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SedanChair posted:If being suicidal is not mental illness, nothing is. And maybe nothing is, but that strikes me as something of a separate debate. I read a thing about a guy who was paralyzed from the neck down wanting to commit suicide. Would that mean he had a mental illness, suffering under an impairment most people can't imagine? edit: plus you have to account for cultural differences, where in some cultures suicide would be held up as a rational, even laudable act.
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Mar 26, 2016 21:14
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SedanChair posted:Those examples are just clouding the issue. Euthanasia for the terminally ill or quadriplegic is a separate matter from people who have their whole lives ahead of them. Drug addiction, homelessness, ostracism, suffering the effects of personal and systemic racism: these are all barriers to functioning that some respond to with suicidality and others not. It is reasonable to respond with clinical tools to those who are struggling with it. Hence the imperfect but sufficient term "mental illness." I think the imperfections of the term "mental illness" in these cases make it insufficient, unless you're making a case that all despair or hopelessness is a diagnosable illness. I'm not in a rush to pathologize these things. And regarding the quadriplegic, you didn't directly answer the question. I should assume that this person would, in your view, be having a mental illness? I'm not "gagging to fire up the lethal injection bus(?)"  , I'm just not willing to tell someone who is undergoing permanent extreme disability that the only reason they don't want to live anymore is because they have a mental defect, and if their mind was operating properly they would realize they would rather be trapped in an inescapable, immovable shell. Or that someone who doesn't want to be a staggering burden on their family should actually, if everything was working properly, realize that the only sane thing to do would be to suffer agonizing pain while draining their family's emotional and physical resources. I don't think you can say that not wanting to live is inherently the product of mental illness without defining "mental illness" so broadly it becomes useless, or using circular logic.
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Mar 26, 2016 22:11
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