Re: Curing mental illness

On 23/09/2007, Howard Brazee wrote in message
<nu6ef31680ir2hnsk9lecvvadd3cn0p8he@xxxxxxx>:

On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:13:07 GMT, jsavard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(John Savard) wrote:

If the mentally ill people with serious problems - from schizophrenia to
bipolar disorder - are cured, but nothing else is different, the world
could be neither bad nor boring, with this just being an incidental
detail.

Some people can't be cured. Suppose someone has a metal disorder because
reality is too tragic to handle. Would you convince them that the tragic
things hadn't happened ? Or would you turn them into a person lacking
emotion just so they could be a functioning member of society ? Would you
call either of those things a cure ?

We already see a tendency to "fix" problems that weren't perceived as
such during my life time. I suspect definitions of health (mental
and otherwise) will change over time. Who controls these definitions
might indicate whether the story is depicting a distopia or a utopia.

Well, we know who controls the definitions in our society: the editors of
DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and CIC
(the British/European handbook). And yes, things do move into and out of
these books are they're recognised as illnesses and as they're dismissed
as the result of how culture or society sees certain behaviour.

It's not possible for someone inside a society to accurate judge the
behaviour that emerges from that society. But you can project similar but
different societies and imagine what would happen in them. And that would
be science fiction.

Simon.
--
http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk
.

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