aleczb
INSANE
The insane person is a one whose propensity is to disregard rather than exercise the superior facilities of the human mind. The behavior of the lunatic is governed entirely by their base animalistic impulses. They demonstrate a striking lack of concern in regards to their deficits and often a complete lack of self awareness. So attribute madness to demonic possession and others to a failure of tier parents to instill discipline or a sense of accountability. My view for what causes the madman to become mad is that he simple just has that such NATURE, HE IS naturally defective, they just are the way they are. One needs to be wary of the insane person who is capable of unexpected bouts of rage, lust, delusion, or any and all other conceivable form of immoral action. They are threats to society because of how well they can blend it and suddenly wreak havoc. I keep my family away from the madman who might disrupt and contaminate the moral integrity with his lack of values. It is important not to keep such persons confined within the walls of the asylums out of view of those of us who value strength, sensibility, honesty, and all the other virtues of a good society. Whether or not the madman is capable of learning proper social conduct or understanding normal human emotions is beyond me. To treat the insane as one would treat a typical human I believe would be futile and might even run the risk of encouraging them to continue on behaving as they do. The insane person has no place in society and poses only harm and degeneracy which is why it's best for the rest of society to stay away
Our (Leftover) Social Problem
Before getting into the main ideas of this section, I’d like to give a fair warning that it is going to contain terms, concepts and views that are offensive and potentially harmful to people living with severe mental disorders. In many cases, the intentional use of offensive language in public discourse is a rhetorical strategy that serves the purpose of increasing the emotional salience of a particular point or message. This strategy requires that these words are used in a way that pays respect to the power and significance of what they meaningfully represent and also makes them a necessary component of the larger narrative refuting the ideas associated with their use. The reason I’ve decided to go ahead and include them rather than simply allude to them is because I believe that doing so serves the purpose of honesty and authenticity. It’s a lot harder to confront and change troubling aspects of our own views if we censor the words that directly call attention to what makes those views so troubling in the first place.
I strongly believe that one of the necessary components of defeating problematic ideas is understanding not only why those ideas are wrong, but also why they exist in the first place. One of the most foundational heuristics of argumentation and debate is that the winning side tends to be the one that can accurately explain and understand the arguments of the opposing side. In this case, the opposing side is the part of you, the reader, that identifies or has identified with the perspective being considered. The part of you that’s been shaped by social beliefs of mental health that are now widely regarded as ignorant, insensitive, and archaic. Your first reaction when trying to identify with these sentiments might be to deplore and reject and deny that any part of you could ever identify with them. But you don't have to do that right now, because this is a safe space... or rather a safe space within a safe space. The larger space being a shield against societies judgements surrounding you mental health, and the space within representing the freedom to understand your own internal that your community would otherwise judge.
All of us a human beings which means we've held views and beliefs that may not be in line with There is nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise, so I ask you to acknowledge any part of you that identifies with the beliefs that you read, so that you can understand the degree to which that part of you influences your perspectives and behaviors in general.
The archetype of the “insane person” is perhaps the most foundational element from which the stigmatization of severe mental illness in the present modern western concept is built from. Along with dozens of other terms synonymous with it, the term insane has developed an adjacent meaning within the context of the everyday lexicon that refers to something as being “outrageous” or “wild”. When used in this context, calling someone or something “insane” normally implies at least a moderate degree of reverence on some level, but can also imply a need for caution. As a legal term, “insane” is used to describe a state of altered mental functioning that causes someone to engage in dangerous or criminal behavior as the result of something interrupting their normal pattern of thinking and thus eliminating the need for them to be held morally culpable for their actions.
Envisioning the archetype of the ‘insane’ or ‘crazy’ person. What do they look like? What do they sound and smell like? What are they doing? How do they make you feel? For me, I picture somebody thrashing around a padded room fighting the confines of a straight jacked, muttering to themself unintelligibly, perhaps doing so in response to voices in their head that cause them to repetitively fixate on an incomprehensible idea that leaves them oblivious to their situation as well as the world we find ourselves in. Interestingly enough, this visualization that I describe, the first thing I think of when I think of an “insane person” is also one of the first images to appear as a Google search result for the term.
