Because a lot of people believe in it
Sinead O'Connor's letter to Miley Cyrus
- Thread starter Cheesypoof
- Start date
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
blah blah blah
what sounds good in a pub over a pint - like 'religion is a form of mental illness' - doesn't sound so good when it's exposed to actual examination.
Those are largely verifiable. Faith *in* a god or gods is a different thing surely?
Not understanding science is fine, but then making the huge leap to believing in supernatural forces indicates some kind of insanity.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
on the grounds that...
You've exposed jack shit
Nice to see you agree with me
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
i've exposed that you think religion's a mental illness because er it's a mental illness, so yeh, i have exposed the jack shit at the core of your argument.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
try as i might i cannot see 'religion' in that quote from nietzsche.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Because a lot of people believe in it
Exactly. Mental illness is basically defined thus:
Doing something different to the other folk
Saying something different to the other folk
Looking different to the other folk
Take any of the above, add the sometimes nebulous element of "distress" and there you go - mental illness.
Or, as once related to me by a psychiatrist - "saying weird things and looking crazy".
You really are a twat. Anyway, I'm not going to waste the rest of my afternoon bickering with you.
That's not what I said dickhead. Bye.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
i asked
it's fucking pitiful.
and you said
all you've done is repeat it's a mental illness.
it's fucking pitiful.
ElizabethofYork
Old Crone
Do you think that the vast majority of people in medieval times were insane?
ice-is-forming
With dignified ease and grace..
When you don't know any better, or don't have the access to know any better then it's the norm . But if you still chose to believe in religion when you know, no evidence, then I think it becomes blind faith.
It doesn't matter if other people believe in it too, madness has a contagen effect. Think cults. Think whole nations that sacrificed babies to their gods. Think America.
I'm a mental health practitioner and if I go to the local Pentecostal church on any given day, I come away shaking my head at the insanity of it all.
I think mental illness is the wrong term and it's one I never use anyway as it suggests that madness is caused by something on the inside rather than circumstances and events.
SheilaNaGig
Break requested
You’re not going to like this GreatGutsby but there’s a good deal of research that strongly suggests that religious belief and spiritual practice associates with good mental and emotional health. People who have a spiritual practice and hold faith tend to have better mental and emotional health than those who don’t. It’s unclear why but it does seem to be more than just socialising with people who hold similar views.
Of course there are religious nutters and perfectly happy well balanced atheists. But it’s wrong to say that believing in god(s) equates with madness.
And lots of scientists and other quite rational people are religious, although they tend not to talk about it because people like you declare them mad.
Of course there are religious nutters and perfectly happy well balanced atheists. But it’s wrong to say that believing in god(s) equates with madness.
And lots of scientists and other quite rational people are religious, although they tend not to talk about it because people like you declare them mad.
SheilaNaGig
Break requested
I’m not sure that’s really religion, or at least not what I think of as religion. Self righteousness and nasty judgment hiding behind dogma or doctrine and dressing up as community is whatever it is, but it’s not what I understand as spritual practice.
Woah. Lots of judgement there. Don’t know “any better”? Is what you think you know and believe “better” than those with faith?
I’m laughing a bit at your blind faith comment too. Faith encompasses, is defined by, uncertainty. If there was certainty it would no longer be faith. If you speak to anyone, in depth, about their faith you will probably uncover quite a complicated story. One of questioning, exploration, times when they felt at peace and comforted, and other times when they have moved more distant from faith, have radically deconstructed it, even completely rejected it, and others when it makes natural sense and the tenants of it feel firm.
I feel you dismiss a complicated and very personal way of relating to God, to the world, to others, to reality even by simply “knowing better”.
Some people say a delusion is an unshakable belief in something that is contradicted by reality. For the majority of people, faith is not unshakable. It is also not always contradicted by reality. It can be both though.
I also don’t think that most delusions are unshakable either mind you. Although some are certainly more strongly held than others. A lot of people can grow to understand and question them. Just as hearing voices, or feeling your thoughts aren’t your own, or are under the control of others, can be understood by people as a way of coping with great conflict or trauma. Is insanity protective or destructive or both?
Are those voices ‘real’? Is faith ‘real’? These are big questions to do with making sense of being human and of the world and what’s happened to us.
Yossarian
⏭️
People believe in all kinds of stupid shit to get through life, it doesn't make them mentally ill.
I think you are overestimating how much religious people believe in their religions - I grew up as a Catholic, things like the doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief that the bread and wine offered at Communion transform into the literal flesh and blood of Christ) did seem completely insane, until I realised that almost nobody actually believed it, it was just part of the religion, and they saw religion as part of the glue that held society together. It's something people pay a little bit of respect to in good times and turn to more fully when they are lonely or bereaved, etc.
How many Christians etc. actually behave like they believe they're going to burn in hellfire forever if they're shitty to people? If all religious people actually believed fervently in their religion, we'd be totally fucked, there'd be dickheads coming up to you and trying to save your soul every time you stepped outside.
