3 ms·
If you think it's not a far scretch, my guess is you have not been close enough to and tried to help someone with actual schizophrenia. My guess can be wrong, o
by fipar 8y ago
If you think it's not a far scretch, my guess is you have not been close enough to and tried to help someone with actual schizophrenia. My guess can be wrong, of course.
People are in contact with other people who both love and eat animals (though usually not the same animals). Further, where I live (though probably in a lot of places), vegetarians are a minority, so most people are in contact with meat-eating people, including meat-eating pet owners, and see them as normal people. By comparing them to shizophrenics, you feed the viewpoint that mental problems are not real and that people can just work them out if they really want to, which is not helpful at all to those dealing with mental health problems.
It seems animal rights is a cause you care about, which I can understand. Mental health is a cause I care about, and I kindly suggest that you can continue to make your arguments without stretching the definition of any mental illness for that purpose.
EDIT: removed double 'seems' and accidental 'using'
- yboris 8y agoThank you for sharing this. I feel uneasy about having used the word "schizophrenic", especially after reading what you wrote. It was a bit of a nasty tactic on my part because it attracts attention (unfortunate that the internet implicitly incentivizes that). In my regular in-person conversations I don't think I've ever used that word. I'll be more sensitive next time online too. Thank you. As a substitute -- can you think of a word that would very swiftly capture the extreme cognitive dissonance people surely must have to engage in the behavior they currently do?
- fipar 8y agoThank you very much for the reply. I normally use cognitive dissonance to say this, but I guess as a single word to mean an extreme version of this, perhaps Orwell's doublethink would work?