Talk:Mental illness denial

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Improved diagnostics...

I removed the first sentence in the 'In their defense' section. It claimed that as psychiatry has developed its diagnoses have improved and become more precise. This is inaccurate. In fact neuropsychiatric research has increasingly abandoned the DSM as unhelpful. Long story short, DSM diagnoses consist of loosely connected and sometimes vague clusters of affective, cognitive and behavioral symptoms. Attempting to take diagnoses developed long before contemporary advances in neuroscience and map them onto the brain has proven difficult at best. This is why the National Institute of Mental Health has abandoned the DSM in favor of an approach that begins with the brain and works its way up from there. Medical sociologist Nikolas Rose's 'Our Psychiatric Future' has a good summary of this history and is an excellent source for citations. ^{— Unsigned, by: 73.236.122.180 / talk}

Needs a cleanup

this article is biased as fuck and reads like a pharma lobbyist's manifesto. it not only overstates the effectiveness of psychiatric treatment but indulges sweeping generalizations that every person taking some sort of anti-psychiatry stance is a 'quack'; it's denigrating to patients traumatized by forced treatment/coercement and who've suffered iatrogenic effects from unsuccessful medication regimens. I realize the antipsychiatry movement is often associated with woo and pseudoscience but this article makes psychiatry out to be some unassailable institution which ironically matches the delusion of mental illness denial itself. linking to another article for arguments against isn't enough and this article desperately needs a more balanced viewpoint. ^{— Unsigned, by: 2605:6000:EB40:3A00:A4E6:834B:3912:EB1E / talk}

Grassroot mental illness denial

I met quite a few people who have never heard about Szasz or likes, but argue that mental illnesses aren't really illnesses simply because they never had such experience themselves and thus don't understand it's severity. It's a large group and I'm surprised that it isn't covered at all.

Most of those who deny mental illness are likely to be mental ill themselves

No, no disrespect to mentally ill people. But worst are those who claim to oppose their identity. See all the homophobes who eventually came out as LGBT's pretending to be straight. 77.20.231.61 (talk) 23:23, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

dogshit on all countsAMassiveGay (talk) 00:28, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi BoN!

Your edits to the article are quite verbose, and make the experience of reading it somewhat tedious.

People are probably going to come by and accuse me of throwing stones in glass houses and what not, cause I'm one of the biggest word-shitters here, but I like being verbose on talk pages. I sometimes get the sense that if I just write two word responses to things then the other sysops will get offended (and I kinda like having them around, so I prefer to avoid doing that if I can). I'm kinda making this a long one because edit warring is unproductive. I would prefer to convey my views to you and come to an understanding, instead of just watching as somebody reverts your edits three or four times before protecting the page. Here as how I view your changes:

Current version

Your version

Mental illness denial is the denial of the existence of mental disorders as real medical conditions.

Mental illness denial is the denial of the existence of mental disorders as real medical conditions, often rooted in anti-psychiatry views and activism that denounces the "psychiatric establishment" as a "tyrannical force" that supposedly "manufactured" mental disorders as a tool of social control and oppression.

This addition strikes me as extremely needless, because the ENTIRE article exists to expand upon the opening sentence. As the readers read the article, the "activism that denounces the "psychiatric establishment" as a "tyrannical force" that supposedly "manufactured" mental disorders as a tool of social control and oppression." bit will become instantly clear to them through the use of examples of such activism.

In the 1950s, L. Ron Hubbard published his book, Dianetics, and repeatedly submitted papers on the subject to psychological and psychiatric journals.

In the 1950s, L. Ron Hubbard published his seminal and infamous book named Dianetics, and repeatedly submitted pseudoscientific papers on the subject to various psychological and psychiatric journals.

Adding adjectives to a sentence doesn't make it more exciting to read. If the additions aren't funny or informative, then why waste time? Less is more.

An influential voice in mental illness denial was the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.

One of the most influential leaders of mental illness denialism is the Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.

An = One of the, except an and a are more concise. Thank f@ck the English language has them. Imagine having to type "one of the" instead of "a/an" all the time. And imagine reading it. And saying it.

