"I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?"-Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

[WispyThought]

Am I mad? Are you mad? We must be mad! All of us!

This man is supposed to be mentally ill but he does not even recognise that there is anything wrong with him. He only knows that there is something wrong with him because people point out the differences, that being, he sits, talks, and stands differently when he is at and away from the piano, but he does not understand it. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which the doctor did not see fit to explain or tell him about. Mentally ill people do not know that they are mentally ill until someone who claims to be mentally stable points it out. This is strange because everyone can be considered mentally sick, so how can one mental person tell another mental person that they are mental, some just hide it better than others.(Low self esteem, jealousy, envy, laughing at horror movies, depression, dark humour, narcissism, posting hundreds of pictures just to get likes, all point towards mental instability).

How can someone fix something that isn't considered broken? How can one help someone who has a mental illness if they do not recognise that they have one. A comment to this video said "what if we are the ones incapable of understanding their higher evolved mind and we perceive it as a sickness. It's been proven that most have a higher IQ level than most". Which actually does make sense.

I think society is dependent on science and medicine the same way it was once dependent on religion. Even though most things can be proven, there is also many things that is just theory. If a doctor says "this man is mentally sick" even though it cannot be physically proven, it would be believed. The human mind is so complex that you literally cannot make sense of it. Society believes whatever makes the most sense because most are afraid of what is different and what cannot be comprehended. A saying that I love is:

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth
- Arthur Conan Doyle

[frostwalrus]

I would be tempted to say that good mental health is defined by how well you get through life, but now I'm not so sure. The issue calls to mind Nietzsche's theory about the necessity of life-preserving lies - i. e. emotionally-reassuring falsehoods and superstitions (religion being the biggest example). It is believed by some that a person cannot live in truth all the time - he or she needs to embrace some amount of untruth to get through the day. A man or woman who is strictly logical and believing only in things that seem most probable may find themselves in dire straits compared to a person who is blissfully drunk on life-preserving lies. Society has this tendency to equate the logical mind with mental "wellness", but one's "wellness" seems inversely proportional to one's grip upon reality. Truth, in a sense, can drive us to "madness" (i. e. an emotional and psychological wreck) because humans didn't evolve to be bearers of truth despite our faculty for reason. I think just about everyone who is "successful" in life has probably internalized some amount of untruth.

I find that humans are irrational and emotion-driven first and foremost, with reason being of secondary importance. It has been my experience that the further you go down the rabbit hole of truth, the more insane and retarded and self-important the human species appears to be. Nihilism is too much for most people to handle. The average "healthy" mind has not the stomach to believe we live in a Godless universe where there is no afterlife or spirits; has not the stomach to realize that we're reaching a point where the distinction between human and non-human is about to be destroyed and that humans are destined to be merely a footnote in the history of intelligent life; has not the stomach to keep at the forefront of his mind a scientific explanation for each and every biological process occurring in him and those around him (processes which include sexual attraction and the need for social interaction); has not the stomach to embrace the supreme insignificance of his existence. Normies can't handle this stuff. Carl Jung once quoted "Show me a sane man and I will cure him."

How "mentally ill" is defined is a diabolically complex problem and I don't even know where to begin to properly address it.

[Anonymous]

I think Carroll's quote gets to the heart of what "self" is. Our "self" is certainly not the atoms that make us up, because those are constantly in flux. Our skin is recycled every 30 days, red blood cells about every 120 days. Our mind seems like a better candidate for "self". But what does that mean? Our mind is this constant source of ideas -- most of which we repress. Our "self" is just that subset that we acknowledge and that we decide to take responsibility for. But if ideas escape us that we didn't consciously acknowledge, then there's this feeling that it wasn't our "self" speaking or acting. Something uncontrollable seems to have slipped out. So, I see the "self" as the part of us that defines an explanation for what we do and that acts as the gatekeeper for what thoughts we allow to flourish. I'm not an expert in mental illness, but I suspect there's still this very palpable sense of not being in control sometimes. In that case, it might be worse that not knowing, but instead a feeling of terror.

[zagor]

Your vagabond who's rapping at your door. Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.

[KristaGrym]

Whatever he was a pedo

[edwilliams580]

Love it!