I think that deep down, mental illness is not really accepted as something real. We tend to believe in free will and how people are responsible for their own actions, and we tend to apply this to the mentally ill too, and this is exactly why free will is a flawed concept.
As long as we do not conceive that mental illness is a thing, we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition, so they will just be a burden to themselves and others.
I always relate with human beings knowing they can make errors because of their mental process or even their mental issues, even mild. Lurking on certain subreddits like JusticeServed, I can often see how some people in the US believe in capital punishment and have literally no mercy towards faulty but natural human behavior. I don't live in the US, so I might be biased, but I'm surprised how people can have such hard belief in free will ("you can make it if you want" etc).
That's a deep rabbit hole. What about the will of those on JusticeServed? Were they free to decide to be on that?
As a naive young person, I hoped that a metal illness was just that, an illness that can be cured.
After discovering mine, the curtain was pulled back, revealing the 'trick' all along behind the illusion of cure, was just suppression. Bacteria are killed, sometimes Viruses too. But thoughts, and feelings cannot be cured or killed, they must be suppressed.
For 'Free Will', one should be free to control one's will.
I can't pass through doors in the first try, or the 20th, sometimes when I'm by myself.
Some people cower right before a fight they've prepared for, for months, they knew fight day was coming.
Anger kills people, people 'see red'.
If these thoughts and feelings are your will, hopefully we find out that they're free, not you.
The universe isn't deterministic as far as we know, so that's probably not right. But if you change it to something that is compatible with the predictions that can be made using quantum mechanics then that's most likely the truth.
Quantum mechanics may possibly be a case of observing determinism but we assume randomness by our current technology. Everything else observable has been fitting the deterministic modal. If a random variable were to be added to a person's mind as metaphorically similar to quantum mechanics, it would result in factoring into the future events of the person and similar to all the other variables & events a person experiences.
The opposite of free will is not necessarily pre-determination. It's probably the case that events proceed randomly at atomic levels and this randomness snowballs into more macro events (e.g. neurons discharging).
Still pre-determination if you have a system that is deterministic but influenced from an outside force and the outside force executing the alterations is not in the system being influenced.
Well that's an extreme too far. Your life is not predetermined at birth. But our options from moment to moment might be limited by our biology. Some of them are weighted by the circumstances of our births. Every day something that we might have absolutely no control of personally might change the course of our lives for the better or worst.
You are you after all. But you are also still just a human being, subject to their quirks, foibles and limitations too.
> We just don't have enough knowledge to fast forward the simulation?
Well we could simulate a trillion possible outcomes because we're talking a simulation that involves a trillion variables. Which one would definitely occur we could only be sure in hindsight.
Maybe just like how computers can't truly generate a random number, we can make it appear virtually random. Maybe freewill is somewhat similar in that regard, that there's quite a bit of freedom in a lot of choices, but overall it's not absolutely free will that we're operating on.
it helps form what the person understands as his/her own 'free will'.
the Free Will (TM) state machine uses this constantly updated training data to bias its decisions throughout its shelf life. so there are rules (like you stated) but there is also a huge set of data that alters the rule's parameters, to such extent that some times, new rules are created and old ones get discarded.
"Reading that, I thought he had never had a chance. Something had been broken inside him at a very young age. This is a dangerous notion because nobody apart from ourselves has responsibility for what we do, we are humans, not creatures subject to forces that drive us here and there without offering any resistance. Unless of course being under the sway of others is part of the human condition, and being a good person is the same as being a lucky person."
This strikes me as a really weird thing to casually drop in the middle of your argument. I would assert that if people from the US are over-represented on /r/justiceserved, it's for the same reason they're over-represented on /r/aww: It's an English language forum and 80% of the native English speakers in the world are from the US.
>As long as we do not conceive that mental illness is a thing, we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition, so they will just be a burden to themselves and others.
Some people arent capable of acknowledging they have a condition precicley because of their condition..
Yah it's a flawed experiment in a sense. Imagine how the majority in the world cannot understand determinism and you conduct a study on empathy. Flawed or results proving something based on the current conditions. Redo the study with people having a deterministic mindset and who understand the fallacy of believing in free will. The balance of empathy will change is my hypothesis from observing others like me that understand free will is a facade. It's like all the studies that try to prove it's better having people conditioned to believe in free will by conducting it on people already with a tainted mindset and who haven't broken out of it in a longterm period.
If you take free will as some kind of a divine spark, then, sure, it is not compatible with determinism. But there are more useful definitions of it. We need to have a distinction between behavior not under coercion and behavior under coercion, between behavior of a person who can realistically assess circumstances and who cannot and so on.
I don't think your assertion is valid. What you're describing is accomplished with describing how a person can have a mental illness, be suffering from coercion and or is contrary to the social conditioned accepted norm.
Further, persons assess circumstances based on their own reality. We live in a world where the normal people look at the ones outside the circle as ill and try to bring them into the circle by doing whatever it takes by punishment, institutionalizing, and medication. It's silly trying to establish society (a system), perfect as it can become and adding an irrational belief to people; it results in harm to the system.
Experiments in quantum physics show that usually you can't know exact outcome of a quantum measurement. I don't think that has something to do with free will problem, but your belief in determinism seems irrational too.
Yes, there are theories which try to mitigate this inconsistency, but they require quite a bit of mental acrobacy and aren't generally accepted.
Quantum mechanics may possibly be a case of observing determinism but we assume randomness by our current technology. Everything else observable has been fitting the deterministic modal. Further, you can have a system that is deterministic but influenced from an outside force and where the outside force executing the alterations is not in the system being influenced.
I don't equate consciousness with free will. I find the way you describe consciousness as an abstraction layer really nice. I'm not sure if I really think it's a real thing though but I also find panpsychism cool. Anyway thanks.
>I think that deep down, mental illness is not really accepted as something real. We tend to believe in free will and how people are responsible for their own actions, and we tend to apply this to the mentally ill too, and this is exactly why free will is a flawed concept.
It is hard when someone is developing mental illness or has hit some tipping point. Once upon a time your friend or loved one was pretty normal, and they've gradually become more erratic, hard to deal with, potentially dangerous even. And most people aren't experienced with how to deal with those issues and they're tough issues. And there's no line when friends, family, society can just take over for a mentally ill person.
>we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition
There's some caveats to that. Mainly being that mental illness covers a huge spectrum and people at the deeper end may not be capable of acknowledging they have an issue, or even if they can, that admission isn't the thing that will change their circumstances.
