4 ms·

That’s like saying some people are just fat. Or some people like to kill themselves. Patholizing it with clinical terms doesn’t help or change anything.

by siva7 3y ago

mcpackieh 3y ago
I think it's unlikely that discrete categorizations for fatness or suicidal inclinations helps many people. To help somebody who's fat, you need to consider them as an individual, particularly their habits and physical and mental circumstance. Splitting hairs with these clinical discrete categories of continuous phenomena is a waste of time. For instance we can create the discrete category of "obese" and define it as any BMI above 30, and "overweight" as any BMI between 25 and 30. But do these discrete categories really give you any advantage when considering somebody who's at 29.9 or 30.1? Do or should you offer substantially different advice to somebody based on what side of the 30 line they fall? Probably not, one person might fall into either of those discrete categories depending on the day of the week. Fatness, and the underlying reasons for it, are a continuum. The clinical terms create discrete categories which might be useful to scientific research but have limited usefulness when you're considering a single individual. And with suicidal behavior, do discrete categories really help? I don't have much experience talking people off ledges so maybe you can say better than I, but to me it seems like the line between some chemical imbalance model of depression and shit life syndrome isn't always so clear. I think in most suicidal people it's probably some combination of those two, or other factors as well.
- pixl97 3y ago
  > The clinical terms create discrete categories which might be useful to scientific research but have limited usefulness when you're considering a single individual. This is the entire point of identifying said categorizations so you can at least have some chance in classifying an individual when they have an issue. It also allows you to identify if treatment for classifications is working on broad scales. Yea, the world sucks that we exist in an analog continuum and use discrete labeling to save in information space and processing, but there is no solution to that for the time being.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Armchair diagnosing assholes in your life as suffering from discrete psychological conditions is not something society forces you to do. It's something you choose to do, and can choose not to do. If you don't know somebody well enough to form a complex opinion on what that person's personality is, you certainly don't know enough to diagnose them with any sort of personality disorder. And if you do know somebody that well, then you don't have to employ such "information space and processing" saving measures, because you already have an understanding of that person. You already did that work.

That’s like saying some people are just fat. Or some people like to kill themselves. Patholizing it with clinical terms doesn’t help or change anything.

by siva7 3y ago

That’s like saying some people are just fat. Or some people like to kill themselves. Patholizing it with clinical terms doesn’t help or change anything.

mcpackieh 3y ago

I think it's unlikely that discrete categorizations for fatness or suicidal inclinations helps many people. To help somebody who's fat, you need to consider them as an individual, particularly their habits and physical and mental circumstance. Splitting hairs with these clinical discrete categories of continuous phenomena is a waste of time. For instance we can create the discrete category of "obese" and define it as any BMI above 30, and "overweight" as any BMI between 25 and 30. But do these discrete categories really give you any advantage when considering somebody who's at 29.9 or 30.1? Do or should you offer substantially different advice to somebody based on what side of the 30 line they fall? Probably not, one person might fall into either of those discrete categories depending on the day of the week. Fatness, and the underlying reasons for it, are a continuum. The clinical terms create discrete categories which might be useful to scientific research but have limited usefulness when you're considering a single individual. And with suicidal behavior, do discrete categories really help? I don't have much experience talking people off ledges so maybe you can say better than I, but to me it seems like the line between some chemical imbalance model of depression and shit life syndrome isn't always so clear. I think in most suicidal people it's probably some combination of those two, or other factors as well.

pixl97 3y ago
> The clinical terms create discrete categories which might be useful to scientific research but have limited usefulness when you're considering a single individual. This is the entire point of identifying said categorizations so you can at least have some chance in classifying an individual when they have an issue. It also allows you to identify if treatment for classifications is working on broad scales. Yea, the world sucks that we exist in an analog continuum and use discrete labeling to save in information space and processing, but there is no solution to that for the time being.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Armchair diagnosing assholes in your life as suffering from discrete psychological conditions is not something society forces you to do. It's something you choose to do, and can choose not to do. If you don't know somebody well enough to form a complex opinion on what that person's personality is, you certainly don't know enough to diagnose them with any sort of personality disorder. And if you do know somebody that well, then you don't have to employ such "information space and processing" saving measures, because you already have an understanding of that person. You already did that work.