Seeing Things Other People Don't

[Doreen]

This is where we disagree. Yes people can be healthy physically. Mild perturbations also indicate distress. If I develop hives on otherwise normal skin, it is an illness in the broadest sense of the term. It's something that upsets the status quo, which in this case is skin not adversely affected. Mental health is no different.

Or it's an allergic reaction to a new shirt that should have been washed. I would hardly say you have necessarily have an illness. And once you move over into the realm of mental illnesses you are talking longer term than a single outbreak of hives. You haven't even made it into neurosis with a perturbation - never used this word so much before, rather fun.

Perturbations, however, can be experienced in reaction to promotions, deaths in the family, meeting someone attractive, giving a public speech and people can experience perturbations, even 'freak out' to be slangy, and not remotely be diagnosible as having a mental illness. Disagree away, but it's my area of expertise and your hypothesis does not match professional practice.

People not in the business of diagnosing often think that 'wrong' beliefs can lead easily to diagnosis. Nope. And, again, religious and spiritual beliefs are actually being met much more flexibly, by even the psychiatric community, than they were 20 and certain 50 years ago.

If you are a neuropsychopharmacologist you should talk to fellow professionals, the one's dealing directly with those who might or might not be diagnosed, and ask them what it takes to get a diagnosis.

And, if you are one, Neuropharmo, or the like, might be a better abbreviation than psychotic episode, given that length was your criterion.

But perhaps others will weigh in on this issue.

We seem to have reached our impasse.

 

[cosmictraveler]

I see things that can make things better than they are by changing the way they are made and how they are used. I will not use my gift for I believe that for every thing we create we destroy something in its wake.

 

[Doreen]

I see things that can make things better than they are by changing the way they are made and how they are used. I will not use my gift for I believe that for every thing we create we destroy something in its wake.

This was enigmatic.

 

[PsychoticEpisode]

Perturbations, however, can be experienced in reaction to promotions, deaths in the family, meeting someone attractive, giving a public speech and people can experience perturbations, even 'freak out' to be slangy, and not remotely be diagnosible as having a mental illness. Disagree away, but it's my area of expertise and your hypothesis does not match professional practice.

This is fun. Yes I have heard the refrain..... The brain can get sick but your feelings can't. The anxiety you describe may not be a physical thing but it is a product of activity taking place within the brain. To be in a steady state of anxiety is not something I would consider healthy. I'm sure you would classify High Anxiety as a neurosis so why is a mild form of it not an illness?

Anyway we'll probably never agree so we will forever be semantically separated. Not to worry, like an illness, mild perturbations come and go. They will never be diagnosed as an illness, I'm just trying to show that it sits at one end of the scale of severity where high is a mental illness and mild is not. Thus perturbations should qualify but only by a stretch

Back to psychics and specifically visions. Is it normal to experience visions? It's normal to have thoughts, that's how we function. So why are the minority who claim to have visions regarded as peculiar oddities(psychics) rather than just being mentally unstable? We all have visions in the form of thoughts. Most of us interpret such occurrences as ordinary, but what is happening to someone who can't see (no pun intended) that their interpretation of the vision has garnered a spot on that same scale of severity.

Doreen, don't get me wrong, I respect the established norm. I just enjoy challenging it every now and then. Call it my mental illness, I'm ok with it.