The identity of self-determination in the U.S. is interesting. There is a lot of truth to how many Americans are just down on their luck millionaires. And how consistently they will work against their own self-interests, because someday they might be wealthy or powerful and they want to enjoy that maximally.
And you can see some of these attitudes among many successful people who want to believe it was their effort, their hard work, their genius that made them successful, solely. Or at least those are the biggest factors, while luck, circumstance and opportunity are minimized or completely dismissed. They want to believe if they had to start over they could do it all again and the admission that that might not be the case is not what a lot of people's egos want to hear.
So perpetuating that myth of the self being all. That very successful people did it all on their own. That we're all completely totally responsible for ourselves and our circumstances can enable us to feel good about ourselves, and make it easier to blame those who are beneath us on the socia-economic ladder for their own circumstances and not acknowledge that the system is broken, or stacked against some people, that some of us had significant advantages. It makes it very difficult for a lot of people to walk a foot, let alone a mile, in another man's shoes. And that permeates everything in our society, even views of mental illness.
>For example, one vignette described “Terry,” a 28-year-old woman who felt deeply sad for the past four weeks and lost interest in activities she usually enjoys. In the “biological” version presented to the study participants, Terry’s father also suffered from symptoms of depression, a doctor told her as a teenager that she might have an imbalance of neurotransmitters, and an MRI scan revealed that she had an unusually small hippocampus, which could affect her reaction to stress. In the “psychosocial” version, Terry’s father died when she was five, her mother has always been highly critical and not very nurturing, and Terry suffered from a recent breakup and problems at work.
>...respondents felt less empathy for the fictional patients when they read the biological explanation.
Am I missing something here? Of course people would empathize more with a person who has relatable experiences. Nobody is going to relate to "an MRI scan revealed that she had an unusually small hippocampus" but almost everyone has experienced relationship troubles and problems at work.
My read is that, if you think about it, yes, it's somewhat obvious that would happen—but the question is, since that's clearly not fair behavior/right, what do we do about it?
It seems clear to me that it's not right since in both cases the causes are outside the control of the afflicted person—even more so in the case of a brain structure anomaly; and a common ethical heuristic is to not blame someone in such a situation—but practically speaking, because people can't relate to the brain structure issue, they won't empathize as much.
Another ambiguity here is what's meant by 'empathy'. If you take it to mean 'relate to' (which is one meaning of course), then it's vacuous to say people have more empathy for those they can relate too. But there's another usage referring essentially to a cognitive mode wherein the empathetic person acts with understanding toward someone they're engaging with. It's surely easier to enter that mode when it's something you can personally relate to—but that isn't necessary: we can become empathetic in this way just through an abstract understanding of someone's situation.
>but the question is, since that's clearly not fair behavior/right
Is it?
In the second scenario, I empathize with the painful experience, not just with the outcome (depression). Even if both fictional characters are described as having the same state now, how they got there matters to us. We feel empathy for what they went through.
I don't think there's anything wrong to have different emotions towards a person who has just been robbed, compared to someone who hasn't been (but doesn't have more money in the bank account).
We have codified this in our laws. We give different punishments for the same crime depending on the criminal's path and emotional state. We literally judge people based on what they went through. Why is it wrong or unfair to feel differently towards the two fictional characters in this case?
I do have to agree with you insofar as the studies' particular results go: in both scenarios, the patient suffered: in the first scenario because of a lifetime of depression, in the second because of the same + the trauma of the early life experiences. So, if we follow your dictum:
> We feel empathy for what they went through.
(which I mostly agree with) —then yes, the relatively higher portion of empathy should go for the character in the latter scenario (which matches the results of the study).
That said, if we generalize the study and apply it to the setting it's concerned with (medical practitioners empathizing with patients)—it's not a matter of relative measures between multiple patients; it's a question of whether the empathy a patient may (or may not) inspire is sufficient to cross some threshold for a medical practitioner.
If the fact that the cause is of biological origin is sufficient to drop the empathy response beneath that threshold —then it's problematic (the paper points out supporting research for just how problematic it is). After all, the person who has suffered a lifetime of depression does deserve empathy from a doctor/therapist, even if not as much (I guess) for somebody who suffers additional afflictions on top.
Actually that makes me wonder how much dealing with many patients who are very badly off (and deserving much empathy) moves the threshold for the doctor, so that maybe they can't empathize so much for patients with situations which are legitimately bad—but not as bad as what they've seen a lot of...
OK, I think I see your point. Maybe we can train the professionals to act out of reasons other than empathy? Or be more attuned to the current state and not the history. (Don't know if that is possible, or what specifically needs to be done).
The real issues at hand with this research are 1) prescribing medicine too often and 2) interacting with patients too little.
If you take a look at the original research (linked to from the posted article), then you can skip to the discussion section to see the authors wording of what you are taking about. They are saying the same thing as you, essentially, in a more specific and sophisticated way (page 4 of 5)
That's a good suggestion I hadn't thought of. Really not sure aside from that—I've got some vague ideas about certain 'empathy trainings' that could be done, but I'd be concerned about throwing a random factor into how the rest of their work is done...
The authors of the original research discuss the evidence in the context of medical practice generally relying upon biological evidence and that such a reliance is linked to a lack of empathy and a corresponding lack of belief that psychotherapy would be a helpful treatment. That dissuasion from psychotherapy, they argue, could lead to worse outcomes for patients that would have benefited from psychotherapy.
>since that's clearly not fair behavior/right, what do we do about it?
Is there something that can be "done about it"? Well someone will probably build an app for it because that's just how people in tech like to solve problems but these kinds of bias just seem to be a naturally built in part of the operating system as I see it.
The authors of the original research conclude with the hope and recommendation that doctors take on a worldview that doesn’t solely use biological cause as a way to differentiate between normal and abnormal.
The part of the “operating system” that they are talking about is a part that isn’t firmware, but rather software (or FPGA, more accurately metaphorically speaking) - meaning thought process, not instinct or gut feeling.
The way it works is this: You need to have a construction of someone (or something) to have empathy for it. The way you generate that construction is by shared experience. The experiences that you have are what you use, the building blocks, to construct that abstract person.
Biological Terry has no building blocks by which the empathizer generates empathy; only super diffuse academic terms. Psychosocial Terry, on the other hand, is an abstraction filled with facts which the empathizer (in almost all cases) shares. The extent to which the empathizer has loss of a close family member, a critical parent, a breakup, and issues at work will be the extent to which they can generate abstract Terry and thus the extent to which they can empathize.
That's the mechanism they are running into in this study, I think.
That’s the beautiful complexity of social science research - always trying to hit a moving target: one person believes that a biological explanation is necessary for empathy and another believes that an emotional reasoning is necessary for empathy.
Either could just be sufficient though and likelihood of sufficiency for empathy is the thing, subject to the whim and winds of society, being studied.
Almost everyone suffered from accidents and physical conditions preventing them to live a normal life temporarilyor permanently. Child with a broken leg, no running and jumping for a month. Adult with kidney problems, a life of dialysis.
So "of course" I expected those clinicians to emphathize more with patients with biological problems.
OTOH, my reaction was to feel more empathy for the biological explanation, which I can imagine corresponding to an unexplained cause of pain in her life, which is potentially unfixable. Psychosocial explanations are important but to me they feel like a normal thing to address in society already (though probably not enough).
This threw me off, too. I initially thought the article was trying to say that there is less empathy for those diagnosed with a biological predisposition because it is easier to legitimize than someone's feelings.
Using a throwaway for potentially obvious reasons. I have a very hard time having empathy for my mom. She is diagnosed manic depressive, bipolar, schizophrenic. I've witnessed her deteriorate over my entire life. You can tell me all day that it biological. I can utterly accept that. I can't accept that a bright woman has fucked up her life to the point where she is homeless. That she has alienated all those who would help her. That she would destroy her own environment and blame the imaginary. We've had to decide to leave her to herself and not help due to the manipulation that comes with it. Her phone is blocked. We've moved addresses. I don't know if empathy is the right answer. It sucks. The whole thing sucks.
Sometimes mental illness turns a person into the moral equivalent of a natural disaster. We don’t exactly blame natural disasters for arriving. They didn’t intend malice towards us. But we don’t therefore let them destroy our homes or kill us because there was no malicious intent behind the disaster. We batten down the hatches, make our homes storm and earthquake proof, we douse fires in water and build protective cellars.
Sometimes when mental illness turns a person into a malicious abuser, we have to protect ourselves regardless of whether we blame them fully for their actions or not. Nature turns the person into a disaster (sometimes, it’s not like EVERY case is like this), and when it does that, we’re justified in doing want it takes protect ourselves, to keep from being abused or harmed - not blaming them doesn’t mean we have to go out and stand in the storm, so to speak.
This is a great perspective for reconciling the "not their fault" idea (which science seems to support overall) with practical measures in daily life. Excellent.
I have nothing but sympathy for you. You no doubt wrote this knowing some, perhaps most people would not understand your decisions and chastise you for them. They don't understand, maybe never will.
At the same time, I implore you not to give up. For people with mental illnesses like you describe, access to reliable Healthcare is everything. A good doctor who monitors their medications is everything. If I were to describe the situation in engineering terms, I'd say that every single support such a person receives is load bearing. Which is why it can be just so difficult, when only one failing can lead to collapse.
I hope you are able to help her, provide her with something. If nothing else, try to put a roof over her head. Being homeless makes all of those other problems of access worse.
It does suck. I hope you try again. If you need someone to chat with feel free to reach out to me. My email is mayreply at my name dot com.
I have to ask, why is it his responsibility? If his childhood is so bad that he has no connection to her why should he work to improve her life rather than the life of any other homeless or mentally ill people?
It's like a double whammy. Not only is your childhood destroyed, you now are somehow considered by society responsible for her just because she is your biological mother.
Responsibility is a loaded word, especially in these cases. I'm not sure it's what you intended, but your simple question has a much more judgemental and condemning tone than the entire post you're replying to -- even though you are defending the OP.
I don't think they're suggesting that it is his responsibility, they're encouraging him to keep trying (because he's in a better position to help than most are) rather than berating him for not trying.
Why is he in a better position? She probably will try to manipulate him more than a stranger trying to help. Also, he is bound to get triggered interacting with her. I would think he would be in a worse position to help her then others.
> A good doctor who monitors their medications is everything
Even if you have good healthcare most doctors and even most specialists are terrible at dealing with anything that they don't see on a daily basis. Having a spouse with multiple rare chronic ailments has been eye opening.
It's really hard to help a neurodivergent person. Normally, that requires having a special type of strong love for that person, the type of love that exists from parent to child (and not the other way around) for obvious evolutionary reasons...
That said, the state in a truly civilized society could take better care of people who aren't neurotypical. Something I believe is lacking in the US.
Just wanted to share that I am dealign with a similar situation and I feel the same way. In my case I am convinced my Mom has schizophrenia but she refuses to be evaluated. She is also a bright woman who has screwed up her life by accusing everybody who cares about her of stealing from her or working against her in some grand conspiracy. Everything revolves around her and everything is always somebody else's fault. When I was a kid I believed the world was working against us but when I grew up I realized that was not true it was just my Mom. A small piece of me cares for her but most of me hates her.
This is about clinicians who are getting paid to deal with the person though.
They should expect to have their efforts to "help" be sabotaged for seemingly no reason, be betrayed as a means to get self esteem, constant testing of boundaries, etc. Then they should make the decision of whether to take the project before ever needing to interact with the person.
The US military provides free care of this sort to members and their dependents. They get paid a salary by the government, but don't charge the patients for care per se.
I'm quite confident that's part of why therapy did me so much good. He wasn't going to make less money by actually being effective.
Well, there's a lot of situations in the US where the need for the doctor to be paid becomes a blockade to getting care, particularly for those in need of mental health.
Similar situation, though my girlfriend has borderline. It's a struggle, one that I occasionally wonder about the worthiness of, but I try to help her through her problems. I just wish I knew how to address the root issue.
Two years working in support trying to perform RCAs on arcane issues and I can't find an answer to why my girlfriend is angry sometimes. It's disheartening to say the least but I haven't given up yet.
The book I Hate You - Don't Leave Me helped me a lot, especially the SET communication skills.
Learning DBT skills (The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Handbook) helped me a lot too especially emotional regulation.
Having an amazing therapist who was supportive as well as a professional and personal support network helped too.
I have borderline and I think working on myself has ironically made me a much better communicator. So there's hope.
I don't know if this is the right explanation but I think someone with BPD is essentially a burn victim except with feelings. I am super sensitive and extreme. You're either amazing or the worst person in the world. When things get bad, I don't have any memory of good times. I can only see black or white- no grey.
This comes from my childhood. My parents were extremely abusive. My dad told me to kill myself when I was suicidal. That's how I survived my childhood. I needed a clean slate and forget all the bad things. Today it hurts me more than it helped me then.
