Insanity

[ray]

I would like to know who decreed the level of insanity that makes one insane.Everything is real in everyone's mind so nothing is insane because it is all reality to someone.

[DuB]

Just to clear things up, insanity is a legal term (not a medical diagnosis) used when a person who has committed a crime is judged to have a mental illness which renders them incapable of distinguishing right from wrong (that part is key) - thereby freeing them from legal responsibility for their actions. I'll assume you're referring to the diagnosis of mental disorders, not the insanity defense. You appear to think that people can be assigned to one of two categories: mentally ill, or not. This is clearly not the case. The way a mental disorder is diagnosed depends entirely on which particular disorder you're referring to. As for the authority behind what exactly warrants a clinical diagnosis, the DSM-IV, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is considered the Bible of the mental health industry. Follow that link for more information.

[Serkat]

Great reply to an otherwise unlettered thread.

[NonDualistic]

Just to clear things up, insanity is a legal term (not a medical diagnosis) used when a person who has committed a crime is judged to have a mental illness which renders them incapable of distinguishing right from wrong (that part is key) - thereby freeing them from legal responsibility for their actions. Even then the definition of right/wrong is not set in concrete. Society sets those values and those values can be drastically different from society to society. Therefore the definition of insanity can also be quite different from one society to another.

[Malac Reborn]

Dub, I don't think you really answered the question. He was referring to subjective reality. (Don't feel like explaining more..)

[Cyclic13]

I've posted this before but here it is again...

[Serkat]

I've posted this before but here it is again... Seriously, the guy in the video is a fucking idiot who has no idea what he's talking about. Cultural relativism is bollocks. You need to accept that Western culture is superior in many aspects to many other cultures, previous and current. We have democracy, we have science and don't go doing rain dances, we developed the internet and connected the world on a scale never before imagined, we have medicine that actually works and isn't just a placebo. And don't even get me started on primitivism. Yeah, I know it's quite the romantic outlook to go paddling in wooden boats and live off of banana trees. I'd like to see how you think of it when you lie on the floor, dehydrated and bleeding with a simple infected wound that nobody's going to heal or disinfect for you.

[Cyclic13]

Terence McKenna is hardly someone I'd call an idiot... Culture is your OS... "Culture denies experience...Cultures put in place...a paradigm. And, then what fits within the cultural paradigm is accentuated and stressed. And, what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, and argued against. And, we live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as...Materialism, and it's many guises. And, the basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter, and pretty much confined to it's surface..." -Terrence McKenna

[Serkat]

Couple of things. 1. Psychedelic experience and introspection are great, but they are what they are. You can't derive anything from them in terms of non-psychedelic experience. Most of what he says does have a point. But it doesn't cure disease and it doesn't stop pedophiles. It doesn't have a cultural effect. 2. Cultural relativism is bullshit. The funny thing is that he agrees with me, because he compares different cultures and judges them. Yet, the guy uses the word "tolerant" in such a way that it becomes completely nihilistic. You can't be tolerant of everything, and you shouldn't be. To him a scientific world view seems to be on par with a stupid one that allows anti-science jibberish, yet he demonizes Western culture as a whole and claims it has a bug. Continuing his metaphor, a cultural OS that supports UFOs (or Christianity or Homeopathy for all I care) you're running Stupidity 1.0, complete with a defective logical subsystem and several security leaks that make your head clogged up with all kinds of nonsense that you're being fed. 3. I don't think I need to say anything about the claim of capitalism being inefficient. Raw capitalism might not be humane, but that's exactly what makes it so efficient. It views humans as machines, subjugating them to natural economic selection. 4. All in all he just put a mixture of psychological claims into lyrical words... that doesn't make it correct. Psychology studies the same things but doesn't make itself sound more important by trying to use the most hippiesque language imaginable. "Culture denies experience...Cultures put in place...a paradigm. And, then what fits within the cultural paradigm is accentuated and stressed. And, what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, and argued against. And, we live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as...Materialism, and it's many guises. And, the basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter, and pretty much confined to it's surface..." -Terrence McKenna 1. There's a logical error. If cultures only allow things that fit within their paradigms, why do they change so rapidly? Funny, huh? Why is racism marginalized when it was the hip thing to believe in just a couple of decades ago? 2. Now if he had put forth an argument against materialism, I might actually take him seriously. Only because you don't like it doesn't make it false. 3. No, psychedelic experiences are not an argument against materialism. Dreaming isn't either... or thinking. So that point is moot.

[ray]

yeah......i meant being mentally ill, because i was recently diagnosed with somehting and everyone was so suprised...they thought i was normal so am i?

