Hey /sci/ Given that mental illness represents a tangible defect

>>7787367

If I cut off your arm, does it grow back?

>>7787367
why isnt your picture a frog? delete it now autismo

>>7787371
No, but the body immediately floods the site with clotting agents and immune vectors to minimise further risks, eventually turning the wound into scar tissue for structural integrity and to keep bacteria and shit out.

>>7787377

Would it not stand to reason that we would evolve some mechanism for regrowing our arms back?

>>7787379
Other species do have that. So yeah. That's a pretty reasonable response to losing a limb apparently.

>>7787381

We don't though. We don't have that mechanism.

>>7787382
Indeed we don't. But if we didn't know that humans can't regrow limbs it would be worth investigating, since it seems a logical thing to have evolved.

>>7787382
>>7787379
>>7787371
what kind of strawman is this? it's like you're saying you can't have mental illness countermeasure unless you can regenerate limbs. you're the dumbest nigger i've seen all day on /sci/. congrats.

>>7787385
>>7787388

Evolution doesn't work by argumentative processes. OP's premises are flawed.

>>7787391
But evolution does tend to mitigate things which pose a persistent threat of killing off an organism.
Mental illness seems to be such a thing, given the massive lifetime diagnosis rate (not even counting the masses of people that would qualify for diagnosis but never go for it).

>>7787407

Consider how recent the medicinal advances in human history are. In the 1900's we were still doing surgery covered in shit.

Precautions against mental illness would be against debilitating ones at an early age. Even now we still have things like Downy's and extra chromosomes because not everything works correctly all the time.

>>7787416
Ye but having the wrong number of chromosomes is a reproductive fuckup, that happens and genetic disorders like that are very rare. 20% of the population has a mental illness any given year. That's not rare. Shit that effects 20% of the population (in a year) is definitely prevalent enough to prompt some kind of mitigation to develop.

>>7787417
that's not how evolution works. the environment doesn't prompt anything. the trait either shows up dominant in a gene pool or it stays recessive. what decides that is natural selection and a ton of randomness in chromosome crossovers.

>>7787417

Mental illnesses are generally treated by attempting to supplement psychoactive substances in your brain.

Are you saying it has no relation to it being a genetic disorder?

>>7787367
We have developed a fucking amazing mechanism.

It's called waiting for it... time can hear mostly anything brain wise.

And most especially sometimes the mechanism loops... but the doctor is always inside your brain with mostly infinite potential to fix things... you just need a specialist to guide the system into focusing on the real problem.

Some brains have very efficient defense mechanism that are not necessary in said situations... like when you have to process emotional trauma and while aware you refuse to do it... eventually you will trigger denationalization and derealization which was not necessary for such an easy thing.. but in evolution it was a great mechanism for people with dysfunction between their hemispheres to feel integrated and work mostly normal.


The more you know aware about the brain the more itself when you are unaware of the process.
Literally science liberates you... we as w/e we are we're in more control over biological processes than was thought before.

>>7787418
Jesus you nitpicking fucking retard, plz show me another health condition afflicting 20% of the population (annually) for which we have no evolved defence for.

>>7787428

Heart disease, Cancer, literally everything else

>>7787428
that's apples to oranges. you're saying that we MUST have this defense because we have a disorder. that's not how evolution works. if we're able to survive long enough to reproduce, then the gene pool will still show traits of mental defects. why is this so hard to understand?

>>7787431
I'm not saying we must, it just seems to follow from other things. People with mental issues are at a huge risk of committing suicide.

>>7787430
>cancer
The body actually has many defences against cancer, tumours which kill people are just the ones that make it through.
I don't know that much about heart disease but I bet there's something, plus it doesn't effect that many people every year.

>>7787440
>it just seems to follow
... except that it doesn't.

>>7787367
define illness and defect

many of the things you likely describe can be quite useful if they are triggered in the correct context

>>7787440

A cancer is a mutation we don't have the defense for. That's how malignant tumors form.

>>7787447
Insufficient defence != no defence.
The notion that we don't have an immune system because infections kill people sometimes is false. Similar cancer.

>>7787447
Before you say anything, the defenses against cancer are rooted in the structural integrity of your chromosomes (DNA's ability to lyse its own cells).

Lobsters, jellyfish, and naked mole rats are able to use stem cells to repair their DNA. We can't. That's why we get cancer.

>>7787450

Your argument in the OP is that we should have evolved some sort of defense against mental disorders because a large population has it.

We haven't developed the ability to repair our own DNA despite a large population having cancer.

>>7787452
By defence I didn't mean a 100% immunity, if that's what you're thinking. Just some way of mitigating it to a degree. Which we do have for cancer. It's not fully effective, but it is there.
You're straw manning pretty hard if you're implying I said we should be immune to mental illness because lol evolution.

I have schizophrenia. Considering that it's one of the worst mental illnesses and it has about a 30% recovery rate that's pretty good.

Many "mental illnesses" are caused by society. They're less a "defect in the mind" than a defect in social relations that society then projects into the mind of the individual, labeling this defect a "disease of the individual," thus further alienating the victim, and worsening his situation, because that's easier to do than fixing the problem in society.

Oh you don't feel safe going outside at night? That isn't because you're poor and live in the ghetto. It's because you're paranoid.

Oh you think everyone you meet hates you? That isn't because you're ugly. That's because you have persecutory delusions.

Oh you feel sad because you're poor, ugly, and everyone hates you? That isn't because your life sucks. It's because you have depression.

etc.