Often, the caricature of “insanity” is someone who is violent and unpredictable, someone to watch out for, someone who ought to be ostracized, someone who doesn’t share in our humanity. This is why terms like “crazy, “insane”, “psycho” and “lunatic” are considered to be derogatory and offensive. They evoke feelings of fear and aversion.
Most people have a certain aversion when it comes to being classified as “insane” or “crazy” or “psychotic” especially within the context of mental illness. Insane as an unspecified descriptor for a mental disorder tells us little more other than the person with it does not occupy the same realm of experience that you and I and all other people occupy. It suggests a lack of shared beliefs and values and problems between us and the crazy person. It suggests an inability to convey information back and forth between one another, and even if that weren’t the case, the term suggests a fundamental mismatch between the way we process information and the way the crazy person processes information. So even if the crazy person were to listen to us talk about our cousin's wedding, they probably would not be able to imagine the scene as we described it or understand the meaning we attached to it the way a regular person would.
Although terms like “insane”, “crazy”, “psychotic”, “lantic”, “mad”, and “mental” are still commonly used within the popular English lexicon, they are next to extinct when it comes to using them to refer to mental illness today, especially in a clinical context. This is because these words, in addition to being archaic and offensive, are also pretty useless as descriptors. The originated back before there was a solid concept of psychology as a science and well before a modern understanding of the brain and a comprehensive understanding of how to classify and understand symptoms. Before we even had the necessary knowledge to conceptualize clinical psychiatric disorders enough to treat people with them, we realized that “insane” actually referred to a lot of different things. Some of which could be grouped together into what we now call “positive schizophrenic symptoms” and some into what we called “manic”.
The thoughts and behavior of the crazy person are utterly impossible to sympathize with or relate to. Maybe we believed ‘crazy’ things as children, but such beliefs are normal for kids, and we came to see such fantasies for what they were, normal child imaginations, before growing out of them embracing reality. I live in the same world as the crazy person, I’ve grown alongside them and seen the things they’re seen and felt the same things they’ve felt… and still I have not lost my sanity as they have. It was not hard for me to accept the world as it is, it shouldn’t be hard for anyone because rational normal behavior is clearly how one ought to be. I hardly even have to try to go through the motions of everyday life, sure I get emotional and upset and irrational at times, but I always find a way to ground myself and return to reality. I don’t understand why they would act as they do seeing how it clearly does not work for them. They look like me, they were raised like me, they live in the same world as me so why are they the way they are?
Mental illness is fundamentally different from other illnesses in two important ways related to their nature as being diseases of the brain: their biological/physiological causes are almost entirely invisible, they affect thoughts and actions which we see as being reflections of our humanity rather than affecting standard functions of the body. This means that not only are the causes of mental disorders invisible, but they are essentially impossible to understand which leaves us with nothing to attribute to as being the cause for the disease. But this is a difficult thing to accept for us because when something seems wrong or out of the ordinary, we believe that it is essential that we explain as being the cause for it. In addition to this, the only difference we see between a mentally ill person and a regular person is their behavior. The combination of these factors means that the most logical explanation for an insane person being the way they are is because that’s just the way they are. The insane person is the way they are because of the intrinsic nature of their character. It must be a flaw in their morality or humanity because if they were fundamentally the same as me, they would behave the same way as me. The just are insane, different, not fully human. This conclusion defines insane as a seemingly concrete characterization that distinguishes between normal people and insane people. It places people living with mental disorders into a category of others that is not only abstract and unfounded in an objective sense, but incomplete as a descriptor of the characteristics of people labeled as such.
The archetype of the “insane person” is perhaps the most foundational element from which the stigmatization of severe mental illness in the present modern western concept is built from. Along with dozens of other terms synonymous with it, the term insane has developed an adjacent meaning within the context of the everyday lexicon that refers to something as being “outrageous” or “wild”. When used in this context, calling someone or something “insane” normally implies at least a moderate degree of reverence on some level, but can also imply a need for caution. As a legal term, “insane” is used to describe a state of altered mental functioning that causes someone to engage in dangerous or criminal behavior as the result of something interrupting their normal pattern of thinking and thus eliminating the need for them to be held morally culpable for their actions.
