Mental health and society

[Tim R]

Mental health is a relative notion and adjusts/orients itself according to the psychological condition of the majority of the population.

What happens, when we discover the relative nature of "healthy" vs "unhealthy"?

How will this affect society?

What happens when we find out that the "unreality" of the hallucinations of a person with a "schizophrenic disorder" is just as real as anything else? 

Will we still arbitrarily classify certain behaviors and perspectives as "mental disorders"? Who gets to decide? 

 

@Leo Gura Will you make a video on this issue? I think it's really important because it already peaks its head out here and there...

The rest of this giant socio-psychological iceberg still lurks in the murky waters of our naive scientific, materialistic absolutism about reality, but it will flip, and I think it will happen more rapidly than we can handle.

[Gesundheit]

1 hour ago, Tim R said:

Will we still arbitrarily classify certain behaviors and perspectives as "mental disorders"?

We should be grateful. They were called "diseases" before. Disorders is a much accurate term, so that's a good step forwards.

I've been trying to understand this topic for a while, and it's really hard to figure out. Do you have any thoughts/suggestions on how to better define health in our modern time?

Edited October 31, 2020 by Gesundheit

[Parththakkar12]

@Tim R The big problem is that people are unconscious, they don't understand the mind. There is this big debate in the psychological community of 'Is the mind in consciousness, or is consciousness in the mind?' We don't know what consciousness is! This is because we don't see meditation as an appropriate way of empirical investigation because what you see isn't quantifiable.

Once we see that, we will understand 'mental disorders' a lot better.

[No Self]

The DSM is updated as new understandings cause additions, deletions and modifications of mental disorder classifications. This ongoing fluidity is the best we can do.

No doubt it will look very different in the distant future. By the standards of a truly enlightened society, the average human today has severe mental disorders at several levels.

[Carl-Richard]

More awareness of relativity doesn't makes you worse at drawing distinctions. It makes you better at it. A schizophrenic is still "different" from a non-schizophrenic person in many ways. Even though everything is imaginary, there are still different degrees of imagination, different degrees of delusion. Are there problems that arise from labelling things as a "mental disorder"? Yes. However, prejudice and stigma dissolves as people evolve. The labels can be changed but the source of the prejudice will still remain.

[Forestluv]

@Tim R Relativity is threatening to self survival, since self is dependent upon being grounded within an objective, external, universal reality. Any deviations from that reality is in opposition to self survival and is judged as “wrong” or “abnormal”.

The closer to self center, the greater the threat and resistance. No one gets upset about different preferences of the best ice cream flavor, because it’s not threatening to self survival. Yet if ice cream flavor determined one’s self survival of identity, career, dating, social status, financial income and power - there would be wars fought over whether strawberry is better than vanilla ice cream. 

Some people may feel threatened by schizophrenic mind that imagines things that they themself do not image - because addressing that relativity threatens their sense of an objective, external reality. If only 1% of the population perceived colors, it would be threatening to many of the 99% that do not perceive colors. The 1% of color perceivers may be stigmatized. Only a minority of the people unable to perceive colors would be fascinated and curious by color perceivers. 

[Reciprocality]

GREAT question, and by extention i would add: what happens when psychological diagnoses are looked upon as philosophical lenses, more so then 'less then ideal' personality traits? I think such times would be reminiscent of daseinanalytics, so there would flow over with people not having to explicitly mask themselves. Now the implicit "mask" would perhaps never really go away, but it would be a beautiful start non the less.

Edited November 1, 2020 by Reciprocality