Mental Illness

[IrisAlthea]

I’ve seen people live miserably and even dying because they self-medicated to handle things that could have been treated way better if we had talked about things like that more, back then.
Where I worked while at university I saw people who had been locked away and medicated into zombies for most of their lives as a treatmen for mental health issues.
Given that, I think mental health issues are handled way better these days.

I do think there is a tendency to interpret normal life issues, like teenage angst or grief, as something abnormal, as if happiness was the norm.
I think that can be problematic too but I think it’s just a symptom of a society where everything has to have a smooth, glossy finish and everyone has to be happy and bring their A-game every minute of every hour and everything is generally for the best in the best of possible worlds.

 

[ace195008]

Yep, having ADHD and HFA (High Functioning Autism) all my life , I am now 70 , but some Doctors don’t deal well with for example my diagnosis. My neurologist is great my the internist now so much. Also after being in the software business for 40 yrs , I found certain cultures had problems with ADHD and HFA…

 

[Ssbbw4u1974]

Interesting article on BPD ...

 

[Bramblethorn]

“Mental illness” / “Mental health” are heavily promoted buzzwords that were rarely heard a decade or two ago.

Not really, no. They've been getting gradually more common in use for several decades. They're a bit more common now than ten years ago, but not drastically so: https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

If you weren't hearing them ten years ago, that's probably more to do with what you were listening to than with people not using them.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I do think there is a tendency to interpret normal life issues, like teenage angst or grief, as something abnormal, as if happiness was the norm.
I think that can be problematic too but I think it’s just a symptom of a society where everything has to have a smooth, glossy finish and everyone has to be happy and bring their A-game every minute of every hour and everything is generally for the best in the best of possible worlds.

There is also an issue that we don't have a good framework for dealing with "different but not bad" conditions. Things like autism and ADHD get shoehorned into a system designed for classifying and treating disease, when this isn't always a helpful way to frame it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Yep, having ADHD and HFA (High Functioning Autism) all my life , I am now 70 ,

Need to update your sig!

 

[emme8]

There is also an issue that we don't have a good framework for dealing with "different but not bad" conditions. Things like autism and ADHD get shoehorned into a system designed for classifying and treating disease, when this isn't always a helpful way to frame it.

Yes. I understand that labels make it easier to get a generalization of things. But we are too quick to look at a label and think we "know"
I'm bipolar, don't expect that I behave like everyone else with it. And definitely don't look at someone else with the same diagnosis and judge them by what you think you know about me.

 

[ace195008]

Emma, I wished there was something else besides labels for various conditions, people judge instead of evaluating …

 

[IrisAlthea]

There is also an issue that we don't have a good framework for dealing with "different but not bad" conditions. Things like autism and ADHD get shoehorned into a system designed for classifying and treating disease, when this isn't always a helpful way to frame it.

Yup.
There is a lot of medicalizing both mental and physical treats, that don’t fit well into today’s society or really just because they bug some people.

 

[BiBunny]

My thoughts are, until you've had the uniquely horrifying experience of feeling like your body/mind apparatus has been turned into a flesh mech piloted by demons bound on inflicting as much damage as possible to body, mind, and relationships, I don't really give that much of a fuck about your opinion on whether or not mental illness is real.