When placed in negative circumstances beyond the ability of the individual to change, the mind will react negatively, and that's a perfectly logical, natural, and expected outcome. People are social animals. How is a human being supposed to react when humanity, his own tribe even, drags him out of the firelight into the winter cold and throws him to the wolves?

A good many people experience this because they're too ugly, too poor, too stupid, too fat, too shy, too silly, too fat, too crippled, or too weird to fit in. It's easier for society to just label them "mentally ill" and ostracize them instead of trying to accommodate them. The only reason psychology and psychiatry exist is because total social rejection is so beyond the realm of experience of anyone socially integrated enough to work in academia or medicine.

>>7787456
>By defence I didn't mean a 100% immunity

What part of 'We can't repair our DNA on our own at all' didn't you understand?

Please state your argument so I'm not strawmanning you then.

>>7787465
>We can't repair our DNA on our own at all
Perhaps, but we can kill cells that mutate and we have things in place which detect that and respond.

I've stated my argument why don't you read it?

What makes it an illness?
Mutants are a byproduct of evolution. Narrow specialization is a death sentence when it comes to adaption.

Schizos may seem useless, but their fucked up chemistry is similar to creatives, which we need.

Idiot savants have abilities that surpass normies and push us forward.

The intellectual stereotype comes with fucked up social abilities since many of them aren't right in the head.

The point of calling theses people "ill" and medicating them is to try to fix them enough to fit into the birth, school, work, loan, work, death mold when we should just eradicate them.

>>7787476
>don't straw man me
Give argument
>lol go read it :^)

>>7787476
Lemme spell this out slowly for you.

The detection and response is not the cause of cancer happening.

Cancer happens because we can't repair our DNA.

I will quote you
>does it not stand to reason that we've evolved some mechanism of recovering from these illnesses

It stands to reason that we should have developed some sort of DNA repair kit.

We have not.

>>7787479
Okay so you know norton antivirus right? Like how it's meant to stop computer viruses? You know how if you throw enough attacks at it something will get through yes, so it's not completely effective. But that doesn't mean that it does nothing, it just can't do everything. My argument is that it seems mental illness poses sufficient risk for us to have evolved something like norton antivirus but for mental illnesses.

>>7787490

>Computers are biology

>>7787493
>strawmanning this hard

>>7787496

>Stop using ad hominen bruh.

Goddamn /sci/ is literally the worst board.

>>7787367
>Could mental health practitioners achieve better results if they knew about said mechanisms and could work to maximise their effect?

This is why they give sad people happy pills anon.
It helps, sure, but really, being happy due to pills is very different from being able to be happy without.
It's not a cure, just temporary alleviation. If this is what you meant by your post, that if we "trick" the mind to feel better by taking advantage of the mechanism, I'd say, straight up, hell no.
It is only a means of alleviation for the actual treatment, and only makes a person more dependant on external sources than being independently able.
Bad or not, is not what this post is about. It's like super-gluing a wound. Unless you've got Dengue fever or something, are you sure you want to do that?

>>7787512
Basically I just think that since most critical systems in the body have something in place for when shit goes wrong the mind should be no different, and that not knowing of this might impede effective treatment, and possibly that knowledge of it could lead to treatments which actually make use of it.

>>7787546
But we do have it, just that it doesn't work as physically as other parts of the body
If you're lacking whatever feel good chemical in your head, you don't automatically just go happy because your brain detected a decrease, you just bitch and moan about it on Facebook and that's how the brain attempts to get it back. I'm guessing the brain tries to make your status known, and for other social beings to stop beating you up, bullying you, etc. Sentient action has become our mind's method of preserving itself.
As such, I wouldn't be surprised that most disorders and complexes are the mind's way of preserving oneself, as warped or twisted it may be.
So the point is that I think you're trying to fix it physically, via chemicals and shit, which is what is the modern practise, but the underlying problems are less physical and more social than anything, ergo, seeing a shrink and support groups, cutting toxic people out, etc.
I'm not an expert however, and I probably worded it badly

>Given that mental illness represents a tangible defect in the functioning of the mind

Does it? What's objectively insane? Self-destructive behavior, obviously. Cutting up the body is self-destructive, unless you take a long-term perspective and the cutting really does help someone in the end.

Insane people often believe in conspiracies to destroy them. Cutting bits out of the brains of people is insane, yet we've done it to both the willing and unwilling. In such cases, who was really insane, and was there really a conspiracy against mental patients?

Humans have been chopping each other's brains up for thousands of years. Today, we have an elaborate library of literature that we point to as justification for cutting up brains. In ancient times, priests justified cutting up brains with... a library of literature.

Are any of us truly behaving rationally, or is rationality an illusion? Consider that seeing patterns where there supposedly are none is a criteria for mental illness - it's called thought disorder. Do we all see patterns where there are none? Occam's razor tells us to accept the simplest solution - which is that there is no pattern, since chaos is simpler than order.

Do apes just have a sick obsession with chopping up the brains of rivals? A mental illness that allowed you to eliminate competitors by calling them - let's admit it - deluded and factually wrong would be very 'adaptive,' as they say.

>>7787546
It's not the same thing though. For instance, if you are hypovolaemic, your heart will beat faster and your breathing speeds up to try to get oxygen round the body despite the lower circulating volume and red cell count. This is not your body fixing your CV system; it's temporary compensation to try to stop you dying from hypoxia.

The systems don't have fail-safes: other systems can up their efforts to try to compensate, but they don't fix the underlying problem (ie a big hole in your abdomen), and to argue this as the system having evolved and adapted to do this to fix having big leaky wounds is erroneous.

For what it's worth I do agree with what you're trying to say, but the way you're trying to say it is flawed. People self-medicate all the time.