In the past when I got upset, it was instantly I think we should break up. The pain whatever it was, was intolerable. And all those break up pains add up. Not only do they hurt me, but it hurt my partners. And I didn't feel like I could survive the feeling of being broken up with, so I was always trying to protect myself by breaking up first. It's still my first instinct whenever I get a whiff of something going bad - shit, do I need to end this? But now I keep it to myself. I wait. I put my crazy emotions together. Talk calmly. Use a lot of I statements. When you did this, it made me feel this. I'm lucky to have a ridiculously supportive partner. I think he's an alien or at least superhuman. We've never raised our voices at each other once since we've been together except to say I can't hear you from the bathroom haha.
I've gotten a lot better. I'm still working on myself. I hope this helps a little and I wish you and your girlfriend the best.
> In patients with schizophrenia, 1054 (13.2%) had at least 1 violent offense compared with 4276 (5.3%) of general population controls (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 2.0; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.8-2.2). The risk was mostly confined to patients with substance abuse comorbidity (of whom 27.6% committed an offense), yielding an increased risk of violent crime among such patients (adjusted OR, 4.4; 95% CI, 3.9-5.0), whereas the risk increase was small in schizophrenia patients without substance abuse comorbidity (8.5% of whom had at least 1 violent offense; adjusted OR, 1.2; 95% CI, 1.1-1.4; P<.001 for interaction). The risk increase among those with substance abuse comorbidity was significantly less pronounced when unaffected siblings were used as controls (28.3% of those with schizophrenia had a violent offense compared with 17.9% of their unaffected siblings; adjusted OR, 1.8; 95% CI, 1.4-2.4; P<.001 for interaction), suggesting significant familial (genetic or early environmental) confounding of the association between schizophrenia and violence.
Doesn't your own link say that there is a ~2.6 times higher likelihood of violent offenses in schizophrenia compared to the General Population?
Of course, it does say that the effect is significantly more pronounced with a 'substance abuse co-morbidity' but I can't seem to find the likelihood of a substance abuse co-morbidity with schizophrenia in this paper.
"Schizophrenia Patients Report Consistently Higher Rates of Substance Abuse Than the General Population, Notably With Respect to 4 Licit (Nicotine and Alcohol) and Illicit (Cannabis and Cocaine) Substances"
it also says this is not to be used as a baseline for studies but if Schizophrenia is commonly co-morbid with substance abuse then pointing out that mental illness doesn't increase violence by much seems like a red-herring.
> Doesn't your own link say that there is a ~2.6 times higher likelihood of violent offenses in schizophrenia compared to the General Population?
No.
It tells us that people who are mentally ill are about as violent as the general population unless they also have substance abuse.
> it also says this is not to be used as a baseline for studies but if Schizophrenia is commonly co-morbid with substance abuse then pointing out that mental illness doesn't increase violence by much seems like a red-herring
When trying to predict risk of violence knowing that someone has schizophrenia tells you almost nothing. Knowing they have substance misuse tells you a bit more.
And knowing that people with schizophrenia are not more violent than the general population means community treatment is easier to provide.
"In patients with schizophrenia, 1054 (13.2%) had at least 1 violent offense compared with 4276 (5.3%)"
thats a 2.5 difference in patients with schizophrenia compared to the general population
> When trying to predict risk of violence knowing that someone has schizophrenia tells you almost nothing. Knowing they have substance misuse tells you a bit more.
That is simply not true though. Substance abuse changes the rate at which it happens but Substance abuse seems to have a high comorbidity with Schizophrenia and while the rate is significantly lower when there are no substance issues it is still higher.
Substance abuse, per the link you provided, creates a 3rd and fourth population subset (1: schizophrenics 2: neurotypical 3:Schizophrenics with Substance abuse 4: NT with Substance abuse) Which after your response, seems like you're being intentionally misleading in order prove your point.
This is often the case. More generally, every crook has a sob story. And it's important to not let that cloud your judgment.
In judging a harmful person's character, all that matters is whether that person has definite potential to become a net-good person given spiritual instruction, social support, medication, or whatever. But if such a process is infeasible, then the person needs to be written off. Some people are irredeemably lost, and the only thing you can do is love them and pray for them, at a great distance.
This is a good time to employ some Occam's Razor: if we've already accounted for the shittiness via mental illness, what is our reason for introducing an additional explanation? Are certain extreme mental illnesses not enough to account for the most shitty of behaviors?
ok, so this is more like the Linda Problem. It is more likely that a person is a shitty person than a person is a shitty person and has a mental illness.
Hmm, there's an element you've left out of the situation that makes it different from a straight Linda Problem though. In logical terms, it looks like this.
And we know know two things: 1) the person in question is exhibiting shittiness 2) the person in question has been diagnosed with a mental illness. So:
mental_illness = true
shittiness = true
Whether being_a_naturally_shitty_person is true or false is something we have no information on.
So, from that starting point, we already have an account for the shittiness being exhibited since:
mental_illness -> shittiness
and
mental_ilness = true
So if we want to go ahead and make the additional claim that being_a_naturally_shitty_person = true —you're violating Occam's Razor by introducing an unnecessary second cause when we already had a sufficient first one.
I suppose the answer to that depends on how meta you want go get, so to speak. But at its most basic, some people are just assholes without being irrational, stressed out, etc. Though you could easily argue they weren't raised right and are being stupid, basically.
I'd argue that all negative behavioral issues are mental illnesses. One way to classify it would be biological mental illnesses and learned mental illnesses. For example autism being a biological one and PTSD being a leaned mental illness.
Any time you have multiple people interacting, you will have some friction, even in a hypothetical situation where all involved parties have perfect mental health. Many times, behaviors are classified as "negative" based on a judgemental third party perspective.
I raised two special needs sons. They are okay in part because I wondered why they did things. I was curious about the first person perspective. I was interested in finding out "What's their motivation?"
So I think this is a much more complicated thing than you are making it out to be. People have a relationship to themselves. They have a relationship to their environment. They have a relationship to other specific individuals and to a larger society.
Mental health discussions often posit that you are mentally healthy if and only if you get along smoothly with other people. They often don't wonder at those other elements and they don't question the possibility that maybe it is the other people who are all messed up, not you.
I think this is a vastly complicated topic. It is both broad and deep. It touches on psychology, sociology and philosophy.
And I don't know that HN is really a suitable place to try to dig into it in a meaty way, frankly.
My ex-grilfriend married herself in one day, after I accompanied her to a hospital for her "severe insomnia" problem, without even telling me.
