Hacker News Reader

Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

> This is entirely wrong. You can suffer from depression (and anxiety) and attribute it to other things, such as personality traits. Many people think "that's just me" with those that know them thinking the same. For less acute forms of depression such as dysthymia, that's common. People can think they're entirely normal and they're just not good at certain things.

My post explicitly says the hypothetical man is happy, not that he thinks "that's just me".

If you want to argue against that, you have to define mental illness from a behavoral or functional perspective which I don't think you've done.

View on HN

What if the subject doesn't realise they're unhappy because they've never been happy and have nothing to compare against? Your statements seem to assume everyone has the same perspective to measure against, but in reality people's perspective can be radically different

Like I said, you can make that argument, but then you need to provide a criterion for saying someone is unhappy. That's where behavioralism or functionalism or something similar comes in.

> Your statements seem to assume everyone has the same perspective to measure against, but in reality people's perspective can be radically different

On the contrary, I think people have different perspectives. Two people can be in the exact same situation and their subjective feelings can be radically different.

It seems that we agree

We definitely need to make judgements based on both behavior and subjective thought processes rather than just one or the other

I don’t know of any mental illness that isn’t accompanied by intense mental distress

The grand-parent comment was arguing that this distress can be objectively catalogued by someone other than the patient, and that the patient may themselves be unaware.

This does seem to be true for some forms of mental illness, depending on exactly how you define distress. For example, someone going through an episode of mania (such as in bipolard disorder) is typically subjectively extremely happy with their state.

Mania.

But mania without the downs is basically what we are all going for.

Psychopathy

But psychological manipulation without the downsides is basically what we are all going for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com