I’ve never thought about this to be honest. I was diagnosed with mental health problems when I was very young and so I don’t think I had an image in my head before then because I was too young to have thought it. I only knew how I felt at the time and so I guess I thought that all people who were ill were like me, sad, frightened, paranoid, full of dislike for myself, very bad in social situations and very awkward. Now, I still find myself learning about how mental health affects people in different ways and so I was surprised when not everyone who had mental health problems were the same as me. I remember being shocked that one of colleagues was quite the opposite to me, overly cheerful all the time, always looking for a party and very careless to the point of self destruction. Now I don’t have one particular image of mental health.

I’m noot sure if that answers your question! Sorry if my answer is confusing.

I suppose I have a proper image of mental illness. I feel like I do. I have a long history of psychotherapy myself, and my brain is slightly addled. I’m paranoid and I hallucinate, and sometimes I have a tiny, little panic attack, but otherwise I’m completely normal. That’s not too uncommon, is it?
While it would be cool if I was completely batshit insane, I’m fairly ordinary, and I guess most people with a mental illness are too. I mean, almost everyone has a mental illness these days. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone did, to one degree or another.

Another GQ @daloon. We’ve discussed this in the past, and I think you know how I feel about certain psychological traits – from experience.

I think there is a stigma about it, unfortunately, and it is probably one of lifes last medical mysteries. I didn’t mean that to sound so Beatlesque, I meant that as we map out the genes and everything (I won’t get all technical – because I can’t – but you know what I mean) there is still this mystery about mental illness.

We automatically fear it – that is the initial tribal gut instinct, I think. Why? Because is it so misunderstood, and unpredictable. Two key factors which cause fear in the hearts of humans.

Case in point: A young girl was online asking adice about depression. Probably the most common, treatable and well-known of the psychological and emotional troubles that ail us.

Yet she was worried that if she sought out council – even just council – for diagnoses, comfort or whatever – she feared of being labeled crazy.

Sad, but I suspect she is like many who still associate Psychology, Psychiatry and even Social Work with being crazy – and what’s so wrong about being a little crazy anyway? It was depression she was talking about. The association is so strong, it still inhibits and stops otherwise perfectly normal people – and even more sadly teens and children – from seeking advice.

Great Question my friend.

The Mother’s Son:

I have a dream—a dreadful dream—
A dream that is never done.
I watch a man go out of his mind,
And he is My Mother’s Son.

They pushed him into a Mental Home,
And that is like the grave:
For they do not let you sleep upstairs,
And you aren’t allowed to shave.

And it was not disease or crime
Which got him landed there,
But because They laid on My Mother’s Son
More than a man could bear.

What with noise, and fear of death,
Waking, and wounds and cold,
They filled the Cup for My Mother’s Son
Fuller than it could hold.

They broke his body and his mind
And yet They made him live,
And They asked more of My Mother’s Son
Than any man could give.

For, just because he had not died,
Nor been discharged nor sick,
They dragged it out with My Mother’s Son
Longer than he could stick….

And no one knows when he’ll get well—
So, there he’ll have to be:
And, ‘spite of the beard in the looking-glass,
I know that man is me!

Rudyard Kipling

@robaccus That was awesome. Thank you for posting that.

@robaccus Perfect. Thanks for sharing that poem.

This

This is a GQ. I hadn’t thought much about this in concrete terms until you asked that.

Of course, the image you project of ‘the wild and crazy guy’ is one aspect of “mental illness”, but there are so many forms!

I have a friend at work, a decent enough guy, and smart, though I’m sure he has his flaws and demons the same as anyone else. I have no idea what his family life might have been like. His adult daughter killed herself. Out of the blue, apparently. He had no idea; his wife was clueless; she hadn’t spoken to either of them or even left a note. (I don’t know the details of her death, but my friend has accepted the police report. His only questions are about “Why?”—not “How?”) This was several years ago, and though we don’t discuss it—I’m not ‘that’ close to him, anyway—I still see him with that thousand-yard stare from time to time.

I watched a slow suicide—it took a couple of decades—but an adopted son of my father’s cousin did himself in with drugs, alcohol and continual petty criminal behavior. He never seemed to be “addicted” or “out of control” with anything, this was like controlled flight into the side of a mountain. No one ever understood—“Why is he doing this to himself?” He was adopted as an infant and raised by the most loving people I know outside of my own parents—and rebelled at everything, broke every rule, participated in every deviant and risky behavior I could imagine. I’m not sure what eventually killed him; when my parents told me about it years ago my first reaction was (uncharitably), “I wonder what took him so long?” I think he eventually died from AIDS as a result of using infected syringes while shooting drugs, back when AIDS was a death sentence.

And I’ve seen what depression can do to people, and the way that can twist people’s minds to act against their own survival.

There’s just no way, I think, for anyone to know with any certainty in most cases, “Oh, this is mental illness” ... and much less can we even deal with it, I think.

I picture my brother (diagnosis rapid cycle manic bi-polar disorder) he has seemed much better after a short stay in a mental hospital and is taking medication, although none of us has heard from him in a couple months so we guess he is on a bit of a downward cycle, we were hoping for a phone call on Christmas Day but none came.

@daloon; I think of a really smart, articulate, well-informed, and clever doofus with the map of the world laminated to an unlikely part of his anatomy.. He is not, however, intelligent enough to believe me (or Milo, who, for once, is in accord).

I have been there, so my image is completely formed by own experiences. My image is that its like being lost. Like being in a box completely seperate from the world. Thats what I think of – confusion and seperation.

What does depression look like fro the insider, especially coupled with Aspergers Syndrome?
*Feeling of utter hopelessness, which gets worse everytime some new medication doesn’t work,
*A sense of lethargy and bleakness, what is the point of even getting out of bed?
*A feeling of being utterly alone, even if someone tells you otherwise, you don’t believe the,
*Complete indifference to personal safety, health, hygiene, appearance,
*Isolation from all other people, and wanting it that way,
*A desire to drink and/or use tranquilizers, not to feel better but only to pass out,
*A hope not to wake up after passing out,
*A desire for absolute silence, after having been a lifelong classical music fan,
*Forgetting what day of the week it is, or even what month, or caring,
*Frequent obsession about death and its aftermath, such as planning to shoot oneself deep in the forest so as not to leave a mess that someone else has to clean up,
*Destroying personal papers, unpublished manuscripts, artwork,
*A feeling of being on an endlessly downward spiraling escalator,
*Feeling chest pains and thinking “oh, good. maybe a heart attack will save me the trouble”,
*Intentionally driving people away from you, even though previous behavior has already driven away 95% of them anyway,
* When your first thought upon awakeing is “oh shit, not another fucking day,
* Desire to sleep continuously and never wake up,
* A deep-seated wish never to have been born,
* Typing into this computer, not even knowing or caring why,
* Reviewing old postings and finding that the drunken ones make more sense than the sober ones,
* Using valuable books, records and CDs as pistol targets,
* Destroying personal possessions so that nobody else can have them when you’re gone,
* Throwing books and furniture into the wood stove because you don’t feel like going out to the woodshed

A great question. My idea of mental illness is amorphous and I wonder if part of the classification is socially determined. I suppose we can generally agree that those who are delusional, who hallucinate, are mentally ill. But what about the others? What is there in common between someone who is OCD or alocholic or depressive? I read someone who said that depression is more of a symptom held in common by several different types of disease rather than a specific disease. How much have we learned about mental illness? The big recent change has been the use of drugs, which has turned psychiatrists into pill dispensers, leaving the therapy to those without MD’s.

Mental illness is extremely vague. You never know if its mental illness, drug induced or alchol. I can’t say I ever had one specific idea. Some people who are mentally ill don’t show any signs because they are good at hiding it or you mistake their behavior for genius or ignorance or shyness or just being hypersensitive. Plus what is mental illness. Some people brains are wired differently and they function just fine the way they are. So this is normal to them. I guess if I had to put my finger on it, I wouldn’t consider anyone mentally ill unless they cause harm to themselves or someone else or can no longer function in a normal capacity among society.

My image of mental illness is that those who look the most sick often can’t hold a candle to the level of illness of the mentally ill who are “passing” as normal.

In other words, when it gets overt odds are those people are getting some help while the quietly insane are skinning cats/hookers/kids/women in their basement.

@Merriment Love the cheerful imagery. +GA

@Merriment, that’s a good answer. Spooky-good.

@CyanoticWasp @stranger_in_a_strange_land – Thank you both :) :)

Pressure.

This.

I’ve always thought of mental illness being the same as any other illness.

I have to agree with @Pandora. Mental illness is vague. For some people, their behavior might indicate a mental illness. See that same behavior in another person and it’s just their personality. People are also too quick to give themselves the labels of mental illnesses and I think that once they are convinced that label applies to them (even if it doesn’t), it makes things worse.

My typical image of mental illness is usually someone who is disconnected from reality. Because in a way, all mental illnesses relate to that somehow or another.

The only mental illnesses that I’ve viewed up close have been schizophrenia (my uncle) and Alzheimer’s (my late grandmother). The theory is that my boyfriend’s grandfather (who is now dead) was bipolar (I never met him, but I heard a lot about him from my boyfriend).

ah FxxK – the voices the voices -

Where the hell are my pills!!!!

I know you are all trying to get my pills

Damn you all

just kidding

I think of my son and my worry that he will never be able to allow himself to succeed at anything.