Out of sadness and anger, I cut off all of our contacts. A month later, she emailed me saying her psychiatrist said she had suicidal thoughts, and she wanted to see me. I went to see her immediately out of worries. That's the first time for the past 3 years I felt that she was not normal. For example, she was extremely talkative and she jumped between different topics that don't even have any connections. I knew that she had a history of depression for 10 years. But I don't know if it was a mis-diagnosis or her depression had developed into bipolar. She said her marriage decision was made during her maniac episode. She only loved me. But she decided to stay in the wrong marriage, because she couldn't punish her husband for her wrong decision. After making sure she didn't have the suicidal thoughts, I left.
I started to read about bipolar and learnt that during its maniac episode, a patient trends to make high risky decisions that he/she would regret afterwards, including spending lots of money, and having affairs.
And then after a month, she wanted to see me again, for a farewell, because she had to leave the country. She told me she had an affair with another guy and got pregnant. Again, she said she only had loved me, but she made wrong decisions during her maniac episodes. She said I could forget about her because she had turned into a different person, not the same girlfriend I ever had. Even I had read wikipedia and even a website about bipolar infidelity, it was really hard for me to accept everything. Again, out of anger, I told her I despised her and would never trust her. This time she blocked my contacts.
I don't know how I should accept and understand her, forgive her and help her. She mentioned that she wanted to leave me, because she knew I loved her, so she can't become my burden. That deeply saddened me.
For the past a few months, I have trapped myself in a loop of thinking about everything happened and feeling being used and then all the nice time we had together. I struggled a lot, not knowing if I should pick up the phone.
You're lucky to not have entered more deeply into this relationship. Maybe she sensed you're a nice person and gave you a break. Better suffer a bit now than a whole lot later on.
> Better suffer a bit now than a whole lot later on.
This is just one sentence, you can re-read it many times. Yet, the guy would not really appreciate the depth of its meaning - since he doesnt know what it means to live with a bipolar or close to a bipolar person. Its a circle of hell of its own, he was only slightly touched by the sickness and is still shaken, compared what it can be after longer time. Words just cannot describe how awful mental illnesses are.
Yeah, a friend of mine had a similar situation, but understood his girlfriend's condition. He stuck with her for a long time (even when she suddenly got married to a different guy). I don't want to speak for him, but despite the incredibly calm way he handled the many difficult situations he was put into, I know it had a pretty big toll on him. Now he's out of the situation completely and I think he is much happier.
With some mental illnesses, you can't really have an effective relationship. The ill person is literally incapable of it, even if they really want to be capable of it. It is not a kindness to try to have such a relationship -- for either party (imagine the hell of guilt the other person must have towards the OP!). I've had good friends who were mentally ill and even that is quite taxing, but you need to know your limits. Again, it does no good at all to offer something to someone when you have no realistic ability to make it work.
I don't think you need to be nasty about it (usually... sometimes it might come down to that). Even if the person has done incredibly bad things, perhaps having sympathy for both parties (yours and theirs) is appropriate. But as the healthy person, you have to be firm and clear about what is possible -- and incredibly often that is nothing.
I really wish there was another way, but you don't dive into the water to save a drowning person, when you don't know how to swim. Instead of 1 person drowning, there will be 2.
That sounds like a hard situation. If you're here looking for an outside perspective, I have one. If not, please don't read further.
It sounds like she has a mental illness, like you suspect. The sad thing about many of those is you just can't do anything about some of them. If a person's disease is so advanced that for example (say Alzheimer's) they don't recognize you / hate you, that's unfortunately the reality of their world and outside of committing them you can't do much but simply be there if you need to.
You've got your own life to manage. trying to manage someone else's, when they're sick to boot, is a monumental effort. Ask anybody with a mentally disabled kid. It's gargantuan. There's no shame at all in deciding you aren't up to the task (in your situation at least).
You've probably heard it, but you shouldn't feel guilty. You've done nothing cruel, you sound like you're being as good a friend / ex lover as you can given the circumstances.
When my friend called me asking me my opinions on the least painful ways to die, I thought it was just another cry for help in 3 years of similar ones. I waited to say something and then they found her body later. Obviously dealt with years of guilt etc over that but I bring it up because I think what the psychs told me can be useful advice for you. They said mental illness is a disease, and just like when your friend gets pneumonia you be there for them, but you let the doctors, the professionals treat them. If they're sick and not going to the doctor you tell them "hey, you should go to the doctor." If you find them laying in the tub unresponsive from pneumonia, you call 911. That's the extent of your responsibility. You aren't a doctor, so don't feel guilty about not being able to somehow treat the disease.
Anyway I'm a person on the internet, if you can afford therapy I say do that, similar to above this is stuff for the professionals and they have good advice.
I just want to spell this out explicitly because I think it's a very important point, you do not need to have a mental illness to get help from a therapist. Feelings of guilt or shame are perfectly valid reasons to see a therapist, even if they're not caused by a mental illness.
> I don't know how I should accept and understand her, forgive her and help her. She mentioned that she wanted to leave me, because she knew I loved her, so she can't become my burden. That deeply saddened me.
As someone who struggled with a bipolar diagnosis and now a borderline personality disorder diagnosis, you do not have to accept, understand, forgive, or help her.
In order to accept her you need to accept that she has hurt you and will continue to hurt you unless she decides to make a change. Mental health issues can make a person do bad things but it should never be an excuse. It's possible to get better but it requires work. I think when you separated you realized that you deserved to not be hurt, no matter what, and maybe she felt that way too. In order to forgive and help her, you will have to sacrifice yourself, because you cannot help her until she wants to help herself. I was diagnosed in high school and it took me almost 7 years to get to where I am today.
> For the past a few months, I have trapped myself in a loop of thinking about everything happened and feeling being used and then all the nice time we had together. I struggled a lot, not knowing if I should pick up the phone.
The bad doesn't take away the good times. I'd recommend going no contact to help recover. Do you have anyone you can reach out to? If you have someone you can talk to, catch up with, get a drink/coffee/shoot the shit with, they should be able to help you break you out of your loops and see the bad and good things better. And as someone commented below, therapists are the best. Wish you the best.
You have no idea how much I relate to this man, I had almost the same exact experience with an ex of mine except that I was the catalyst to a large chunk of the problems she ended up experiencing.
My girlfriend was an old friend from high school that I reconnected with after many years. We clicked instantly and started dating shortly thereafter. Slowly she let me in on her struggles with depression and bipolar disorder. I was openly supportive but I never paid it any mind since she seemed the same as anyone else whenever we were together.
Fast forward a number of months and things quickly unravel. Out of nowhere she starts shutting me out and acting erratic. Then she breaks up with me. A week or so passes and she reaches out asking for some of her stuff back. I oblige and we meet up. Afterwards, she starts telling me about how she misses me and how she made a rash decision. We start sleeping together again but she's still being distant.
