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1 in 5 americans have a mental illiness (or so I read on FB)

The problem with many mental illnesses is that they are not always absolute. You could see a mental illness as a dysfunction between someones psychology and the world they live in.

Take for example homosexuality. Most people here would not consider that a mental illness but if you look 50 years back you will realize that this is because our current society (well, most if it) doesn't make it so. A society's response to certain behavior defines what that society calls mental illness. A light touch of schizoid personality could make you a person of great importance in a shamanistic society!

This also means that a shift in mental illness demographics may not be biological at all but says more about a change in society.

In a society made up of small close knit groups (tribal, family, village, guild, parish etc...) some states we call mental illness would function perfectly. On the other hand some other behavior that we now call completely normal would be very disruptive to the group and might be considered pathological.
 
skepticalbip said:
dystopian said:
God, you're so happy all the time, off to the asylum with you.
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:D

http://viewpointsonline.org/2014/05/01/happiness-easily-overlooked/

This month is Mental Health Awareness and there’s a health issue that needs its turn to be addressed as well.

With the all-good attention of telling people who are afflicted with depression and anxiety to be positive, we tend to overlook the opposite with those who are too happy.

Can happiness be an actual disorder? How can something that makes us feel good and have positive physical results be bad?

We all too easily notice when someone is depressed and make encouragements for them to seek help but what if you saw someone who was overjoyed? Too happy?

That excessive happiness could be an underlying medical condition that shouldn’t be overlooked.
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I like that. It reinforces my view that there aren't any people without illness. A person who considers himself illness-free is obviously ill.

Language is so lame.
 
NobleSavage said:
Togo said:
Happiness as a mental illness

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1619629
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"A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder. 1992". I'm guessing it didn't get adopted.
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It wasn't trying particularly hard to get adopted - the purpose was rather to make a point about how mental disorders are viewed, the use of the illness/medical model where it isn't strictly appropriate, and so on. It wasn't so long ago that what and wasn't a mental illness was being decided by vote, and so there have been various attempts to get it onto a more scientific and objective footing. The proposal I linked to is making the point that there are still entirely subjective/social elements to the process, hence the comment in the abstract that "One possible objection to this proposal remains--that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant."
 
To answer the OP: If it doesn't harm our chance of survival and procreation, then evolution doesn't care. Strictly speaking evolution doesn't care anyway: it has no brain and no preferences. But as a mechanism, it will only come into play for traits that change the chances of either survival or procreation.

The majority of mental illnesses don't express in ways that significantly inhibit either of those. Severe forms, such as schizophrenia, catatonia, etc. can have a profound effect, and are also very rare. To the extent that they can be controlled and treated through medication, however, then prospective mates may be unaware of the condition, and those with them may lead relatively long lives and pass on their genes to future generations.

Other illnesses, such as mild depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorders, and attention deficit disorders are much more common, and undoubtedly make up the bulk of that 1 in 5 statistic. None of those, however, presents a barrier to daily life, or to procreation in any meaningful way. As such, they are unaffected by evolutionary processes.
 
Personally, I'm more concerned that 1 in 5 Americans score less than the 20th Percentile in math aptitude.
 
There is still not a single diagnostic test that demonstrates mental illness to exist. That is to say, no blood test, no brain scan (unless there is brain damage) no temperature, no other measures.
Some proponents of the Mental Illness philosophy religiously claim that you can find some physical diseases which also do not have any medical tests. However while a few physical diseases have no conclusive testing criteria, there are no criteria for 'mental illness.' The DSM (aka billing bible) continues to swell:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/12/medicine-dsm5-row-does-mental-illness-exist


IN THE NEW MANUAL, DSM-5:

■ Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, or DMDD, for those diagnosed with abnormally severe and frequent temper tantrums.

■ Binge-eating disorder. For those who eat to excess 12 times in three months.

■ Hoarding disorder, defined as "persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of actual value".

■ Oppositional defiant disorder, described by one critic as a condition afflicting children who say "no" to their parents more than a certain number of times.

OUT OF THE MANUAL

The term "gender identity disorder", for children and adults who strongly believe they were born the wrong gender, is being replaced with "gender dysphoria" to remove the stigma attached to the word "disorder". Experts liken the switch to the removal of homosexuality as a disorder in the 1973 edition.

AND THE FUTURE?

Hypersexuality and internet addiction will both be included in a section that suggests they could become disorders following further research
 
whichphilosophy said:
There is still not a single diagnostic test that demonstrates mental illness to exist. That is to say, no blood test, no brain scan (unless there is brain damage) no temperature, no other measures.
Some proponents of the Mental Illness philosophy religiously claim that you can find some physical diseases which also do not have any medical tests. However while a few physical diseases have no conclusive testing criteria, there are no criteria for 'mental illness.'
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I'm not entirely sure that's fair to say, whichphilosophy. My sibling suffers from both chronic migraines and bipolar disorder. Neither of them has a medical test, but both of them have specific symptoms. My friend's sibling is a severe schizophrenic; there are certainly criteria for his disorder.

I agree that there are many mental health disorders that have been defined that are not things I would consider disorders at all. I believe there is a very real danger of medicating natural variance out of our species and forcibly "normalizing" us. Not all that long ago, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. Women were diagnosed as "hysterical". On the other hand, if he were alive today, Isaac Newton would very likely be diagnosed as schizophrenic. Albert Einstein would probably have been given Ritalin, or have been considered to have Asperger's. There's a very significant amount of judgment involved in psychiatry, and there is much of which I am skeptical.

