The Myth of Mental Illness

[EveHarrington]

Google doesn't seem to know what that is and is giving me a bunch of things that has the criteria. Can you define that for me?

Narcissist

noun

a person who is overly self-involved, and often vain and selfish.

 

[lostforgottensoul]

Narcissist

noun

a person who is overly self-involved, and often vain and selfish.

But wouldn't that be the diagnosis? I'm confused. I'm wondering about the term "adjective Narcissist".

 

[EveHarrington]

But wouldn't that be the diagnosis? I'm confused. I'm wondering about the term "adjective Narcissist".

No, the diagnosis is much more involved, with specific criteria like PTSD.

 

[EveHarrington]

No, the diagnosis is much more involved, with specific criteria like PTSD.

My bad. I meant to say “the adjective, NARCISSISTIC”. Oops. Stupid autocorrect. But then I put in the noun definition anyway. Oops.

 

[Fadeaway]

@lostforgottensoul it is frustrating. Made worse by googles algorithm constantly pushing stories of people blaming their bad breakups on NPD.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Practice Essentials, Background, Pathophysiology and Etiology

 

[joeylittle]

Someone can be narcissistic (or called a narcissist) without their narcissism rising to a clinically significant (diagnosable) degree.

Personality disorders are an ever-evolving area of mental health study, and the one thing we can probably be sure of is that they will continue to shift their diagnostic criteria regularly, as they become more studied and more treated.

I sometimes have to take a deep breath when posters get all up-in-arms about personality disorders. All the defensiveness rises so quickly. I can understand the general fears of mental health stigmatization out in the world at large...I don't really understand why on a mental health site people can still carry these attitudes around with them.

Anyway..

So much of trauma recovery has to do with validating the trauma experience - ie, encouraging the individual to recognize and accept that the problems they are trying to live with are in fact symptoms. They are the result of the mind getting caught in an extreme experience. The mind is (essentially) not working optimally - it is failing to convert events into memory, and (instead), it is recognizing them as 'current'.

And all of the above can be true even for people who cannot - should not - be diagnosed with PTSD, but do experience lingering after-effects from an extreme (negative) experience. Those individuals will benefit from many of the things that folks with PTSD benefit from. They also can make better use of some other techniques that those with PTSD tend to find either over-stimulating, or simply insufficient for treatment.

Once someone accepts that they are having symptoms, and that those symptoms rise to a clinically significant level - they can say to themselves, "yes, I have PTSD, and I'm working on recovery".

That's also the juncture where the individual will decide whether or not PTSD is a mental illness, or a mental injury. They will decide based on their own beliefs about mental illness. For some, mental illness is synonymous with "mental disease or defect", and seeing themselves that way is so powerfully negative that they cannot bear it. Instead, they look at the trauma as being the thing that harmed them, and the trauma is not their fault - therefore they do not have an illness, they were injured. And most importantly - the injury was not their fault.

Notice how the "not their fault" thing is also a very common part of trauma recovery work? Accepting that whatever happened was an accident, or a result of circumstances, or initiated by someone else, or a byproduct of one fulfilling one's duty...Seriously, we all know it: that's a big part of the whole 'acknowledgement of the trauma' phase of therapy.

So, I'd argue that it's completely understandable for someone to end up coming out the other end of their fight with PTSD choosing to think of it as an injury, not a mental illness. They've got a belief that "mental illness" is a bad, bad label - and they aren't interested in changing that belief. Hard to blame them, given that just working through PTSD requires a lot of thought-shifting.

Personally? I came to PTSD by way of capital-D-Depression (clinical). Anyone who lives with depression in the 21st century will tell you, it's almost impossible to avoid accepting it as an illness. You have depression - you're sick, you'll take some pills, do some other lifestyle changes, you'll get better, you get off the pills. If that doesn't work, you'll get a few more diagnosis-type words assigned to you, you'll deal with other kinds of treatment, you'll work on accepting it as a chronic illness. Still, an illness.

You'll struggle with the whole "is this genetic? why me? am I bad/broken/defective?" series of thoughts that tend to accompany every serious illness. It can be a relief to be able to point to your family history as an indicator, or to see that science is better understanding the links between constant stress and depression, etc, etc. Being able to point to a reason for "why me", helps.

PTSD - when you ask, "why me"? the answers are so often "it wasn't your fault", or "it could have happened to anyone".

So, yeah. I do empathize with the OP, the concept of PTSD not as "mental illness"...I don't agree, but completely can see why it needs to be that way for some people.

My own opinion - I disagree, it's a mental illness, and lets all just educate ourselves more about the massive variety of mental illnesses that there are, and keep chipping away at the stigma.

And to bring it all back around - lets also get smarter about the entire concept of a personality disorder, stop using it so interchangeably with personality traits, and be willing to take a smarter look at how dastardly a personality disorder can be. One of the biggest challenges for getting treatment is simply the person's inability to even accept that they have a disorder - let alone, report on it accurately. Reporting on it accurately is barely even possible - and that's why they are so unlikely to ever get any treatment.

Someone with a personality disorder - their life has to essentially collapse all around them as a result of those behaviors, and then they need to come to terms with the fact that they were the architect of their own destruction. That the things they need to change...those are things they can barely even see clearly.

My opinion - the individual who can accept and acknowledge that they have a personality disorder - they've already progressed through one of the hardest parts. I always kinda want to say, "yes, good job owning that".

And all that is why I find it so frustrating when it gets slung around like "they're a narc", "they have NPD"...really waters down the diagnosis, ultimately, and I know people do it because they want others to understand how severe it is - but just being narcissistic is, in fact, a pretty severe problem all on it's own.

I'm so f*cking long winded.

 

[TruthSeeker]

But this doesn’t actually “make” your world safer, it just allows you to FEEL safer.

As someone who has the opposite reaction and feels safer out there IN the world, I totally get that this is a ptsd reaction.

I hate to point out the obvious, but you’re on the Internet, the world of computers.

@EveHarrington No, actually doing the things I enjoy, staying in a positive place, being productive and finding purpose daily, getting up and dealing primarily with folks who are positive, kind, and supportive people does several things to make me feel safer( and feeling safe is super essential to making headway in life): Not choosing to engage w drama seekers- my choice.By surrounding myself with people I trust, people who share an interest, and people who give me positive my stress level is at a more normalized level-and making a concerted life style change to maintain balance helps when I hit a roadblock or a bump and then I feel that nagging “unsafe red alert” I’m more able to act with forethought rather than react with emotion spewing everywhere- making ass of self or totally ruining my day/week. participating in drama,blaming/fault finding, being sarcastic, being judgemental, jerking people’s chains w my unchecked emotions isn’t the authentic me I’m striving to be and it’s doesn’t keep me in a safe place. Keeping balanced by avoiding the unnecessary negative nellies-avoiding drama- a huge step in feeling and keeping myself mentally, physically, and more spirituality in touch- and this translates to “real safety because I’m in the real world choosing to spend more time in the part of this world doing things I enjoy, spending my time helping and not full of self pity-that makes me feel good) grounded and functional-this makes me feel better than always being on the watch out for the shoe to drop. It’s sll ones perspective, I guess.

I can’t control the ugliness of what others do to me- or their drama but I can choose to participate in the parts that don’t create so many issues. And that gives me the positive and safe feeling I deserve. We all live in the real world- and we all can make choices as to how to do that so we feel as safe as possible. We all deserve to feel safe but a part of it is our responsibility.

 

[Fadeaway]

@joeylittle I absolutely understand that it is an injury. One can't just devolp it, or be born with it. My issue with the OP was the word adaption.

Adaption to me means a change that is usually bennifical to ones survival, or helps to overcome deficiencies. It is generally a positve. Correct me if I am wrong but PTSD is the brains attempts at adaption gone wrong.

 

[joeylittle]

Correct me if I am wrong but PTSD is the brains attempts at adaption gone wrong.

I think I'd phrase it as, the behavioral adaptations (I think for the OP, that's synonymous with "symptoms") are a result of the brain not consolidating the memory of the trauma.

In that regard, they are neither bad nor good....they are the result of the trauma.

What distinguishes PTSD from a more 'normal' trauma response has to do with the degree to which those behaviors interfere with daily activity. It's the interference that is considered 'bad' - so, looking at it that way, some behavioral changes as a result of PTSD could be considered mal-adaptive. Others, simply adaptive - if they are managed in a way that they do not disturb the overall quality of life at a clinical level.

Why some people develop PTSD and others do not - that may connect more to a genetic pre-disposition. That's also partly why I don't agree with the "injury" approach....you can take two people, put them through the same trauma, and one could develop PTSD, while the other does not.

 

[Fadeaway]

OK, I think I get what you are saying, but it leads to more questions about separating what symptoms are behavioral adaption and which ones the inability to consolidate the memory. Some are clear cut like avoidance but hypervigilance seems like it could fall under both?

 

[Anarchy]

@ white hyacinth

Sorry that you just experienced the avalanche of outraged opinions and feelings.

Thomas Szasz' works are excellent. I haven't read nearly as many of them as I'd like to.

For those who haven't encountered Szas' works (sadly he died in 2012), he was a practicing and teaching psychiatrist, based for many years at Syracuse in upstate New York.

I guess that Szasz work would be a very difficult "red pill" / cult deprogramming experience, for people who have only been exposed to the BS of mass media (fake) news, and the marketing hype from big pharma!

Szasz has a depth of scientific and logical understanding, that very few writers can match, and he couples that with a deep respect for individual humans.

He was an immensely powerful critic of coercive treatment and of the political abuses of psychiatry on both sides of the iron curtain.

Szasz is correct, it is an abuse of the scientific method to try to deal with ptsd and other mental dis - eases as though they were genuine physical diseases with physical /material causes, like malaria.

 

[whatamidoinghere19]

I've grown a lot in the past few years, and I've realized a lot of hard truths about the world. I've always been honest enough with myself to see the world for how it truly is, even while others continue to lie to themselves and others. One thing I've realized is that this thing we call "PTSD" is not a mental illness or disorder at all. I'm not debating whether or not we all suffer, of course we do. I'm not arguing that what we suffer from isn't a physical, deterministic thing in our brains and bodies. But it's not an illness. It's an adaptation, and to call it an illness is disrespectful to ourselves. "Hyper"vigilance, flashbacks, avoidance, dissociation, etc are natural and necessary responses to being in danger. We are not "disordered" for being afraid in a dangerous world, our feelings are righteous and justified. I don't know about the rest of you, but life hasn't gotten less dangerous "post" trauma, and therefore these "PTSD symptoms" have not become less necessary.

The concept of mental illness is mostly used to scapegoat individuals who are negatively affected by social and environmental factors, which allows people who caused these problems in the first place to never be held accountable. Remember "hysteria"? The concept of mental illness is used as a tool of oppression; it allows society to scapegoat an individual or their genetics for what is really caused by a dysfunctional society, it allows the psychiatric industrial complex to make huge profit off of our suffering while doing very little to help us (if anything), it allows the state to control what we do with our bodies, and it allows abusive families to conveniently send away their undesirable members to mental hospitals. We all know that people with mental illness are discriminated against, even in psychiatric settings. There are Dead Link Removed that show just labeling someone "mentally ill" makes people more likely to be hostile to that person.

I can't condense all my new revelations on mental illness into one post, so before any of you respond with some half-baked snide remark I recommend reading Dead Link Removed by Thomas Szasz (which an old therapist recommended to me), he published an article also called The Myth of Mental Illness prior to the book. I also recommend Dead Link Removed by Johann Hari, who has talked about the contents of his book frequently and plenty of videos about it are available on Youtube, if you don't want to buy the book.

We must move on from this hateful idea of "mental illness", and recognize our distress as part of a bigger problem if we want to grow as a society. We must realize that problems caused by societal and environmental factors need societal and environmental solutions. Then maybe, someday, society as a whole can begin to heal.

Regarding the idea of "lost connections"...(and I haven't read the book yet so I might be completely wrong here)...
I I think that is exactly what has happened in our "society". Connections are being ripped apart and not just "lost". The greatest human needs are met by COMMUNITY and personal extended networking and not just some few or more isolated "friendships", whatever that is these days, and too many people have NONE of that either.

And that is what, in my opinion, is driving so much of this alarming universal inordinate psychological distress, mostly still UNarticulated. Families are shattered more often than not, in all sectors of society from rich to poor. Personal exclusion from a supportive family or small "circle"...can be psychologically unbearable, and that's to say nothing of people unjustly incarcerated who are routinely given this message that invisibility is the worst punishment endured by mankind. Except it's not at all endurable when it comes to the sustainability of the society. Forced invisibility/obliteration might be the real name of the game and the game has high stakes...the death of human civilization for good or a fighting chance for survival into a reasonable future. Too much work is being ignored because of our human brokenness from one another and ourselves.