Fast forward another month or so and I finally learn the truth. She broke up with me because her ex reached out to her and she didn't know how to handle it. Then she got back together with me out of impulse, but she didn't know what to do since her ex had already moved back in at that point.
Where our stories differ is that I kept on seeing her after finding out about the boyfriend because I didn't want to abandon her. One day she'd tell me that she was only with him because she needed the financial support that he was able to provide her, then on another she'd talk about him like he was the greatest thing to ever happen to her.
Eventually things came to a head and she blocked me out of the blue. Later on I found out that she was actually pregnant and had an abortion. At the time I was so angry at her for everything but in hindsight I think she did me a great favor. Mental illness is nothing to scoff at and being with a person burdened by it is a struggle regardless of how much love you have for them. I don't think she's a bad person and I'm greatly indebted to her for forcibly removing me from her life.
> It’s possible that biological explanations lead clinicians to see the conditions as immutable.
This an error in thinking about how the brain works, and unfortunate if true, regardless of what level of "clinician" it refers to.
Perhaps both frameworks for understanding are equally valid, but the "psychosocial" explanation is several layers of abstraction above the "biological" one.
As I've said before on the same topic [1]:
1) the brain is an organ that obeys physical laws
2) behavior and perception depend entirely on the brain
3) of course environment is important, but how is that represented in the brain? It's still physiological, which inevitably includes chemicals/biology/whatever you prefer to call it.
I’m not sure that I understand the first sentence of your comment - are you saying that you think it is an error for the authors to make that specific conclusion? Or are you saying that clinicians should never see mental illness as immutable?
We find medical conditions hard to really solve. Most people just can't begin to cope with a medical explanation of mental issues in terms of seeing it as treatable. That's a concept not even in its infancy. We've barely conceived it. It is still gestating.
Also, with the psychosocial explanations, there is an element of blaming someone or something else. Most people will feel they are the victim of something unjust and that resonates with many people.
Mental illness typically has both components. Family is known to compound mental health issues that have a biological component.
My sister minored in psychology in college and took some graduate courses in it later. She once told me "We must not have the genes for schizophrenia or someone in the family would surely have it given how the family operates" and then talked about how schizophrenics go do inpatient therapy, get better, go home to the nutso family and get worse again.
I think we need better parenting resources for families dealing with neurodivergent offspring. I've seen time and again that parents don't know effective means for dealing with such kids and it actively creates problems which then become very intractable.
I'm good at that and did some work for a time with a related organization and spent a few years trying to figure out how to blog about such subjects. That never really got traction. Articles like this give me a twinge of regret and guilt that I never figured out how to more effectively share what I know. I'm convinced that better parenting resources for difficult kids would really make a difference in the world.
But, I just don't have a path forward. You need fertile ground for such seeds to take root and I've never found that, basically. Then I got badly burned by someone who used information in my parenting blog to manipulate me and it's a case of... Whatever. Not my problem.
>My sister minored in psychology in college and took some graduate courses in it later. She once told me "We must not have the genes for schizophrenia or someone in the family would surely have it given how the family operates" and then talked about how schizophrenics go do inpatient therapy, get better, go home to the nutso family and get worse again.
It is said that if C-PTSD was correctly diagnosed, the DSM manual would shrink to a small booklet. At lest 85% of the mentally ill suffered some kind of abuse according to a recent study, and since the parents know they can't do anything that leaves physical marks, many smarter people get more creative - teaching them things wrong, or not at all; ordering them to do something, then punishing them for doing it; (or a semi famous case of a man who was among other things deathly afraid of water, because his father's punishment of choice was spraying him with a hose) etc. All that while maintaining the image of a sweet person outside home, so that nobody trusts the victim, because it's "impossible" that such a nice man/woman would do something like that to their child...
It's doubtful there is a biological component at all, since the Nazis killed off most of the mentally ill in some parts of Europe, but the prevalence rates remained unchanged.
I'm all for freedom, but there should be ways to remove the child from their parents when it's being raised in some nonstandard, and clearly dysfunctional way. There should also be some equivalent of witness protection that would give the people a new identity. Once it gets known the person is "mentally ill" people will harras them, try to convince them of nonsense (or that some common knowledge is actually false) for the kicks, or otherwise "gaslight" them, (well knowing that nobody will trust the person) so there is no way they could get better with such a label at home.
I used to participate in the online gifted community and was somewhat respected as a knowledgeable person with good ideas. As such, people would email me and talk to me about their parenting challenges. So I got to talk to a fair number of parents who were at wit's end. In many cases, I was able to help them untangle their mess.
A common theme is that bright toddlers can wind up with screwy ideas because of being bright toddlers. They are just smart enough to leap to ridiculous conclusions based on partial information and incomplete mental models.
For a time, my oldest was deathly afraid of ladybugs. We lived on the third floor and there was a tall tree just outside his window. He ended up with yellow and black ladybugs in his bedroom.
He was terrified. I laughed about it, but shut the door and let him sleep in my room. I couldn't understand why he was so afraid of these harmless insects, but I respected the fact that he was.
Years later, he was able to tell me what he couldn't articulate at the time of the incident: because they were yellow and black and he knew bees were yellow and black, he was convinced they were bees. He couldn't explain how he knew the color while having no idea they looked nothing like bees.
When he was about seven, he similarly reacted with terror to rolly pollies. They are completely harmless.
So I collected a few up and put them in a dish with lettuce. I figured he was mistaking their antennae for mandibles, and he was. He thought they would bit him.
I told him they eat plants and showed him the chewed lettuce. I explained the antennae were how they smelled. They were not for biting. I held them in my hand and showed my son "See, they are smelling me."
He got over his fear of these harmless bugs. His fear was based on incorrect conclusions due to partial info and the ability to make inferences.
After providing the right mental models to some parents, they were able to help their children also let go of phobias based on similar circumstances.
But most parents don't have access to those mental models. Instead, they are given models that make the problem worse.
Humans are not going to stop having a childhood phase. We aren't going to start springing fully formed from incubators or something like that. There will always be a long period of growth in which they are taking in a lot of knowledge.
Furthermore, parents in the US are going thrown to the wolves. There are studies and articles out there showing that American parents are incredibly stressed out in ways and to degrees you don't see in most developed countries.
If we want parents to do a better job with their kids, we need to design a supportive system that helps them raise their children. One of the consequences of our current model is that the societal message to parents is that authority is inherently abusive and cannot be trusted. This tends to poison their relationship to their children. If society were more of a "good steward" for the people, parents would have an easier time being good stewards to their kids.
