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Old 12-26-2012, 04:47 PM   #117
Jonathan
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: northeast us
Posts: 887
Quote:
Originally Posted by Saya View Post
You'd be laughed out of the faculty if you tried to call that scientific thinking. Ape Descendant already provided ample evidence that mental illness does not by any means equate violence.

So I have a question, do you think every white colonist, every Nazi, every slave owner ever did the horrible things they did because they were mentally ill?
Of course not every member of a society, a political party, or a class did horrible things or were mentally ill. The members of said groups who committed grotesque abuses of other human beings, though, those guys were!

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Something wrong with them does not mean they are ill. Mental illness does not mean that you are fucked up or wrong or anything, it means you have an illness. To classify all senseless violence as the product of mental illness is not only stupid but ableist. Do you fear Ren for being autistic? Do you fear all depressed people because Klebold might have had depression? They're probably horrible people, yes. Mentally ill? Were you their doctor? Did they confide in you? Do they call you at home?
Fear is a poor choice of terminology. Any kind of illness is by definition a dysfunction, so of course it means there is "something wrong". What and how much of an impact it might have can vary.

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Mentally ill does not equal psychologically damaged does not equal fucked in the head. I'm mentally ill, but I don't consider myself psychologically damaged and I'm not fucked in the head. Assuming you're in good mental health, by virtue of being a white man you're far more likely to shoot up a school than I ever would be, and you don't think that's odd? If mental illness is all that is required, you'd see a lot more PoC or white women doing these things, but you don't.
Mental illness, psychological damage, personality disorders, trauma, all have different origins and manifestations. But they are all factors of an individual person's mental health.

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I get it, you don't understand psychology at all, even after Ape Descendant landed down some pretty good evidence that you're absolutely wrong. Eric Harris was not mentally ill or insane, his profilers acknowledged that. He was probably a sociopath, but sociopathy isn't a mental illness. It has never been in the DSM, its used primarily in the justice system. There isn't any real treatment either, maybe you can wait it out and they'll grow up to have a different personality but otherwise, there's nothing to make anyone stop being a sociopath. No drugs for it, and therapy does more harm than good. Splenger might probably be a sociopath, and that probably shaped his personality and world view, but it does not automatically mean he's violent BECAUSE he's a sociopath, and it does not mean he is mentally ill.
So, sociopathy has never been in the DSM. You know what was at one point? Being gay! The DSM is far from an inviolate authority. There's a reason it's coming up on the fifth major revision. It was wrong when it defined homosexuality as a mental illness back in an earlier edition and I'm sure it will continue to become less wrong in the future.

"Might probably be a sociopath" - haha, yeah, like there's a realistic scenario where he wasn't. Maybe it was actually a very sophisticated ruse in order to fool people into believing a character he was playing. He was actually a gentle, caring soul (when not holding a hammer).
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