He argued that severely depressed people should not be prevented from committing suicide if that was their wish.

Infamously, Szasz controversially argued that there is nothing bad about severely depressed people committing suicide if that was truly their wish, and that no one should force them to stay alive.

Well, yeah, but that's implicit in the statement. Like saying "Let's get food" instead of "Let us go and obtain nourishment to satiate our hunger. The act of chewing and swallowing the food we acquire will facilitate this."

What I'm trying to get at here, stranger, is that succinct writing isn't inferior writing. A paragraph doesn't become more informative because it has a load of polysyllabic words in it. If we can save OURSELVES time by being terse and also save our READERS time by giving them less to wade through.. then why wouldn't we do it?

Maybe you didn't find my arguments convincing my friend. Maybe you did. Either way, I hope I wasn't rude or anything. I'm no mind reader, but I suspect the reason Chris reverts these edits is because he feels the same way as I do, and if we were to ask the other janitors who clean up the corridors of recent changes, they would all tell you what I just did.

Mind yourself. - Rairyu75 (Talk) 20:03, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Take a look at the edit history of this page and ableism (as well as the latter’s talkpage). This person is bizarrely dedicated to making our articles on psychiatry needlessly verbose, and hasn’t listened to reason yet. Christopher (talk) 20:43, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Should we add a section regarding dissociative identity disorder?

It's a highly controversial mental illness with psychologists suggesting that it's therapist induced/ a mood disorder with a label on it/ or isn't real at all. There is also an online group of people who fake DID that believe you don't need trauma to have it at all. Nice if this had a mention.--32.213.247.125 (talk) 14:31, 7 January 2023 (UTC)--32.213.247.125 (talk) 14:31, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't jump the gun here. It is a controversial diagnosis but it is also included in the DSM. There is no scientific consensus about its legitimacy. There are famous cases of therapist manipulation, yes; as with the case of Sybil, but that isn't necessarily the norm in this case. You tend to see spikes in self-diagnoses of DID (previously referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder) whenever a depiction of it appears within in pop culture then it quickly starts to die off but that doesn't necessarily mean that people are intentionally "faking" it. We already see "disassociation" as a symptom of various disorders, it's actually somewhat of a normal component of human psychology. For example, on a walk you regularly take do you ever find yourself "blacking out" and suddenly finding yourself at the end of your walk? These sorts of experiences are also pretty common with various drugs. I know plenty of stoners who talk of seemingly "teleporting" from one location to the next. I know I have disassociated on drugs before suddenly "coming to" mid conversation. We also know that the brain is capable of creating perceptions without sensation. When people tell me they hear the voices of other people in their head, whether they be struggling with psychosis or self-identify as plural I don't think it's entirely fair to them to simply jump with the conclusion that they are simply "faking" their experiences. If you were to experience conversations with seeming people that seemingly only exist within your own head, and you experience moments of disassociation would you not take something like DID, or having multiple/plural personalities, as a possible explanation? It's not inconsistent with such evidence. Of course the issue is that there is differing causes for such phenomena that isn't easy to tease out -- especially alarming if someone is actually developing psychosis. But if the person in question isn't exhibiting delusional symptoms psychosis may not actually be what's going on. If you ever take a psychopathology class (aka abnormal psych) the controversy will be addressed but the ongoing interpretations are not that people are simply "faking it" at least not intentionally. As much as there are psychologists who doubt it's legitmacy there is also psychologists who defend the status of DID as a legitimate diagnosis, and others who see say the plural community as a separate phenomena worth investigating. There is talk of the role of suggestibility and unconscious role playing but even then you sort of run against the wall of unfalsifiable hypotheses with that. The truth is....we do not really know. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 17:03, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Also with the DSM criteria there is no mention of having to have suffered from trauma, just that there may be gaps in memory in daily events OR traumatic events, which does not necessarily mean it must result from trauma [1]. Just because a disorder is associated with trauma does not mean the disorder itself requires trauma for diagnosis. There is also necessarily a component of distress and dysfunction to classify the experience of multiple identities as a disorder and I think this is important. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 17:11, 7 January 2023 (UTC)