Why the hate for wisdom?

[Glow]

Perhaps irrelevant but from personal experience my mental illness was caused not only by pain but the most intense part was not being able to be my true self, knowing my true self would not be accepted in society, and more importantly I could not accept myself.

I would describe what you wrote here as a kind of mental distress (mental pain). Not being able to express who you feel you are is a mentally painful experience.

The repression of my known m/b/s self that needed to be free and accepted at least by my self was the most suicide inducing distress. Judgement from outside does not make that easier. I think that is very common in the world. In cases with homosexuality in the past, and trans people now, the very fact “who they know themselves to be” is called a symptom, deep breath,!that is the source of much of their “mental illness”. So saying it’s caused by illness verse trusting they are who they say further compounds the denial of that self.
Anyways I have probably said enough over the last few day. Sorry for prattling on.

Like I said, I think the problem is the stigma of mental illness. I think any state of mind can be a mental illness if it is causing dysfunction in your life, or chronic distress. I know some people just categorize some things as mental illness because they want to stigmatize it. And I agree that needs to stop. But I think there are a lot of situations that are mental illness and because people don't want to deal with it, they pretend like its normal. Far from being compassionate, it is actually very unloving and destructive.

Like for example, if someone had schizophrenia, would you be doing them a service to placate them and tell them that everything is normal and that they don't need medication? I have a lot of experience with schizophrenia (I'm not schizophrenic, but I've known people that were paranoid schizophrenic), and they can be downright dangerous and violent, and you can't reason with them if it is a severe case. The loving thing to do is get them help, so they don't endanger themselves or others.

But are there cases where schizophrenia isn't a mental illness? Sure. We call them shamans, psychics, and psychonauts. Those people have a similar ability to disengage from the reality you and I are experiencing right now, but the difference is they aren't being drowned by it. They have control over it.

Or if you had someone that sincerely believed they were a cat, would you be helping them by placating their delusion and feeding them raw fish and catnip and having them use a litter box? I would say not.

There are situations where people don't even realize they are suffering, even though they obviously are. Did you know there are people who feel like they're supposed to only have one leg? And they actually try to get doctors to remove one of their legs. And when doctors refuse, they try to do it themselves. Would you be helping them to placate their obvious mental illness by telling they are not mentally ill? I think that would be dangerously irresponsible.

So in regards to transgenderism (because that seems to be the popular topic in this thread for some reason), I do in fact think there are cases where that is a mental illness. I also think that there is a lot of confusion in society today where people think if you subjectively identify with being something, it changes objective reality. This is not the case. For example, this male identifies with being a Filipino woman. I'm going to be honest, despite how "politically incorrect" it is to say this, I think someone like this is severely mentally ill. I don't say that to stigmatize them, I say that because I think their need to identify with such a bizarrely specific category of physicality is rooted in some deep trauma of some kind, or deep lack of acceptance of the body/race they were born into.

But then I've met other transgender people, that I didn't feel were mentally ill, because they were not under the delusion that their subjective identity changes their objective reality of what sex they are, nor were they distressed by it. They knew the difference between subjective and objective truth. Anyway, just sharing some thoughts on the subject. There is no one right answer of course, but it is a complicated topic.

I’m following you a bit better now. Still you aren’t saying “transgender is mental illness” you are saying it might be in some cases.

That’s different than negating the experience of an entire group down to it definitely being a mental illness vs a personal truth. That is the statement I took issue with earlier in the thread.

As to mental illness being stigmatized, I might be oblivious to that because I legitimately think everyone is a bit crazy and have many conversations with people to that effect, as a result people are very open with me about their struggles, but it may again be Canada is a bit different.

I remember even 20 years ago people calmly talking about being bipolar, everyone around her knows someone intimately that has been treated for anxiety and/or depression, hospitalized even, especially the younger generation they have no fear of talking about their mental health issues, it’s reality.

Schizophrenia is taken less lightly but up here it is spoken about with empathy more than stigmatized against at least in the circles I’m exposed to which is a pretty broad range. However they are mostly educated and more open minded.

One that is horribly stigmatized is borderline personality disorder. I hear these people demonized. Not much compassion for such a difficult and painful experience. I realize it is a scary one. My mother suffered (she seems better now she is older/70) from it and it was very much not pleasant she even tried to kill all 3 of her children but the root is still worthy of empathy verse demonization. That one may take another ten years to be less stigmatized but I have faith once it is better understood it will be easier to manage.

So I do hear what you are saying, and can say in some cases it may be illness but it’s really still not our call to make, or any of our business to diagnose, we cannot fully know anothers’ experience so assuming one knows more about them than they do about themself is in most cases a bit presumptuous.

Still I do get what you are saying.