Envisioning the archetype of the ‘insane’ or ‘crazy’ person. What do they look like? What do they sound and smell like? What are they doing? How do they make you feel? For me, I picture somebody thrashing around a padded room fighting the confines of a straight jacked, muttering to themself unintelligibly, perhaps doing so in response to voices in their head that cause them to repetitively fixate on an incomprehensible idea that leaves them oblivious to their situation as well as the world we find ourselves in. Interestingly enough, this visualization that I describe, the first thing I think of when I think of an “insane person” is also one of the first images to appear as a Google search result for the term.
Often, the caricature of “insanity” is someone who is violent and unpredictable, someone to watch out for, someone who ought to be ostracized, someone who doesn’t share in our humanity. This is why terms like “crazy, “insane”, “psycho” and “lunatic” are considered to be derogatory and offensive. They evoke feelings of fear and aversion.
Most people have a certain aversion when it comes to being classified as “insane” or “crazy” or “psychotic” especially within the context of mental illness. Insane as an unspecified descriptor for a mental disorder tells us little more other than the person with it does not occupy the same realm of experience that you and I and all other people occupy. It suggests a lack of shared beliefs and values and problems between us and the crazy person. It suggests an inability to convey information back and forth between one another, and even if that weren’t the case, the term suggests a fundamental mismatch between the way we process information and the way the crazy person processes information. So even if the crazy person were to listen to us talk about our cousin's wedding, they probably would not be able to imagine the scene as we described it or understand the meaning we attached to it the way a regular person would.
Although terms like “insane”, “crazy”, “psychotic”, “lantic”, “mad”, and “mental” are still commonly used within the popular English lexicon, they are next to extinct when it comes to using them to refer to mental illness today, especially in a clinical context. This is because these words, in addition to being archaic and offensive, are also pretty useless as descriptors. The originated back before there was a solid concept of psychology as a science and well before a modern understanding of the brain and a comprehensive understanding of how to classify and understand symptoms. Before we even had the necessary knowledge to conceptualize clinical psychiatric disorders enough to treat people with them, we realized that “insane” actually referred to a lot of different things. Some of which could be grouped together into what we now call “positive schizophrenic symptoms” and some into what we called “manic”.
The thoughts and behavior of the crazy person are utterly impossible to sympathize with or relate to. Maybe we believed ‘crazy’ things as children, but such beliefs are normal for kids, and we came to see such fantasies for what they were, normal child imaginations, before growing out of them embracing reality. I live in the same world as the crazy person, I’ve grown alongside them and seen the things they’re seen and felt the same things they’ve felt… and still I have not lost my sanity as they have. It was not hard for me to accept the world as it is, it shouldn’t be hard for anyone because rational normal behavior is clearly how one ought to be. I hardly even have to try to go through the motions of everyday life, sure I get emotional and upset and irrational at times, but I always find a way to ground myself and return to reality. I don’t understand why they would act as they do seeing how it clearly does not work for them. They look like me, they were raised like me, they live in the same world as me so why are they the way they are?
Mental illness is fundamentally different from other illnesses in two important ways related to their nature as being diseases of the brain: their biological/physiological causes are almost entirely invisible, they affect thoughts and actions which we see as being reflections of our humanity rather than affecting standard functions of the body. This means that not only are the causes of mental disorders invisible, but they are essentially impossible to understand which leaves us with nothing to attribute to as being the cause for the disease. But this is a difficult thing to accept for us because when something seems wrong or out of the ordinary, we believe that it is essential that we explain as being the cause for it. In addition to this, the only difference we see between a mentally ill person and a regular person is their behavior. The combination of these factors means that the most logical explanation for an insane person being the way they are is because that’s just the way they are. The insane person is the way they are because of the intrinsic nature of their character. It must be a flaw in their morality or humanity because if they were fundamentally the same as me, they would behave the same way as me. The just are insane, different, not fully human. This conclusion defines insane as a seemingly concrete characterization that distinguishes between normal people and insane people. It places people living with mental disorders into a category of others that is not only abstract and unfounded in an objective sense, but incomplete as a descriptor of the characteristics of people labeled as such