To me mental illness is not loaded with value or lack of value – I think of multiple personality disorder as a mental illness, for one…though I’ve known a spouse of a person with that disorder and their life was interesting, maybe not ‘normal’ but so what.

I find it helpful in discussions of this sort to the questioner to define their terms. “Mental illness” may mean different things to different people.

Personally speaking, I think most people who consider themselves “normal” are mentally ill. (Kudos to @Merriment.) One image, in particular, is that of the person who talks incessently on mobile speaking devices. There’s something odd about anyone who feels the need to talk to someone all the time.

Mental illness takes many forms; a cursory glance through Fluther questions (or any other social forum) could leave anyone with the impression there are a lot of sick people in the world.

“The difference between you and me is, I know I’m crazy.”

@SABOTEUR thanks!

@Merriment That was disturbingly delicious.

@Zen_ Again lol! Thank you :)

@SABOTEUR To have a definition completely destroys the point of the question—which is to find out different people’s personal image of mental illness, however they define it for themselves.

@gailcalled That’s your image? What was your image two years ago? That fellow isn’t mentally ill. He’s just crazy. He will reap what he has sown. Will he be happy then? He has no idea. Maybe he believes that anything is better that what is now.

Moderated myself by Fluther removers.

JK ;-)

I Am

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest—that I loved the best—
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

—John Clare

@daloon: Oh…ok…

Drat! Fooled by the old “Asking-The-Question-Just-For-The-Sake-Of-Asking-A-Question trick again!

@SABOTEUR – The main thing that separates those who are mentally ill from those who are not is simple. If you can function successfully in the real world without medications, you are not mentally ill. You might be crazy as a loon or just eccentric, but you do not have a mental illness.

@Darwin That’s crazy as daloon, thank you very much ;-)

@SABOTEUR Huh? I am very much interested in how other people conceive of mental illness. Even, you might say, vitally concerned. While I occasionally ask hypothetical or speculative questions, most of my questions spring directly from concerns in my life.

I can see that…whatever works for you.

I just like to cut to the chase…I guess my perspective stems from wading through a lot of irrelevant information (on my job) to get to the 3 or 4 pieces of information I need to get the job done.

As for @Darwin‘s comment, that’s an unarguably technically correct definition; but on the real tip, a lot of us are functionally insane. We only discover the truth when somebody snaps.

What about supposedly normal behavior? Is the unquestioning belief that a particular book is the word of God a type of mental illness? It sure seems that way to me. What about the Holocaust? @Darwin‘s definition breaks down when an entire entire group acts mad.

@LostInParadise: Good point. There was a time when people considered owning slaves and burning people at the stake to be normal behavior.

The moderators, it’s part of a conspiracy…

Quick, where’s my tin foil hat!

<—- be on the look out, last seen displaying abnormal behavoir

I’ve been trying to think of how to argue against @Darwin‘s definition of sanity, too. Because we all know stories of people who had jobs and families and did all kinds of “normal” things, and then were found to be long-time serial killers, for example. And I’m not talking Unabomber crazy, either, but those like the Green River Killer, the BTK killer and others: family guys, apparently normal to most observers, but anything but normal in reality.

On the other hand, there are also examples (thankfully more than the previous cases) of people who have strange quirks, think and act very “abnormally”, and really do lead productive—and sometimes outstanding—lives.

Sometimes it takes a new age and entirely new eyes to make the distinction. For example, in his day prior to the American Civil War, John Brown was probably considered mad by most of his peers for trying to start a slave revolt. (Even by modern observers he’s considered to have been a dangerous and violent radical.) But was he mentally ill? ‘Crazy’ in the vernacular? He was undoubtedly possessed by his idea, and to a degree that was judged to be criminal, but—since slavery in this country has been ended, and we’re not going back there—I don’t think that people think he’s “crazy” any more.

For that matter, suicide bombers in the name of their religion are considered “crazy” in Western eyes (that is, in the eyes of their targets), but that’s arguable. I think they know they’re going to die, but they have apparently done a mental calculus of their own that makes theirs a ‘rational’ act.

So a lot of times mental illness is in the eye (or the mind) of the beholder, or the jury.

“So a lot of times mental illness is in the eye (or the mind) of the beholder, or the jury.”

Brilliant.

Thanks, @SABOTEUR.

I beg to differ with many of you. Being a sociopath is not suffering from a mental illness. It simply means that you lack any empathy at all for others. Those who conceived of and carried out the Holocaust were not insane. They were either sociopaths who considered Jews, Gypsies, etc. as non-human, or they were folks who wanted someone else to blame for all the ills of the world.

Serial killers are also typically not mentally ill. They are also sociopaths who have discovered doing terrible things to living creatures makes them feel happy, so they do those things because they have no empathy and because they figure they are smarter than average and so won’t get caught. Folks like Bernie Madoff are also sociopaths, although not violent. They see no problem in ruining the lives of others because they don’t consider them to be human.

