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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

> Since mental illness is largely defined as any sort of behavior or thoughts that make it difficult for one to be a productive member of society

I have seen enough of this up close to know that it isn't society's construct, that many sufferers are objectively having problems.

Maybe not all cases and conditions are like this. But it doesn't do anyone favors to handwave some of those serious conditions away.

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The more society becomes increasingly oriented around thought-work the more these problems will manifest. Humans evolved to cooperate, but we didn't evolve to spend all day thinking about long-term work-related stressors that are only indirectly related to our own well-being. Once it became trivially easy to obtain food, water, and shelter, a good portion of our biological imperative was left without anything to be concerned with.

For an interesting tangentially-related thought, try asking people what the definition of "healthy" is for a human. Mental health is the hardest part to define out of all health.

> Once it became trivially easy to obtain food, water, and shelter

I would argue that the average human being doesn't consider these things easy to acquire. For society it COULD be easy to distribute these things if we decided that was a goal of ours, but we haven't gotten there yet. I would be very interested in seeing the ideas (or problems?) invented by children born into a world where this was true, but unless things get very interesting very quickly, I doubt we'll get the chance.

Most mental illness is definitely society's product.

Without the immense pressure to conform to insane, abusive and destructive standards in combination with living in a harmful environment with poisonous "food" and "medicine" in competition with others who are likewise fighting to keep their head above water; I suspect most mental illness would disappear by itself.

Treating mental illness like some kind of natural law which can't be avoided, only stops us from finding the real causes and progressing towards a more humane society.

I think you're right that there are social, societal, and stress-related causes of many of these conditions that are under-explored. And certainly the cultural attitudes need to be adjusted more towards compassionate acceptance and helping others than they are today.

However, when it comes to an individual person being stuck in one of those states... What you are saying winds up feeling a tad ridiculous. For example, if presented with someone who has a delusional belief in something objectively, demonstrably false on a factual basis, to the point where acting on their belief makes them a danger to themselves or others ... It is not the case that a different society will make those delusions into true facts. What they need in that moment is probably medication. I have seen people for whom that has definitely been the case, and they show improvement with treatment.

You are missing the point.

I'm not saying a more humane society would cure existing mental illness, though I'm sure it would help.

The point is that most mental illness is a product of the society we live in, and the long term solution is fixing that rather than medicating the symptoms.

There are a lot of factors. Stress and trauma. Genetics and heredity. Some degree of randomness. I think you are onto something but over-simplify.

Trust me, there's nothing simple about taking this stance and pointing out the big elephant in the room.

Blaming chaos or genetics, that's how you over-simplify.

Genetics is not the only factor, but it is a huge one, not to be ignored. I suppose you think people talk about terms like "family history of mental illness" just for fun?

What do you mean "most"? What kinds of mental illnesses are you referring to here?

I mean most, that's about as specific as it makes sense to be since the definition keeps morphing to hook an ever growing part of the population into the profit-machine.

When I said that the sufferers of mental illness objectively do suffer, you did not seem to have a problem and you said that society is the primary cause. (And explicitly not a hereditary disposition, as is generally believed to be a factor.)

Now you seem to be suggesting the conditions are expanding, as if invented, to serve a profit machine.

This all suggests to me that your real opinion is that the illnesses don't exist.

All I ever said was that most mental illness is a product of society. Anything beyond that is a product of your imagination. If you're going to actively avoid truth by taking every chance to derail the discussion, why even bother?

But you seem to be morphing the definition in order to sculpt your narrative, which is why I'm asking you to nail it down.

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