Thu Aug 11, 2005 12:30 am   Reply with quote      

There are a lot of books written for mental illness patients. Does reading these books actually help cure their illness?

Thu Aug 11, 2005 1:08 am   Reply with quote      

Question is... how drugged-up should they be when they read them? Should they be totally zombified? Or just sedated?

Thu Aug 11, 2005 1:29 am   Reply with quote      

Suppose that they are not taking any medicine while they read. Is reading helpful?

Thu Aug 11, 2005 5:12 pm   Reply with quote      

I would think it could be, assuming the reader actually wants to read what he's reading. Can be fun to get involved in a good story sometimes... take your mind off other things.

As far as I'm concerned, mental illness is a myth. The trouble is, where do we draw the lines with what's to be considered normal behaviour and abnormal?
If you were to do a tribal raindance in the middle of the night on the streets of New York city, you might be thought of as mad.
However, if you did this in a reservation alongside fellow raindancers, this behaviour would be considered normal. Get the idea?

So what's normal behaviour after all? We're all different, individual, and beautiful in our own way. Why try to put us into only two different compartments? Why label people because they don't behave the way we expect them to?
Labelling is dangerous! The worst thing you can do to a human in this regard, is to make him believe he has something wrong with his mind. How degrading and rude!

Thu Aug 11, 2005 5:18 pm   Reply with quote      

Do you think that there is any definition of abnormal behavior? Serial killer, for example. I don't call that he/she has mental illness, but isn't it fair to assume that there is something wrong with the mind of serial killer?

Thu Aug 11, 2005 5:37 pm   Reply with quote      

There may very well be something wrong with his reasoning, which is related to a lifetime of inputs (education, upbringing, society).
Somebody who is antisocial, is in my opinion, someone who has been rejected by his surrounding society, and is reacting to that.

(Physical brain damage is a different thing altogether, and this is not something treatable by cloud-nine-drugs.)

Thu Aug 11, 2005 5:51 pm   Reply with quote      

I want to step back and reference information related to what you said about mental illness and how it can be defined by one's perception.

Controversy over its nature

The subject is profoundly controversial. For example, homosexuality was once considered such an "illness" (see DSM-II), and this perception varies with cultural bias and theory of conduct.

Neurochemical studies have proven that there are systemic lacks of certain neurotransmitters in the brains of certain individuals. Also, some structural differences between brains of people with behavioral differences can be detected in brain scans. Some mental illnesses tend to run in families, and there have also been strongly suggestive, but not conclusive, links between certain genes and particular mental disorders. Routine tests for these conditions are, however, not generally required for prescription of drugs, and are not always employed in law either.

It is not clear whether these differences in brain chemistry are the cause or the result of mental disorders. Traumatic life experiences may exceed an individual's coping ability and result in lasting changes in brain chemistry. Patterns of learned behavior can also alter brain chemistry, for better or for worse. Cognitive behavior therapy focuses on changing patterns of thinking through learning, which may ultimately restore so-termed "healthy" brain chemistry.

Drug therapies for severe mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and clinical depression, which are consistent with biochemical models, have been remarkably effective, and there are reports of increasingly effective treatments for schizophrenia. Some argue that drugs merely mask the symptoms of mental suffering by physically crippling the brain's emotional response system. Studies have shown that many patients' symptoms return once drug treatment is ceased. Others reply that many physical conditions, such as diabetes, must also be controlled with use of medications for an indefinite period of time.

It is important to note that the existence of mental illness and the legitimacy of the psychiatric profession are not universally accepted. Some professionals, notably Doctor Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Syracuse, are profoundly opposed to the practice of labelling "mental illness" as such. The anti-psychiatry movement often refers to what it considers to be the "myth of mental illness" and argues against a biological origin for mental disorders, or else suggests that all human experience has a biological origin and so no pattern of behavior can be classified as an illness per se.

Other arguments against psychiatry include controversial treatments, such as Electroconvulsive therapy, or the practice of placing patients in a mental institution with other mentally ill people. This does much to increase the emotional stress levels of the patient by influence of the other patients, causing the mental illness to worsen.

See the topics anti-psychiatry and causes of mental illness for a fuller treatment of these topics.

The document was originally published at Wikipedia and the document is licensed under GNU Free Document License. If you'd like to find out more about Mental illness, you might be interested in visiting this page in Wikipedia.

Ok, here's a question. Do you think that long term drug abuse and other substance abuse like alcoholism can damage one's brain permanently? Also can this cause one to exhibit symptoms of mental illness?

Thu Aug 11, 2005 6:08 pm   Reply with quote      

I think they label that "Alcohol Induced Psychosis"? You might seem off your rocker for a while, but you're by no means mad for it, I think.

Thomas Szasz. Have you read any of his books? I can recommend "The Manufacture of Madness".

And yes, the treatments have always been rather cruel! Hear about the head banging machines? Chaining people to poles & walls? Psychiatry really has a bad history!

Thu Aug 11, 2005 6:19 pm   Reply with quote      

Is this it, "The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement"?

(BTW, I heard that the book store linked is a really good book store ...)

Thu Aug 11, 2005 6:25 pm   Reply with quote      

That's the one! Very good reading.

It's strange actually how we can create evidence for things we want to prove. His analogies to The Inquisition witch hunts highlight this very well. well written & easy to follow.