If you don't put those pieces in place, adding aggressive measures to take kids from parents just deepens the problem.
Positing that parents are merely intentionally abusive for no real reason and there isn't a biological basis and then seeking to add more punishment to the system is broken on the face of it. A lot of abusive parents are trying to control a child and simply don't know how to get good results. A punishment model isn't very effective.
I was a homemaker and full-time mom for years. I am frequently pissed all over by career women who think what I did has no value. I have been told he people on Hacker News that college education is wasted on a mom and homemaker.
But the reality is that raising healthy people is a serious challenge and requires a lot of knowledge and skill, especially if there are any special needs, including a high IQ. Very smart children are endlessly curious and "curiosity killed the cat." Patents of gifted kids are often tearing their hair out.
And we aren't providing them the support they need. Then we wonder why so many people are dysfunctional.
Given the journal and the time it was published, are we sure this is research that would replicate? I looked at it and I don't see anything egregiously bad-looking, but I don't know much of anything about experimental design.
I hate living in the world where I have to ask that question -- and it does seem that there has been an improvement, such that modern research is less likely to be based on faulty analysis. 2014 seems like it could be on the borderline, though.
A comment from someone with more knowledge of statistics and experimental methods would be helpful.
This study was submitted to Track II for review by the Editorial aboard at PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) 4 years ago. The study was conducted by psychologists at Yale and editing by a professional at University of Melbourne, AU.
You can find the full article, free at https://www.jstor.org/stable/43278786?mag=when-do-we-have-em.... The article contains a full materials and methods section to aid with replication. The study design was simple enough to allow for relative ease of a repeat study. The authors applied relatively simple and traditional statistical methods (a more complex ANOVA) along with a mechanism to ensure that they were measuring empathy correctly by correlating measure of empathy with a separate measure of personal distress. You can dig into the details in the article, but it all seems to line up well.
In summary, you could probably replicate this yourself using Survey Monkey and Wolfram Alpha.
So am I right in concluding that the design was simple enough to be mostly forking-paths-free, and there weren't any oddly specific choices made in the analysis (to dig a "significant" result out of the data)?
The fact that it could be replicated from details in the paper without excessive expense or difficulty is also reassuring, even before knowing if such a replication has taken place.
Absolutely, this was a straightforward research design with a straightforward statistical analysis. The statistical significance was strong.
To give you a better mental model: they essentially came up with two sets of 6 words where one set was paired to representing empathy and the other to personal distress. The authors then grouped doctors to receive either biological or psychosocial stimuli and asked them to rate themselves on each word after being presented the stimuli. Statistical analysis was simply comparing the results.
Another noteworthy item is that they also included another set of six words to be rated, which they did not use in the statistical analysis, but which they claimed were used as fillers (words like angry, resentful, joyous, etc. - implying that they took care to not make it readily apparent what specific variable they were measuring).
Study integrity aside, they found that schizophrenia vignettes elicited almost the same magnitude of empathy for either bio or psychosocial explanations and depression showed the widest gap.
In all honesty, I’d recommend that you spend an evening perusing the actual research article as it is a good example of academic social science research, in my opinion.
1) Its not some random guy's job to replicate this stuff. Its the job of people getting paid to do this type of research (ie, the peers) to verify each other's work.
2) You're right, its been published for four years, seems to have had some sort of impact (since the news has mentioned it), and doesn't seem that complicated or expensive to do in principle. So, is there a direct replication?
1) I was replying to someone who asked “Given the journal and the time it was published, are we sure this is research that would replicate?”, as I am a person with “more knowledge of statistics and experimental methods”, the kind of person to whom the question was being asked.
2) I can look into your question, later, but you can answer it by searching for citations of the original research.
> "That’s one reason why efforts to encourage empathy for people with depression, anxiety, or other mental disorders often focus on the biological basis of the conditions."
There is a deeply insightful book called "Against Empathy : The Case for Rational Compassion" by a Paul Bloom. I hadn't thought too much about it until I read the above quote assuming empathy to be a Good Thing and that researchers and doctors et al should strive for greater levels of it. I think practitioners should at the very least make the distinction between empathy and compassion. We need more compassionate doctors, not empathetic ones. And disambiguating language opens up all sorts of incredible and sophisticated interactions.
I found the premise of that book to largely just be disputing definitions [1] with a very particular definition of empathy that isn’t actually how people use the word.
Something about it bothered me - I think that it felt like a straw man arguing a position nobody really has just to be very pedantic about his specific usage of the word empathy.
I don't see it as disputing definitions at all. Paul Bloom is clear what he means by "empathy" and doesn't carelessly apply his argument when the word "empathy" means something else. In fact at the same time he argues that empathy by his meaning isn't good practice for doctors he says the "empathy training" for doctors that he is aware of is a good thing, precisely because the word is used in a different way. He defines certain terms in certain ways for the sake of making his argument while acknowledging that the same words are commonly used in ways that his argument doesn't apply to.
I was just reading some reviews and overviews of the book and walked away with the same impression.
The most interesting definition (partly just IMO, but also because it's the one whose derivative of 'being talked about' is also large right now), which is also an important concept in certain Eastern philosophies for instance, has to do with a cognitive mode perhaps best characterized by 'openness'—but since that term is fraught, let me try something from scratch.
There is something in our brains that works in a very sphincter-like way—similar to the pupil, for example. Rather than letting in more or less light, however, it determines how much you will be affected by present percepts. If it is closed, you can see all sorts of horrendous or magnificent stuff and have little to no reaction; if wide open, you may genuinely weep while hearing a beautiful song or something. (I don't want make strong claims on this next point, but I think it's useful to say something on the matter: what determines the openness here has a number of factors, but how safe you feel at the moment [e.g. anxiety can block it] and how 'internally pre-occupied' you are, are probably two big ones.)
The empathetic 'cognitive mode' I was describing earlier is essentially just being in the 'open' state. It allows you to be affected by someone else's present suffering in a very direct/immediate way, without contemplation—which is why the author's alternative of 'rational compassion' is so controversial: the claim of modern proponents of the sort of empathy I've been describing stresses the importance of this direct connection and immediacy, claiming that being in this cognitive mode is the only way to genuinely act in the interest of another person—whereas when you approach altruism purely rationally, other motivations will typically be involved.
But, the picture I got is that the book doesn't actually talk about that sort of empathy at all.
yes, I've heard that argument but couldn't empathise with it ;) The book spoke to me directly and I have the opposite opinion. Definitely an interesting read but also polarising.
I saw someone post to HN once in an article about a cancer vaccine - "Doctors want patients, not cures". Really stuck with me.