It's a polite fiction, for the most part - the true believers are the ones like Jehovah's Witnesses, who do seem to genuinely believe that their religion is 100% true and they have a responsibility to save everybody's souls - most of them do seem a little bit mentally ill to me but I always try to be polite to them because at least they're walking it like they talk it.
That’s not to say that I don’t think ‘mental illness’ (ie not being able to function because of the way your brain is working) isn’t underlined by neuroscience.
Like if you take PTSD, social phobia, panic attacks- these are all “diagnoses” but they’re not causes. The underlying cause for all of them is dysregulation in the sympathetic nervous system, part of the autonomic nervous system that signals via acetylcholine to release adrenaline that triggers “fight or flight”. You can then understand the role of adrenaline within the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and how it relates to cortisol the “stress hormone”.
So you can understand (some of) how adrenaline and cortisol contribute to symptoms such as hyperarousal, hypervigilance and accentuated startle response. Also things like how memory is processed is effected, fear conditioning etc. And then as a result you get ‘behaviours’ that are similar between all these disorders, but which are named an arbitrary different name as a ‘diagnosis’ in psychiatry.
So yeah, maybe understanding the neuroscience would enable a drug to be developed that intervened in this dysregulated feedback loop somewhere. Like prazocin which blocks alpha adrenaline receptors (used for hypertension but also in ptsd). And maybe it helps (there’s evidence it does). That’s probably a good thing.
But I’m unclear to what extent that would be useful for a Syrian refugee with ptsd come to an understanding of what has happened to them. Or a woman with agoraphobia who was raped as a child. How you process that reality, how you come to terms with it, understand it, I’m not sure that’s the sole realm of neuroscience.
Anyway. Rambling. Good luck to Sinead.
Like if you take PTSD, social phobia, panic attacks- these are all “diagnoses” but they’re not causes. The underlying cause for all of them is dysregulation in the sympathetic nervous system, part of the autonomic nervous system that signals via acetylcholine to release adrenaline that triggers “fight or flight”. You can then understand the role of adrenaline within the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and how it relates to cortisol the “stress hormone”.
So you can understand (some of) how adrenaline and cortisol contribute to symptoms such as hyperarousal, hypervigilance and accentuated startle response. Also things like how memory is processed is effected, fear conditioning etc. And then as a result you get ‘behaviours’ that are similar between all these disorders, but which are named an arbitrary different name as a ‘diagnosis’ in psychiatry.
So yeah, maybe understanding the neuroscience would enable a drug to be developed that intervened in this dysregulated feedback loop somewhere. Like prazocin which blocks alpha adrenaline receptors (used for hypertension but also in ptsd). And maybe it helps (there’s evidence it does). That’s probably a good thing.
But I’m unclear to what extent that would be useful for a Syrian refugee with ptsd come to an understanding of what has happened to them. Or a woman with agoraphobia who was raped as a child. How you process that reality, how you come to terms with it, understand it, I’m not sure that’s the sole realm of neuroscience.
Anyway. Rambling. Good luck to Sinead.
Yes, insane and uneducated.
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No, I explained WHY it's mental illness, I didn't just say she's mentally ill because I said so. O'Connor cannot be religious without falling for the delusion involved, so it can be seen as a type of mental illness. And I'm not saying that to have a pop at her, I have a history of mental illness myself and it's nothing to be ashamed of.
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Baronage-Phase
Well-Known Member
I think you mean "bearing"...
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
no, you didn't explain why it's a mental illness
You simply repeated your assertion it is a mental illness
Indeed I do
That is absolute bollocks and if you don't realise that then there is something seriously wrong with you mate. And even if that's true, I've since explained why it's mental illness so your 'point' is redundant.
I think you guys are just arguing for the sake of it
Baronage-Phase
Well-Known Member
Exactly what part of say...Christianity ..causes ... for the sake of your argument...bipolar disorder?
Or ..what part of Protestantism causes a 21 year old youth to suddenly develop schizophrenia overnight?
You'll find that religion is not the cause...
I was watching a documentary last night about a reporter who developed a form of extreme psychosis within hours of receiving a yellow fever vaccine. His wife documented the course of his psychosis over 6 years ... on camera. He went through hell for 6 years. Ended up received all sorts of treatment and was isolated in a psychiatric hospital. He is now doing ok and was interviewed at the end of the documentary. He blames the vaccine for what happened to him. 7 years on and he is ok.
People have yet to understand fully how viruses and infections and indeed vaccines may cause not only physical but mental health problems.
But you go on...go right ahead and blame religion
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Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Be nice to see you argue rather than flounder
I dunno about the chap in your case PippinTook but autoimmune response has been shown within the last 10 years to be a cause of psychosis (Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis - Wikipedia). Edit: and is curable!
And of course one of the biggest causes of mental illness and psychosis was almost eliminated when antibiotics were developed, neurosyphillis.
Much still to discover about the neuroscience of psychosis.
And of course one of the biggest causes of mental illness and psychosis was almost eliminated when antibiotics were developed, neurosyphillis.
Much still to discover about the neuroscience of psychosis.