A high school kid who shoots up the cafeteria may very well be mentally ill and this event is the first overt sign of it (although typically there have been many, many clues all along). Similar is true of a man who seems fine but one day goes home and kills his wife and children and then himself. In those cases, we don’t recognize the signs and so are surprised when it becomes blindingly obvious.

An example is Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech student who suddenly “went postal.” For years people knew he had a problem with anger, but no one ever stopped to look at all the evidence of his mental illness until he went ballistic. People considered him normal, or normal but with an anger problem, or slightly strange, ut no one ever sat down and pointed out that the guy was beyond having “an anger problem,” but was consumed by anger to such a degree that it impaired his functioning.

@Darwin – Do you not see someone who is “consumed by anger to such a degree that it impairs their function” as a person a little less than mentally healthy?

@Merriment – Yes, I do. It is just that folks refused to see that he wasn’t functioning normally. Some people did try, but no one did enough to actually get him into treatment. If their mental condition impairs a person’s function, then it is not a condition, but an illness. Cho was mentally ill. It is the fault of those around him that no one did enough about it.

OTOH, the BTK Killer and Bernie Madoff are not mentally ill. They are sociopaths, and no treatment or medication is ever going to change they way their minds work.

Regarding large group memes such as hitler’s fan club, there has been much experimentation. Societies have a way of being manipulated by hopes and visions of changes, for quality affordable concentration kamps.

The behavior of the masses has a certain predictability to it.

Lemmings and sheep.

Beware the non-transparent tyrant.

It might be you for supper.

How can a sociopath not be mentally ill? If someone tries to kill someone on ethnic or religious grounds, there is a serious problem. I don’t think that it matters whether they are curable or not. In a similar way I would say that a pedophile is mentally ill.

And I do think there are grounds for thinking that Bernie Madouf is mentally ill, though I would not say this of criminals in general. What makes Madouf different is that he did in his closest friends and that, given his knowledge and expertise, how could he possibly think he could get away with what he did?

There was an article about sociopaths in the New Yorker some time in the last year. It was about a scientist who is looking at differences in how they think using MRI scans. It looks like there is a difference, although I’m not sure if they posit any causes for that difference—whether genetic or environmental or both. I think there was definitely an environmental component, which, if I remember correctly, has to do with abuse, as one might expect.

Here’s that article.

@daloon, great. Now all we have to do is identify all the sociopath markers in MRIs, give one to everybody, and then kill off the sociopaths.

Wait a minute… who’s going to administer that program?

Sociopaths aren’t mentally ill in that there is nothing you can do to “fix” them. Once a sociopath, always a sociopath. With that said, not all sociopaths end up as serial killers. A lot of them end up as CEOs of large companies because it doesn’t bother them to step on others on the way up, and they have no problem making huge layoffs.

If you follow Darwinian thinking, then you might assert, that the ability to behave as a sociopath may have conferred better probabilty of survival in some way.

Definately, many in the profession and practice of law and politics could benifit, not that they do.

Think however about combat.

My grandfather was part of a unit that crossed the former french german line after the battle of the bulge. He opened the door to a windmill in germany to find a german soldier in full gear with his weapon pointed.

There they stood, inches apart, both froze, guns at the ready. Fingers on the trigger.

My grandfather pulled first, hence I live.

His entire unit was killed by the second shell from a panzer. He awoke in the hospital. Of all of the horror that he saw, nothing bothered him as much as that one german soldier.

Now Imagine if you were a sociopath.

1/5 soldiers in this situation don’t pull.

There is a reason that veteran soldiers do so much better. The non-pullers have been weeded out.

@Darwin – I think everybody who looked the other way as he spiraled out of control bear a responsibility for that and that alone. I don’t think they can be held accountable for his mental illness or for his actions.

Have you ever tried to get treatment for a reluctant adult? It is nearly impossible. And even if it is accomplished it is only for a limited treatment. Typically 72 hours. After which the adult mental case is judged on their ability to function within the clinical environment. If they can “pull off” normalcy for a moment they will be released and getting them “committed” for treatment in the future will be even harder.

You say:
Sociopaths aren’t mentally ill in that there is nothing you can do to “fix” them”

That can’t be the measurement. If it were then being incurable would mean that every person with a mental illness that doesn’t respond to treatment isn’t really mentally ill.

There are many schizophrenics that do not respond to any treatment…but they are still very mentally ill.

It’s become far too common to even be morbidly fashionable any more.

I had a young friend who was bi-polar. When we had lunch (he and his mother and I) he chain-smoked, sweated a lot and his hands shook. But I got the feeling he was trying to integrate with us.