framing the issue as being around anxiety is likely more productive than framing it as being about mental illnesses in general.
Interesting, I haven’t heard of most of these. When I get the chance I’ll have to do some research.
Anxiety CAN be a good response. The fear-response that anxiety basically is can be a good “oh crap, I’m in a bad situation here.” Getting nervous when asking someone out is uncomfortable and kinda useless. Getting nervous walking down a street at night when someone seems to be following you is normal, and helps you respond properly. The pervasiveness is a major part. If the anxiety is infringing on your life in a lot of useless ways, you probably have an anxiety problem. If a minor problem causes extreme fear, like an unbearable fear of close spaces, you might have a problem- almost everyone has to get in an elevator at some point, and having a panic attack because of it would be inconvenient and unpleasant.
Perhaps tackling specific problems at a time would be more effective. But considering the sheer number of kinds of problems here, I’m not sure. If I wanted to write a sequence on “general mental illness” (sorry, I’m going to continue using that phrase because it’s not confusing and it’s a good, simple term that doesn’t require a lot of terms and you all know what I mean), and wrote, say, one article per mental illness… Well, I could say goodbye to ever getting anything else done. The research alone would take a lifetime, just on what we know now. Writing something worth having on LessWrong is a pretty big endeavor.
Once again, the problem is the sheer complexity of the problem. If we only tackled the really common ones (depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc.) we might be able to do some good work, though.
The question Lumifer raised was if mental illness is really that common.
Not quite. I pointed out that mental illness can be defined in different ways (DSM was not brought back on stone tablets from Mount Sinai) and these different ways will give different answers about the prevalence of mental illness.
I should hope not, that would make me seriously question a good deal about history and biblicism. That’s very true, but narrowing the problem too much causes the same kinds of problems as opening it to everyone. If you give everyone with upcoming life changes a Xanax, you’re not letting them learn how to cope. If you refuse to help someone unless their illness is ruining their life, you’re letting a lot of people live seriously suboptimal lives. We don’t have a good entry barrier for determining if someone is mentally ill or not. We simply don’t know enough to make one.
Do you think that such an “entry point” could be discovered once and for all, an unchanging truth like a constant in physics, or do you think that the answer will always depend on who’s asking?
Yes, and that definition leads to a field that’s not productive at solving the problem. Plenty of criticism surfaced in the wake of the DSM-5 which currently contains the official definitions for mental illnesses.
I’m aware. I do study psychology, although my personal passion is microbiology. The question Lumifer raised was if mental illness is really that common. It’s pretty hard to find any evidence saying it’s uncommon, and a LOT of evidence saying it’s common. I’m curious- from your comments here, you seem to have a differing point of view than I do. Could you explain what you think mental illness is, and your related opinions? I think that would lead to a more productive discussion.
I’m not sure that the term “mental illness” is pretty useful if your goal is to do change work. Part of the societal role of the term is to distinguish mental phenomena where it’s legal to take drugs to solve them from mental phenomena where it isn’t. To decide what insurance will pay for and where it won’t pay. Those concerns dictate how wide or narrow we have our net as to what constitutes “mental illness”.
If we talk about anxiety I’m not sure that “mental illness” is a good framing. Every healthy human being sometimes has anxiety. There might be some brain damage that prevents certain people from having anxiety, but it’s part of normal human functioning.
That means it’s useful to learn how to deal with anxiety in a productive fashion. There are a bunch of emotional management skills that are useful for everyone.
I know little about schizophrenia but my general impression is that it’s something that’s qualitatively very different from a phobia.
Anxiety transcends a normal thing and enters mental illness when it becomes pervasive and unreasonable. My anxiety about having used a wrong word in a conversation I had last year is unreasonable. My constant feeling of dread is unreasonable because I’m not constantly in a situation that should inspire dread. Mental illness is really hard to define properly- there always seems to be something left out, or something that’s implied to be illness when it isn’t.
Honestly, I feel like the discussion has been derailed a bit- we’re focusing on defining a very vague thing that we don’t understand yet. I can’t offer answers at to how we should define mental illness because that’s a question that would take years to answer. And it seems like one of those questions no one will ever agree on, either. As a utilitarian, I think mental illness is a thinking pattern that causes unhappiness or harm over a period of time, or that blocks someone from being able to view the world realistically. Someone else might have a different set of values that has an entirely different set of “bad thinking patterns.”
