On mental illness.
I urge everyone to have a look at Mark Chu-Carroll’s discussion of the perceived differences between physical and mental illness. Read the comments too, because there’s some interesting discussion there.
When you’ve got your fill have a look at John Searle’s Chinese room argument, which I find to be a most satisfying discussion of mental processes, even if - taken to its only logical conclusion - it actually shows the opposite of what Searle wanted to prove. But hey, no-one’s perfect, eh?
So is anyone else with me in attempting, from now on, to deprecate the term mental illness? Brain condition sounds satisfyingly real and tangible, and correspondingly less mystical.
I have a physical mental illness… which is to say that I have what used to be a mental illness, many hundreds of years ago, but nowadays is considered not more interesting than a rash. Epilepsy may happen for a myriad of unknown reasons, but we know exactly what happens when it strikes (and we can even watch it on a graph in realtime). The subtler skewings of perception afforded by depression, schizophrenia or the like still seem to be unknowns for most people.
And because they affect people’s emotional states and behaviour they can be hard - impossible, even - to diagnose without prolonged observation. Like the Chinese room example: is there a difference between having a 5-minute conversation with someone who is manic, or with someone who just took several tabs of ecstacy? Is there a difference at all?
As you can guess I’m pretty much out of my depth here but I’m keen and interested to hear folks opinions on the matter.
Tomorrow night I’ll be tuning in to watch Stephen Fry’s show about (his) manic depression. Maybe you’re interested too: BBC2, 9pm, Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive.