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Permalink Reply by LeaT on February 5, 2009 at 7:34am

But then you demand them to give you attention but the focus still lies on self.

Oh well, I guess we can just agree to disagree, we must seem to have different defintions at this point.

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Permalink Reply by LeaT on February 5, 2009 at 5:08pm

I am not arguing over that though, but rather the defintion of "personal focus", sort of, as I for example don't really believe that any act actually is for example, truly altruistic (there's always a personal motif), so care for others for the sake of others is sort of, impossible in my worldview.

But nevermind :)

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Permalink Reply by Deborah on February 7, 2009 at 4:25pm

What would you say about Middle Eastern societies today or about medieval European society? Would you be comfortable in saying that entire societies can be mentally ill? If everyone in a society thinks that they have a relationship with a god, then a member of such a society who has this belief would not have an unusual sense of entitlement relative to the people around him. Actually, I think that atheists can be quite narcissistic and lack empathy.

Permalink Reply by Deborah on March 20, 2009 at 4:08pm

I think it was a nasty and cruel society but I would not go so far as to say that all of the members of it were mentally ill.

Permalink Reply by Deborah on March 21, 2009 at 4:35am

Alex Donovan - "So the desire to commit genocide is perfectly sane?"

Not all members of German society under Nazism wanted to commit genocide. However, I acknowledge that populaces can get whipped up into a frenzy and do things they wouldn't normally do. Perhaps you can colloquially say that they are insane, although I understand that insanity is no longer considered to be a medical diagnosis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity

An article on Wikipedia on folie a deux - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux - says the following:
"The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that a person cannot be diagnosed as being delusional if the belief in question is one "ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture" (see entry for delusion). It is not clear at what point a belief considered to be delusional escapes from the folie à... diagnostic category and becomes legitimate because of the number of people holding it. When a large number of people may come to believe obviously false and potentially distressing things based purely on hearsay, these beliefs are not considered to be clinical delusions by the psychiatric profession and are labelled instead as mass hysteria."

Erich Fromm had no problem in calling societies insane. It seems to me that this is a medicalisation of a moral judgment. Trouble with this is that, while people have no problem in demanding justifications for moral judgments, they may feel inhibited from asking for justifications for medical diagnoses. Then there is also the issue that describing something as a mental illness will be seen by many to imply that it is abnormal for humans. But is, for example, hostility towards other "tribes" abnormal? Maybe applying the label of "mental illness" will induce a false sense of complacency about human nature.

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Permalink Reply by FreeThinker on March 22, 2009 at 7:44am

I wouldn't call it psychosis, at least not for the majority, although there may be a few such cases. I think when they see or talk to "God", it is because they are letting their mind wander rather than directing their thoughts. As German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote "Where a man has a passion for meditation without the capacity for thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease". Now, "disease", in this sense, is similar to the "diseases" of depression, anxiety, alcholism, etc. These aren't cured by drugs, although drugs like Paxil are often used to relieve the symptoms of depression. The way to cure depression or alcoholism is by reprogramming the brain. That's what cognitive behavioral therapy does for depression and what the 12-step program does for alcoholism.

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