Mental Illness Getting Bad Press Again
Question:
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Has anyone seen the news stories on TV about the Ohio sniper ? Every story I see emphasizes that the suspect has a mental illness. They just use the general term – mental illness. They don’t specify his diagnosis or if he has ever seen a psychiatrist. Yes. He might well be a sociopath. Or a bad case of bipolar who isn’t controlled. I just think the talking heads on TV give everyone with a mental illness a bad rap by generalizing the term – mental illness. Yes. But Margot Kidder admitted to having bipolar, Howard Stern to having OCD, many other media figures to clinical depression. So such things are more out in the open. It’s better known that things can be done for us. My wife tells me I’m not mentally ill. She herself has had clinical depression, 11 full years of it and many episodes before that! A while back, she told me, "You’re not mentally ill, you just don’t know how to relax." Which is what an anxiety disorder is. She means, I think, that I’m not schizophrenic – I don’t see things or hear voices. That’s what most people still think "mental illness" is. Sometimes I think language is the root of all evil…… Many, perhaps mosts, students of language would agree. They would also say that language is what makes us human, what separates us from the monkeys. Dennis
the term mental illness is a tricky one, one with much social stigma. I prefer to reserve it to those illness that are true to form dysfunctional ones like psychosis. This is not to say that anyone who suffers any disorder is not dysfunctional, but that those who suffer from a more pure form of illness like psychosis can truly be called mentally ill. I don’t like to stigmatize ocd patients by calling them ill-they are disordered, they may be dysfunctional but I do not see them as ill-their conditions may be managed, controlled and lived with productively. Those who have a severe form of pure illness can not. They are not socially rehabilitable, they may not be functional except on a basic level. It is not so much a matter of degree, but of type of condition. One can have an irritible bowel or bowel cancer, both are vastly different. As for a diagnosis of this fellow-it is impossible to do without first hand knowledge, but generally those who have bipolar disorders are not capable of commiting murder. Other crimes, usually of impulse control or of passion or so forth, yes. But this fellow has commited repeated premeditated acts of violence-he is by design antisocial or sociopathic-it may include some psychotic manifestations but his predominant feature is sociopathology. His brand of illness has little to do with those suffering, he does not suffer, he suffers others LM — The charter is available at:
