bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
- Messages
- 36,224
- Gender
- He/Him
- Basic Beliefs
- Strong Atheist
Well then we're not really in disagreement. I do things that are comforting. That's rational to do. But those things I do make no rational sense in and of themselves. A religious person who behaves as if there really is a magic spaceman interested in his or her sex organs is not the same thing. That is more like mental illness.
I think that's a bit of a dangerous position. There is such a thing as "psychic reality" (psychic in the original sense as meaning pertaining to the psyche), at least at the subjective level. Someone can be afraid of the dark despite all manner of reason that it's irrational. We don't say they are mentally ill. So if someone sees and interacts with "spirits" but this does not manifest as a psychological pathology (in other words they are able to have fairly normal social interaction) do we call this mental illness? For that matter, someone who believes spacemen are interested in their sex organs could well be experiencing a paranoid fantasy symbolizing a childhood trauma related to sexual molestation, where the actual memory is too painful to be brought to consciousness, in which case do we label that as a mental illness? Where and how do you draw the line?
All of these things you describe are mental illnesses. Some are more debilitating than others, but that's not a barrier to their being mental illnesses - some physiological illnesses are more debilitating than others too. A mild head cold is still an illness, even if it doesn't prevent you from doing all the things you normally do; Likewise, phobias are illnesses, even if you are able to overcome them and live an outwardly normal life.