I think the difference between insane and mentally ill is just the difference between the impression these words give, I mean, insane sounds worse than mentally ill... its like the difference between big and colossal.

For me, "mentally ill" is any kind of mental disorder admited by the person (otherwise "weird personality" sounds like a better description by me) up to the level of insane, wich would be then the mental disorder(s) are too significant for the person to be allowed to live in standart society.

Guys

Maybe before we try to find a nice word or mentally challenged people, we should try to define what is SANITY.

I think we are all a little insane, where does one draw the line?

Alan

Alan; there are no creditable figires on the extent of mental illness, but in a sense that is what we are dealing with in the greater part of philosophy...So often, what difference there is between a good and a bad person, to use a very general term, is bridged by what a person thinks they know, because upon what they know, they do... If we are all working hard to make our lives work, and our relationships work whenn the society does not work, when the overburden of wrong ideas is liable to crush us and bury us, then understandably, many will suffer psychological symptoms and act out of their pain... Mental illness is wide spread, and much further wide spread than our use of medication and illegal drugs accuratly indicates... I use to drive too fast... I used to crave sex with any girl with YES in her vocabulary... I used to work iron and put my life on the line for a buck and pride every damned day it was possible... We all have our drugs, and our methods of coping, or dealing with not coping... But on the bright side; I never busted an army in Iraq... I never killed thousands in defense of ideology... All we can do is push for a rational approach to life, honesty in behavior, help when needed, and an acceptence of morallity as springing out of our natural affectionn for other human beings... We must change this world, and make it more user friendly, and we must be more kind to our environment, and to each other... We treat the symptoms of change long denied... A sane world is better than a bucket of pills...

I would disagree....Most of us are mentally ill, depressed, cruel, hateful, or otherwise struggling withour lives, and without the support of communites which were once our doctors of choice... Very few of us are insane, and by that I would suggest a physical diagnosis, such as brain injury, infection, some morbidity, genetic or chemical inbalance...Not all conditions, even those making violence or risk taking more likely are necessarilly illeness... If many thousands of years of evolution has tended to make a person who can defend themselves or society if necessary without craping in their pants we should not rush to judge them as having an unnecessay gene... It may at times be difficult to live with them or accomodate them, but it is easier to punish excess than to pursue genocide especially against a possibly useful gene...

i wasnt trying to avoid it, i just dont feel like "mental disorder" and " mentally ill" would be the same thing. somehow i believe theyre different:Not-Impressed:

Guys ,

What I think really separates a good person from a bad person, is true altruistic love toward our fellow beings, and in that I include all life, animal and plant.

But I am not a tree hugger

Alan

Indeed they do not seem to imply the same thing. Perhaps there is confusion between the word ill and the word sick. A person could be "sick" (a word expressing a sort of objective evil which I suppose would be considered less colloquial than the word insane since sick seems to be needed in legalities) but not insane.

What I was trying to get at with all the other posts on sanity is that the term cannot be defined as a subjective term otherwise it would indeed be colloquial and kinda useless to talk about. It has to have some objective basis. So insanity cannot have anything to do with a set of morals.

Insanity is amorality.



Now that's insane.:baloons:

Holiday



I agree but a nice impossible delusion don't you think?.

But define Sanity before stating what is insane

Alan

Due to the subjectiveness of minds I like to define "insane" as someone who is perceiving completly different things from me, such as people who claim we are being enslaved by a civilization of two metters tall pink rabbits.

Oh and i dont think thats a good delusion, too much stuff to care about there

Manored



This reminds me of the story of a mother watching the army graduation ceremony of her son.

She nudges a woman sitting next to her in the grandstand,

"Look, look . look there is my son the only one in step" :bigsmile:

Alan

Hi there. Just dropping in and trying to extend the matter by adding a little history. Wasn't it Foucault who wrote a "History of Insanity"? Could be of relevance here, but talking about this book is not my intention now (I didn't read it). What I wanted to tell you here is pre-scientific. There's a strange and archetypical figure in the history of western civilisation and that's the "Fool", appearing frequently during the Renaissance and returning later in quite a few contexts. Some will know the "Stultifera Navis" (Ship of Fools) by Sebastian Brandt, a satire widely spread in 16th century Europe, thanks to the invention of printing. Better known though is Erasmus' "Laus Stultitiae" (The Praise of Folly), and in this book we meet a very interesting kind of Fool. The "Stultus" on the pulpit in Erasmus' work is clearly a Fool and is presented as such, wearing the "uniform" of all Fools, the cap with the bells. But Erasmus' Fool is also very well read, he is wise in his own peculiar way, conveying that wisdom by the use of irony; it seems as if he has reached some kind of enlightenment. In that respect he is comparable with John Lennon's "Fool on the Hill", standing above conventional wisdom in a very literal sense, seeing the world from a higher perspective, insight resulting in a beautiful melody. Yet no Fool is beyond humanity and the grasp of death, as Hamlet found out when he met the gravediggers ("Poor Yorick, I cite my Shakespeare..."). It appears that the Fool is a deep and many-sided Symbol, emerging in an age that still knew to handle Symbols as representations of complex concepts. But the Fool is also quite alive today, and I don't mean the former president of the United States. What are the main characteristics of the Fool, in the ancient as well as in modern tradition?

-He's a jester, and thus a counsellor of the King, thanks to his fresh view and unconventional way of thinking. He tends to "relativate" the current frame of mind, revealing dogmatic attitude and conventional reflexes. He represents criticism in a society that has not yet discovered free thinking or still has some difficulty with that. He is a symbol of transgression, going boldly where the wise of the age did not dare to go. He's a positive symbol in this approach, if one chooses to sympathize with him, seeing the good side of this hippie or "punk" avant la lettre. But he can also become an element of disturbance and destruction, being clever but not wise, and certainly not "good" in the moral sense. His intentions not being to "teach" or to provide insight, but seeking to ridiculise others and even to destroy them (take the pre-romantic Thil Uylenspieghel, or wisdom in a -dark- mirror). He becomes a symbol of Hate in that case, an outcast of society. A late version of this being the Joker in the Batman strips and films...

