Insanity

[metadigital]

No. I'm the guy who can't resist opening any door he sees, need to put any glass right in the middle of a coaster, and tries his hardest to make anything that is uneven into an even number with the exception of the numbers 1 and 3.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, I can see how that is equally as serious as hearing voices in your head telling you to take a bread knife and stab that random pregnant woman walking down the street.

 

Oh, but it's serious because it's YOUR problem! Right. Because egoists devoid of empathy believe that all their problems are more important than everyone elses ...

[alanschu]

Touche.

[mkreku]

But who said anything about equally serious? Is the world black and white to you guys? There are degrees of almost everything, insanity included.

 

Or, as our dear wikipedia puts it:

 

Slang usage

 

In popular culture, something "insane" is something extremely foolish, while persons may be deemed "insane" if their behavior strongly deviates from accepted social norms.

 

Nitpicking is exactly what you do when you deliberately fail to admit that a word has a common (slang) meaning just because the term also happens to have a medical usage. Or are you trying to imply that you're too intelligent to be able to acknowledge such an uneducated usage of the word "insane"?

 

There's nothing "touch

[alanschu]

I'm thinking that in a discussion such as this one, which seems to be predominantly about mental illnesses and whatnot. When discussing insanity in the context of mental illness, I typically don't think of the slang usage.

 

Furthermore, even with his slang usage, it's obviously still subjective. I wouldn't consider his need to open doors to be extremely foolish, nor would I interpret his behaviour as strongly deviating from social norms.

 

I agree with meta, as it does depend on what what someone has experienced. If he's exceptionally insecure about his actions at times, then his perception of those actions as being insane is amplified. Having a friend of mine develop schizophrenia and be absolutely terrified of me because they are absolutely convinced that I am intending to inflict bodily harm upon them seems much worse IMO. In fact, as far as OCD goes he's probably gotten way relatively "easy."

 

As an aside, I think people are too quick to apply the OCD label. It doesn't sound like any of True Neutral's conditions are particularly disabling...at least in the way that he described them. OCD is believed to be quite common, but people write off any nuances (especially if someone is in a nervous situation). I have a friend (anecdote, so take it for what it's worth), that just submitted his PhD thesis. The whole time while on the way to turn it in, he was worried that he might have forgotten something, some key diagram, or maybe a page was missing. But it wasn't disabling. When he finished looking at the paper and put it away, he wasn't immediately going through it again to verify that what he had just seen was actually there. He did go through it a few times, checking the page order, making sure they were all there and whatnot. We even joked about his "OCD" since he was so concerned about it.

 

There were confounding variables though. Submitting a PhD thesis isn't a small deal. And the last thing he wanted was to have it rejected because of some stupid little detail because he didn't think to check something. It's a very expensive scenario (in both time and money). But he wasn't incapable of handing it in. And once he had handed it in, he wasn't not persistently worried that something was wrong with it.

 

We all have our little quirks, and for all I know maybe TrueNeutral does constantly check that his glass is immediately in the middle when given a coaster. Maybe he is incapable of being around closed doors, and is constantly checking to see if they have closed when he wasn't looking. As for the number thing, I'm surprised he's even able to post, as there's a natural conundrum that the only way to make a thread have an even number of replies, is to make an odd numbered post. (Note: The American definition of OCD states that the "time investment" of an OCD disorder must exceed 1 hour a day...though it's typically much more).

 

In the end though, TrueNeutral openly commented that he wishes to use his own definition of insanity, so it's all moot.

[Llyranor]

Hi, you should all read the DSM-IV if you want to diagnose yourselves with psychiatric illnesses using official criteria.

[Surreptishus]

llyranor is almost a doctor! (w00t)

[metadigital]

Can I say touch

[Dark_Raven]

Sounds like madness to me.

[LoneWolf16]

We're going over this sort of thing in psychology...amazing stuff.