But people ARE suffering, we know that there ARE diseased thinking patterns, and we know that people want help. Maybe “mental illness” is a bad frame, but at the moment, do we really have another to work with? I don’t think so, which is why I think that this is an important question. All of the answers we’re getting are mysterious, and thus not answers.
Yes, I want to do change work, and I think that it’s impossible to do anything if we refuse to start helping because we don’t have a good frame yet. Sometimes you have to explore a problem for a while to even start to figure it out. We have an extremely flawed and basic understanding, and saying, “well, what can we do then?” is like throwing out a hypothesis because of one inconclusive experiment.
If the thought of asking out a woman for a date raises anxiety in me I don’t care at all whether or not that’s “reasonable” or “normal”. It’s a trigger that I don’t want to have regardless of whether it’s classified as a mental illness.
Yes. I have multiple different one’s.
In Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy an answer might be: “You have problems with anxiety and worry about what you said last year because you constantly feel that you have to prove that you exist. If you would have a strong feeling of existence, your issues with anxiety would simply clear.”
In NLP it might be: “There are a bunch of situation where you are ineffective triggers that produce unproductive emotions. Let’s do the Fast Phobia Cure on all of them and get done with the problem.”
Lefkoe Method would say: “You might have 40 limiting beliefs that produce that problem like “I’m not lovable”, let’s go and clear those beliefs by spending 30 minutes on each of them with the Lefkoe Method.”
I haven’t been at a CFAR workshop so I don’t know their exact answer, but part of it seems to be: “Let’s get clear about how our emotional desires differ from our intellectual one’s and train comfort zone extension.”
That’s no complete list.
But when we go back to how to discuss the issue on LW, framing the issue as being around anxiety is likely more productive than framing it as being about mental illnesses in general.
Interesting, I haven’t heard of most of these. When I get the chance I’ll have to do some research.
Anxiety CAN be a good response. The fear-response that anxiety basically is can be a good “oh crap, I’m in a bad situation here.” Getting nervous when asking someone out is uncomfortable and kinda useless. Getting nervous walking down a street at night when someone seems to be following you is normal, and helps you respond properly. The pervasiveness is a major part. If the anxiety is infringing on your life in a lot of useless ways, you probably have an anxiety problem. If a minor problem causes extreme fear, like an unbearable fear of close spaces, you might have a problem- almost everyone has to get in an elevator at some point, and having a panic attack because of it would be inconvenient and unpleasant.
Perhaps tackling specific problems at a time would be more effective. But considering the sheer number of kinds of problems here, I’m not sure. If I wanted to write a sequence on “general mental illness” (sorry, I’m going to continue using that phrase because it’s not confusing and it’s a good, simple term that doesn’t require a lot of terms and you all know what I mean), and wrote, say, one article per mental illness… Well, I could say goodbye to ever getting anything else done. The research alone would take a lifetime, just on what we know now. Writing something worth having on LessWrong is a pretty big endeavor.
Once again, the problem is the sheer complexity of the problem. If we only tackled the really common ones (depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc.) we might be able to do some good work, though.
Not quite. I pointed out that mental illness can be defined in different ways (DSM was not brought back on stone tablets from Mount Sinai) and these different ways will give different answers about the prevalence of mental illness.
Oh, sorry. I misunderstood.
I should hope not, that would make me seriously question a good deal about history and biblicism. That’s very true, but narrowing the problem too much causes the same kinds of problems as opening it to everyone. If you give everyone with upcoming life changes a Xanax, you’re not letting them learn how to cope. If you refuse to help someone unless their illness is ruining their life, you’re letting a lot of people live seriously suboptimal lives. We don’t have a good entry barrier for determining if someone is mentally ill or not. We simply don’t know enough to make one.
Do you think that such an “entry point” could be discovered once and for all, an unchanging truth like a constant in physics, or do you think that the answer will always depend on who’s asking?
It’s possible we could. I certainly hope so. But it’s such a complex question that, at the least, we probably can’t have a simple universal answer.
I sometime do have some reservations against what happens in psychology departments, but I don’t think they are completely hopeless.
You could start a self help group with fellow psychology students. It would likely be a more productive road then seeking help on the internet.
There are various CBT techniques in the literature for dealing with anxiety that you can do as peer training.
You might even use the daily gratitude sharing exercise in such a group.