-If he's not a clever jester (morally either good or bad) he's often just completely ignorant, being stupid in a sometimes dangerous way, for himself as well as for his fellow human beings. He's the guy who's continuously thinking and doing the wrong thing, denying to see the "better way" that yet clearly stretches in front of him. Fools are "just fools" in this conception and are the symbolic opposites of the wise. They can never be converted to wisdom, and they are never to be revered, only to be despised. They are incessantly stubborn and dumb and clueless, being rhetorically needed as the personification of how it is "not done". To be to classified as such may be the Fool of the Tarot (?). and in several religious treatises. And Catcha found himself as such in the "Navis":





-Last but not least: the Fool has to do with laughing. Now there has been quite some exploration of the "notion of laughing" (what a horrible combination), but I just want to mention here an old duality, laughing with some-one versus laughing at some-one. The Fool represents both sides, being "on top" while people are laughing with him, but this often means he's laughing at some-one or something. He's defeated in turn by being laughed at by the wise, defending themselves and their values in their own way, denouncing him for his "lack of wisdom". For an exploration of the subversity of laughing in a rigid society see Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose".

I think the conclusion is obvious: it may be useful and even necessary for philosophers to be Fools from time to time, be it only not to get stuck in so many opinions or illusions, in particular their own. So much was and is still qualified as "foolish", yet this often prooves to be the only sensible way to think and the only effective way to act. The Way of the Fool brings us a new perspective, often revealing the Fool as wise and the wise as fools. And how can the Fool be seen in the light of modern psychology and psychiatry? Is he a clever autist or the ultimate non-conformist? Is he some kind of demon or is he the last hope of humanity, a beacon of good sense in a foolish world? These are only some first questions and ideas that can be elaborated at will. I hope this is relevant for the thread.

Catchabula,

Yes some fools are mad to use the term of the philosophers you quote,

But some who were considered odd and even fools made huge contributions toward the advancement of man.

Micheal Angelo , the agony and the ecstasy is just such a person , Vincent van Gogh another. These highly creative souls had few friends and even frightened and disturbed people that did not know them

Poor Vincent only sold one painting in his life and that was to his brother who bought it out of pity

Alan

I am surprised that no one has taken note of the word sane, as in sanitary... It is like saying dis-ease for disease since a very common denominator of mental illness is dirt, with those suffering that disease filthy, unbathed, unkempt, ill-clothed... I am a pack rat... But having seen real packrats suffering metal disease collecting god knows what for god only knows why until they could not navigate their personal spaces, I don't seem so bad... Yet, I recognize that when I have to turn out a bit of work, that I am facing terrible impediments in my organization.... My mind is not disorganized... I always do a job there first, usually from beginning to end, and only then, with thought fairly complete do I proceed... If my head were as bad as my garage I would get in the suicide line... Why I cannot have a place for everything and everthing etc is beyond me... I can make disorganization work better than organization. I put stuff out of sight and it is out of mind....

This is not insanity, this is just madness. If we define insanity as subjective then it really does become this colloquial, useless word. And thus defining sanity becomes impossible, and meaningless... which is a problem.

We think of ourselves as righteous and justified, so we could call any form of abstraction insane, the only difference is whether you admire it or not. So the definition of insanity becomes an unhealthy bias this way, something that is only relatively negative.

The term vaguely seems like it is meant to attribute negatively, objectively. I suppose this is just my opinion of the way it should be so nevermind. I just think there's room for the word to be brought back to legalities via asserting it as amoralism.

Now the question is, does this concept become hypothetical. Is that what mentally ill is? Depends in what manner, but I'd say no.

All moral concepts are hypothetical.

Think about what amoralism implies, does the above statement really refute anything?

Holiday20310401



Yes we must separate liars from the insane, to me liars are mad because they do what they do deliberately

Insane people truthfully describe their delusions

Alan

I think you simplify to the point of speaking nonsense... The mad are no less complex than ourselves, and as capable as us of lying... Ultimately; any behavior which is self destructive, or destructive of human life is mad... By this definition I must conclude that our whole society and world is mad... Where is the foresight...Where is the understanding of cause and effect, of consequences... Our economies are depraved... They support and are supported by depravity... We are childlike in our ignorance with the power of giants or monsters in our technology... We are a curse to all other forms of life, and a disease to ourselves... We cannot love, so we cannot bless... We demand destruction and deliver it thinking we will have some life beyond the grave... Why not rave and babble in the streets??? Why not drip drool and foul ourselves... We would only be doing as individuals what we do as a species...

Well, that is my meaning... if you want a stablier meaning for it, I suppose changing "me" to "most of the society" would work

Thats kind of a overly negative view of the world I think, and its nice to get depressed, but getting depressed isnt really good I like to think we just happen to have recently evolved from species whose individuals couldnt co-work in large scale, and therefore had to compete and push forward the best genes, so we didnt had time to stop being stupid yet.

I am not saying that moralism is of necessity good, or that amoralism is bad... I tend to hold a rather neutral view of morals myself because it is the only way to see morals at work in people's lives, and see them for what they are, and why they work when they work... But even to say there is such a thing as a moral concept is hypotheical... We think there is such a thing as morality, as justice, and liberty, and etc, by effect; since no one lives long or well without good, -another moral concept... If it is essential we conclude that it IS; but it is only theory, as no expample of a moral concept can be thrown upon the scales of life...