Modern society categorizes people. When a citizen fails to adapt to society (for better or worse) and they feel a certain pressure to submit to the opinions of an "expert", they become part of a revenue stream. The DSM-V has them figured out.
Many types of mental illnesses are symptoms of the environment. We are spending too much time looking at MRIs, that is, looking inward - the brain structure must hold the clues to the "cure".
But the brain molds to interface the user with its surroundings. It is the effect, not the cause.
Perhaps show empathy for the mentally ill once they've spent years being drugged out by attempted "cures".
I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of doctors who are well-respected in their field.
I never once saw one more excited than the times they’d describe what it was like to find out a patient was a candidate for a targeted therapy and bring them back from death’s door.
Most of them do this to treat, and I believe they’d be very happy to be out of a job if it meant fewer children, parents, or simply humans, had to die.
Even "very good" doctors often don't know the state of the art procedures and treatments for their craft, as I have personally discovered since a close family member began receiving cancer treatment. From my experience, the vast majority of doctors' response to bringing up experimental treatments or care - or even recently approved, well-researched treatments - is a mindless affirmation of "that's the future", meaning they don't know anything about it. If you press them, most will say that they prefer to start patients with XYZ, which means "I want your business but don't know about that treatment". This happened to my own sick relative, a pharmacogenomics researcher, who said it reminded him almost exactly of trying to get clinicians to incorporate basic gene panels into their practice (e.g. don't give this patient warfarin because they have this gene which will make them bleed to death).
As a society we are much too afraid to call shitty doctors shitty doctors. Having parents in medicine, I grew up hearing about them all the time.
I do believe that most doctors would not consciously and maliciously decide to sacrifice people's health for money. I also believe that most doctors aren't particularly diligent about keeping up to date on medical information throughout their careers; for every developer with 30+ years of experience who has treated a job as a job and worked with the same tech staff for all his life without bothering to learn new ones, there's a doctor doing the same with medicine.
It’s true that there are such doctors. My experience is not necessarily typical, as these were faculty at a well-regarded cancer hospital and always very close to new developments.
The ones I mention, being involved in clinical trials and new treatments/diagnostics makes them particularly appropriate for this discussion because they are at the intersection of translational treatment and patients. (Cures vs patients)
You’re right that many doctors aren’t called out like they should be out of some misguided deference, and I’m disappointed to hear how many of them are in cases which matter so, so very much to you, if not to them.
With regard to your personal experience, remember that no professional will care as much about your or your loved one’s condition as you will. You (or your loved one) are the only patient you’re treating, and I encourage you to advocate as necessary.
I do believe that most medical professionals are well-meaning, especially when people choose to trust them with their health. I do not question their empathy and selflessness.
But my comment is directed at the belief that a medical professional always knows best. The doctor that actually interfaces with the patient is equipped with tools and techniques that originate from other divisions of expertise that develop pharmaceuticals, testing equipment, or coordinate large-scale case-studies.
These numerous cohorts that sift through the data (and are now faced with ever-increasing administrative costs) seem disconnected with recurring patterns in the life of a citizen that end up causing these brain anomalies.
Again, they are chasing down the effect, not the cause.
>>"Doctors want patients, not cures". Really stuck with me.
I suspect you don't know many doctor personally. If you have the intelligence, patience, grit, money, etc. to go through the many years of school and training to be a doctor, you're not doing it primarily for the money. There are other professions that offer similar levels of pay and prestige with much less trouble. Doctors want to help patients.
I used to work in road construction, traffic control. I was paired with a man twice my age that had spent the majority of his life in OTR trucking. He told me stories of all the uppers and downers he took, in order to allow for the lifestyle of "racking up as many miles as I can."
He would smoke through a pack every night. Needless to say, his base-line health was compromised because of these habits.
One night he tells me the doctor has discovered a tumor on his lung. He continued to smoke at the same rate, against my (and I'm sure his doctors) advice.
At some point he started chemo, and still came to work. Looked like a dead man walking. I'm no medical expert, but it seems to me that chemotherapy irritates the wound.
Fast forward a couple months after I had quit that job, I hear that he has died of lung cancer. But I also here that his wife had resorted to putting donation jars at cash registers at nearby gas stations, in order to keep funding this "treatment".
So this man died of a habit he refused to give up, but not before trusting the doctor(s) involved and draining the resources his family would have after he was gone.
I know this is not a story of mental illness, which seems to be a more elusive affliction that something like cancer that directly affects the bodies hardware.
The theme of my input on this empathy matter is not directed at the disposition of the doctor, but rather the assumption of the patient that the doctor always knows best.
It is more of a trust issue, now that administrative costs make up 30% of healthcare cash flow.
This is mildly interesting because people who are mentally ill and who get treatment will report a contrasting experience.
When we ask people about stigma we see those with an illness usually described by a medical model (schizophrenia, bipolar) experience less stigma than people with an illness usually described by a psycho-social model (especially the personality disorders, where levels of stigma are remarkably high, even from mental health professionals).
> The authors note that their findings can’t be extended to all situations. For example, other research has found that trial judges tend to impose less severe sentences on people with mental illnesses when given a biological explanation for the disorder.
I refrain from making crazy people jokes when I realized that as many as a quarter of certain subpopolutions, e.g. middle age US women, may be on psychoactive drugs for one condition or another. Pretty good chance of hurting soneones feelings then without knowing it.
The literal definition of empathy is rooted in the ability to understand and relate to someone else. Doctors can't empathize with most patients, nor do they need to. I think sympathy is the word this article is looking for.
I went through a couple phases of clinical depression as a young man, and now that more than a decade has passed, I can't relate to that person who didn't have the willpower to get out of bed for 6 months. Even though that person was me, it's hard to imagine now what that is like. But I can certainly sympathize.
I think people had more empathy for the mentally ill before the advent of science or religion.
Science will reduce and dehumanize all that makes that human to a nameless patient file while trying to fix the issues.
Religion might demonize and ostracize.
I feel that before all of this because there was no explanation, the mentally ill were just treated as having a different mindset. I mean.. if we tried to "fix" all the artists that have lived, the world would be a much bleaker and empty place without their art.
As long as we do not conceive that mental illness is a thing, we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition, so they will just be a burden to themselves and others.
I always relate with human beings knowing they can make errors because of their mental process or even their mental issues, even mild. Lurking on certain subreddits like JusticeServed, I can often see how some people in the US believe in capital punishment and have literally no mercy towards faulty but natural human behavior. I don't live in the US, so I might be biased, but I'm surprised how people can have such hard belief in free will ("you can make it if you want" etc).