[DuB]

I wouldn't get too bent out of shape about it. As some of my Christian friends say, the last perfect person that I heard about got nailed to a giant slab of wood . Unfortunately, there's a stigma surrounding mental disorders in our society. It doesn't help that popular media consistently portrays the mentally ill as being violent and/or ineffectual. In reality, violence is no more prevalent among the mentally ill than it is in the general population, and the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are (usually with some form of treatment) perfectly able to lead "normal" and fulfilling lives. Even the term "mentally ill" has attracted a fair amount of controversy, and rightly so - there are serious problems with conceptualizing abnormal or maladaptive behavior as an illness to be cured in the same fashion as, say, the flu. So like I said, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Being diagnosed with a mental disorder doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything "wrong" with you - although there will probably always be people who choose to interpret it that way.

[ray]

yeah,i am not that upset about it i just wanted to discuss mental illness,i was wondering where the line is and who made it....stuff like that.

[LucidFlanders]

Seriously, the guy in the video is a fucking idiot who has no idea what he's talking about. Cultural relativism is bollocks. You need to accept that Western culture is superior in many aspects to many other cultures, previous and current. We have democracy, we have science and don't go doing rain dances, we developed the internet and connected the world on a scale never before imagined, we have medicine that actually works and isn't just a placebo. And don't even get me started on primitivism. Yeah, I know it's quite the romantic outlook to go paddling in wooden boats and live off of banana trees. I'd like to see how you think of it when you lie on the floor, dehydrated and bleeding with a simple infected wound that nobody's going to heal or disinfect for you. Don't make fun of dead people, it's not nice.

[Serkat]

Don't make fun of dead people, it's not nice. What

[LucidFlanders]

He's dead in real life, cancer i think.

[Serkat]

So...? That wasn't the point of my post. The point was that I disagree with what he said. How do you figure that calling a dead person an idiot is worse than calling a living person an idiot? They aren't actually there to receive the insult, so what gives? And yes, I'm using the word 'idiot' in an exaggerated manner here. I should have said that he has some idiotic points, it would have been more polite.

[Bonsay]

yeah,i am not that upset about it i just wanted to discuss mental illness,i was wondering where the line is and who made it....stuff like that. It's quite simple to imagine really, If we seperate the world on an objective and subjective one, which seems to be the case with our world. You can see pink elephants jumping around and that's just a part of your reality, no problem. Objectively other people don't see it and because people like to call other people names they label you as insane. A psychologist can't really know what a mentaly ill patient experiences. All we have are claims from patients. It's like with that authist, who managed to fit into society well enough. He can calculate anything he wants without a problem. He explained the process of seeing shapes and feelings. Quite awesome. Usually we don't know what goes on inside their heads.

[ray]

what if the things you see interfere with your daily routine?(not me but i know someone who is pretty bad off)

[Bonsay]

You need people to watch you or you get sent to a mental institution. If you're actually asking for advice, then he should see a doctor, I guess. Especially if it interferes with his life.

[ChaybaChayba]

As long as you're able to change, you're not insane. People with any mental decease think the decease is actually something physical! But this is not true. The mental decease is just something thats wrong with your thinking pattern, you can change it yourself if you realize it is not static. (In mental hospitals they sometimes even use electric shocks to kinda reset the brain, and it recovers mentally ill patients.. look it up) I think the biggest problem with mental deceases is when you start to label people with a mental decease! People in general don't know anything about psychology, so when they get labeled insane, they believe it, and they will behave accordingly. If everyone treats you as if you're insane, you will become insane. If you get put in a mental institute for the rest of your life, theres no way you will stay sane. A good example is dyslexia, a mental decease that prevents you to read properly. But actually dyslexia is a myth. Theres no such thing as dyslexia. Because people claim dyslexia is a handicap, this is not true, people who have so called dyslexia only lack the basic reading skills, and if they follow a speed reading course for example, their dyslexia will suddenly dissapear... and they will get very very angry and frustrated because all their life they have been made to believe there was something wrong with them and that they couldn't read properly, so they wont even try. And then suddenly, after 2 weeks of short training, there so called handicap suddenly dissapears? Yeah, I'd be pissed off to if I was made to believe all my life I had this decease but its actually just a little, easy correctable mistake in my thinking pattern.

[ray]

he was already in an institute and he knows the things he sees aren't real but they still sometimes interfere with his daily activities.no i wasn't asking for advice either.

[Bonsay]

Ok then. So yeah, the people make the line between normal and "strange". Somebody here on DV posted a link showing us how ignorant people are in regards to LDing and sleep in general. It was about a poster on some other forum, who posted a thread about his visual and auditory hallucinations when going to bed and waking up. Everybody started to panic telling him that he was mentally ill and stuff. So there you have it.

[Mattrick]

I would like to know who decreed the level of insanity that makes one insane.Everything is real in everyone's mind so nothing is insane because it is all reality to someone. Want to know when you're insane? When you stop asking if you're insane, is when you are insane. Way I see it, if you're sane enough to comtemplate sanity you're not insane.

[ray]

thats what my mom said today because she said you are still rationally questioning sanity.