Mental Health
After the recent death of Jordan Neely, many on Twitter commented on how he has a mental illness and should have been in treatment. But what is mental health and what is mental illness?
Popular psychology and psychiatry made these terms a part of everyone's vocabulary, but just because they sound familiar, it doesn't mean we understand them. The "mind doctors" seem to think you have a mental illness if your day-to-day functioning in society is "severely impaired". Calling it an illness makes it comparable to a physical illness - it is expected to be (more or less) temporary, and you are expected to get better with "treatment." And just as we have reduced expectations of someone that is physically ill, we also expect less from a person that is said to have a mental illness. This is why people - most on the left, but some on the right as well - excuse away Neely's crimes. He is not responsible for his crimes and misdeeds because he is mentally ill. The "system" is at fault.
Is this justified, though? A physical illness is a fact. A blood test or other test shows the evidence clearly. A mental illness, on the other hand, is extremely vaguely defined. There is no physical test for it. If you did an autopsy on a person that "suffered" for years from "schizophrenia" before dying, you can't point to anything that can corroborate the "disease". It basically amounts to the therapist's opinion about the "patient's" behavior. The DSM is filled with all sorts of made-up diseases and disorders, which are basically descriptions of human behaviors that some may find odd or objectionable.
"Chemical imbalance" in brain is often given as the root cause for some disorders, e.g. depression. The correct balance is not specified, nor is "chemical balance" in brain measured before a psychiatrist decides a person has depression. If you are feeling sadder and more helpless than usual, you are prescribed a medication. If you feel better after taking it, then you must have had chemical imbalance in brain and the medication must have corrected it. This is how the thinking goes. Even the depression pills are not invented for the purpose. A pill made for another disease - a physical disease - was found to make patients feel euphoric. This is when psychiatry hatched this "chemical imbalance" scheme.
Do the pills work? All feelings, including feelings of sadness and helplessness, subside by themselves with time, especially if they are brought on by a life event. Even without a pill, you will likely make a full recovery from "depression" in a few weeks. On the other hand, it is hard to get off psychiatric medications. The brain changes in response to medication - it may increase or decrease receptors for certain chemicals, for example, depending on what the medication does. Getting off the medication requires the brain to undo its changes. The period of adjustment is uncomfortable enough that some people end up taking the pills longer than they need to - may be much longer. If the unwanted sadness is a result of a "thinking defect", it could last long. It is usually dealt with by talk therapy, e.g. CBT. It's hard to equate these defects with a disease, though. It's like a friend or a trusted elder talks things over with you, and your perspective changes as a result. Did you have a disease before the talk that went away as a result of the talk? Even saying it aloud makes it sound ridiculous.
"Mental illness" may be ill-defined, but if you tell a criminal his criminality is a result of his mental illness, you can be sure he will exploit that little tidbit to the fullest. People have a way of living up to your expectations of them! Society needs to make people take responsibility for their actions instead of giving them cop-outs like "mental illness".