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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

> Medically speaking a mental illness is no different than a physical illness.

I'm sympathetic, but don't make the discussion worse by throwing falsehoods like this around.

Besides the fact expressed by others that physically illness is more diagnosable, you typically don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person. (At least, I never have.)

Physical illness is a different situation. That's why my workplace offers near unlimited sick time for this reason. As much as we'd love you have to working, we don't want your diseases.

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(Granted, having an anxiety attack in the middle of work may not do wonders for the mental state of your coworkers, but blithey asserting this "no different" is dubious at best.)

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>you typically don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person. (At least, I never have.)

You also don't get physically ill from being in proximity to someone with a non-contagious disease or a sprained ankle, so that's an irrelevant distinction.

Sick days are not just for flus and colds that are contagious...

> Sick days are not just for flus and colds that are contagious...

Agreed. I meant to mention that.

> so that's an irrelevant distinction.

Flus and colds are by far the most common uses of sick days, so I wouldn't say it's "irrelevant."

> Besides the fact expressed by others that physically illness is more diagnosable, you typically don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person.

Contagious diseases (and, a fortiori, those that are contagious on casual contact) are a distinct subset of so-called “physical” illness.

You don't get cancer from being in proximity to someone with cancer, either.

If I recall correctly, Morgellon's Disease is a mental illness that spreads via social interactions with an affected person, or journalism featuring such a person.

The disease itself is a delusion, regarding microscopic fibers in the skin. Sufficiently impressionable people simply hear about it, convince themselves that they have it, then they go on to try to convince others that it is a physical ailment rather than a mental illness.

If you are politically incorrect enough to classify religions as mental illnesses, many of those appear to be contagious as well.

But on a smaller scale, workplace morale is definitely infectious. If someone is having a particularly stressful day, they may be rude to someone else, who then feels worse as a result, and may propagate that to yet another co-worker. Of particular interest is that such transmission need not take place in person. A person with a common cold could work from home to keep everyone else from catching it, but someone with malaise or anxiety could transmit that via any medium that can include emotional undertone, such as a voice or video call.

As far as I've read, Morgellons is only "contagious" in the sense that people who already had symptoms of delusional parasitosis or undiagnosed/misdiagnosed skin conditions gravitate toward it as an explanation.

Contagions always spread through only the susceptible fraction of the population. Prior to mass communications, there were too few susceptible individuals in any given population for it to spread. The herd was immune, because any infected person would die before ever meeting another susceptible person.

Enter the Internet. Now all the susceptible people can aggregate around their own forums/boards/podcasts/groups/subreddits and infect each other with their unique strains of madness.

There's no more herd immunity, because all the susceptible people can find each other instantly.

Sorry, I should have been more precise: they are both recognized as treatable illnesses by the health care professionals, the government and insurance companies.

In the sense that you can go to a doctor, get diagnosed, get treatment, get that treatment paid for by an insurance company and get legal protections under laws applying to health care they are "no different."

Since we are talking about how corporate HR policies apply to mental health and not the philosophy of medicine I would argue that these are the similarities that actually matter.

> You don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person. (At least, I never have.)

I tend to agree with you, but the concept of "contagion" is widely used in mental health settings. Self harm, or suicidality, can be "contagious".

Mental illness can cause physical illness. Anxiety can cause gastrointestinal disorders for example. So should someone having an anxiety attack not take the day off just because they weren't exhibiting any physical issues? And many gastro disorders can happen without being obvious until the situation worsens.

Waiting until the worst happens isn't sustainable and just makes things harder to recover. Perhaps burnout isn't just simply mental but a larger, systemic degradation of the body.

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