I'm not, however, prepared to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. A lack of precision and accuracy does not indicate that the entirety of mental health disorders are "invented" or otherwise made-up. Some are most certainly real. It seems very short-sighted to me to dismiss all of the field due to this current incarnation of misuse of power.
 
I would guess that behaviours categorised as signs of mental illnesses are real enough most of the time. What is disputable is the label of mental illness. Most people are reasonably well adjusted to the kind of societies we live in, which cannot come as a surprise. Yet, many of the same people will have a range of behaviours that will make them somewhat less well adjusted than the average. A smaller proportion still will have behaviours making them utterly unacceptable to their social environment. Yet, for some of those, perhaps for all of them, there might be a different social order in which they would thrive. Perhaps, they would only survive in the wild, perhaps with only limited contacts with other people in the same category of behaviour. We could maybe try to rate the social dysfunctionallity of specific behaviours by working up a metric for the unlikelihood that some natural environment would satisfy the needs issuing from the behaviours. In which case, however, the whole of life on Earth would be rated very dysfunctional, at least until we could prove that many exoplanets are like the Earth.
EB
 
Emily Lake said:
There's a very significant amount of judgment involved in psychiatry, and there is much of which I am skeptical.

I'm not, however, prepared to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. A lack of precision and accuracy does not indicate that the entirety of mental health disorders are "invented" or otherwise made-up. Some are most certainly real. It seems very short-sighted to me to dismiss all of the field due to this current incarnation of misuse of power.
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Ditto. A friend of mine had a breakdown (she has manic paranoia, so she ended up taping herself into an airing cupboard to protect the TV from being stolen), and wound up back in psychiatric hospital. They diagnosed her with hallucinations, because she kept on saying she wanted to get onto the TARDIS to pick up her mail, and prescribed electroconvulsive therapy. Since she wouldn't consent, they needed next-of-kin permission to zap her by force, so they rang her mother. Who pointed out that TARDIS was her email server, and where she kept records of her prescription and treatment plans in case she had a relapse.

Or to put it another way, just because you're an expert, doesn't mean you're not an idiot.
 
NobleSavage said:
skepticalbip said:
All evolution requires is survival and reproduction. It doesn't create perfection.
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Wouldn't schizophrenics have a harder time reproducing and raising a child. Seems like there would be selective pressure against it.
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Not really, if I consider some of my former wives. Most schizophrenics start exhibiting symptoms in early adulthood, their late teens or early twenties. This gives them at least 5 good reproductive years before they start hearing voices. It would have been tough to be the child of a schizo cave person, but probably little tougher than it already was. Our current cultural norm of discouraging children between the ages of puberty and legal adulthood is a fairly new idea.
 
Togo said:
Emily Lake said:
There's a very significant amount of judgment involved in psychiatry, and there is much of which I am skeptical.

I'm not, however, prepared to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. A lack of precision and accuracy does not indicate that the entirety of mental health disorders are "invented" or otherwise made-up. Some are most certainly real. It seems very short-sighted to me to dismiss all of the field due to this current incarnation of misuse of power.
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Ditto. A friend of mine had a breakdown (she has manic paranoia, so she ended up taping herself into an airing cupboard to protect the TV from being stolen), and wound up back in psychiatric hospital. They diagnosed her with hallucinations, because she kept on saying she wanted to get onto the TARDIS to pick up her mail, and prescribed electroconvulsive therapy. Since she wouldn't consent, they needed next-of-kin permission to zap her by force, so they rang her mother. Who pointed out that TARDIS was her email server, and where she kept records of her prescription and treatment plans in case she had a relapse.

Or to put it another way, just because you're an expert, doesn't mean you're not an idiot.
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The critical element that allows a normal person to strap another person to a table and send electrical current through their brain is the firm belief it actually has some benefit. The stress of inflicting this kind of treatment on people can lead to a tunnel vision which makes it the preferred treatment.
 
Bronzeage said:
The critical element that allows a normal person to strap another person to a table and send electrical current through their brain is the firm belief it actually has some benefit. The stress of inflicting this kind of treatment on people can lead to a tunnel vision which makes it the preferred treatment.
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OMYGOD!

Psychiatrists exploited  Chunnel tunnel tickets
 
Togo said:
Or to put it another way, just because you're an expert, doesn't mean you're not an idiot.
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You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Togo again.
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:( I would if I could, because that statement surely deserves it!

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Bronzeage said:
It would have been tough to be the child of a schizo cave person, but probably little tougher than it already was.
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Maybe not. What are the chances that the schizophrenics of today were the mystics and shamans of ancestry?
 
I'd take issue with a blanket statement that there are no measurable physical indicators of mental illness. PET scans and fMRIs of the brain show clear irregularities in blood flow, neural 'wiring' and reactions to stimuli. MRIs often reveal anatomical irregularities. Lab tests show abnormalities in neurotransmitters and even routine blood tests often show abnormal catecholamine and steroid production or metabolism. Even such crude contraptions as polygraphs have revealed unique response patterns in certain demographics.

As has been pointed out, what is a dysfunctional abnormality in one situation may be be a selective advantage in another. In a tribe of hunter gatherers a few hyperactive, hypervigilant individuals (ADHD) might be the best hunters and the first to notice something dangerous along the path. Homosexual males might make good camp guards when the hunters are out, or bodyguards for foraging groups of women.
In Chimpanzees, marginal individuals exhibiting symptoms we would label depressive, function as sentries on the periphery of the band.
 
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