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This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyo

This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. But a healthy species, evolutionary speaking, requires these outliers. These deviations from the "norm" offer the species a safety net should conditions change rapidly. Should we really be trying to herd everyone back to a norm? Also, psychology is a dying profession. A mental illness is described as a set of symptoms manifested from physical biological systems we don't fully understand yet. But once understood, psychology becomes obsolete.

selfie 2y ago
So, this: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
jalapenos 2y ago
It's definitely a growing profession. It only came into existence fairly recently, and it continues to innovate and develop new approaches. Good psychologists can provide enourmous value to their clients, and contrary to what the drug pushers want people to believe, mental illness isn't a physiological problem but a complex problem involving much more than that.
triumphblr 2y ago
> Also, psychology is a dying profession. A mental illness is described as a set of symptoms manifested from physical biological systems we don't fully understand yet. But once understood, psychology becomes obsolete. That's a fundamentally reductionist perspective and assumes everything is biological in its etiology? For example, you could say we don't need a justice system once we have the biology worked out, or arts, or sports. At some level it's a fundamentally authoritarian argument as well: if you have the biology worked out, what's to keep the holders of power from altering people to whatever norm they want? Having the biology completely worked out won't magically reveal natural disorder states. The biological explication of a behavior doesn't obviate the need to have some norm for intervention decisions. Biology doesn't have norms, psychosocial systems have norms. Non-behavioral medicine is still full of ethics. And that doesn't even get into issues about whether you could ever identify any biological substrate as synonymous with a human experiential state or history.
- 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
  The shape of that argument works equally well for unduly centering psychosocial mechanisms, though. That's how we got pseudoscientific garbage like the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism, the "anal retentive" theory of OCD, "tabula rasa" theories of social behavior, and so on. Maybe what I'm getting at is that double standards abound when it comes to mental illness, and it's fucking exhausting work to even attempt to avoid them. I'm not blaming anybody (least of all you). I suppose it's just one of those Lovecraftian/Cronenbergesque sorts of things where once you see it, the world never quite makes sense again.
  - faeriechangling 2y ago
    Regarding the refrigerator mother theory, autism as a diagnosis has expanded over 100x since that was first debunked and I have no idea why people have any confidence whatsoever that bad parenting cannot cause Autism. This was from a time before people as functional as "Rain Man" were the norm. Twin/Sibling studies were used to debunk this but twin studies don't totally control for shared environmental influences. It seems more like a politically controversial thing than something which has been seriously scientifically examined either way. It can't be the smoking gun only cause but I see no actual evidence that it's impossible that parental neglect can't be a contributing cause. I will note that it is more politically convenient to simply blame a child's inherent defects instead of parental neglect, since the children relative to their parents lack political power. I'll also point out that contemporary autism diagnosis relies on parent reports to establish a diagnosis, and people often only get diagnosed if a parent actively seeks out a diagnosis. Autism is also based on observation, if somebody was socially impaired due to neglect, how exactly would an examiner know the difference between that and somebody being socailly impaired due to say epigenetics? I would be rather surprised if who raised somebody doesn't have a rather large impact on if somebody will end up with an autism diagnosis. As in an especially well resourced and attentive parent might mean somebody who would be considered autistic might not be, and somebody who was overstretched and inattentive might have a child who would otherwise not be considered autistic be considered autistic.
- deanresin 2y ago
ACow_Adonis 2y ago
Sounds like programmers are obsolete because software will become redundant once we've solved everything in hardware :D
- marssaxman 2y ago
  A surprising number of people seem to believe this is actually true when they discuss Copilot and ChatGPT!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
crtified 2y ago
> But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mentally ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. A converse is the way public/media perception will use mental health itself as the reason or motivator for major crime. For example, with the just-happened knife attacker in Bondi Australia : the resulting public discourse urgently searches for a cause - "why did this person do this? was it terrorism? revenge? drugs?". But no, soon enough the media latches on to Mental Health, and everyone sighs in relief that the reason is now found. "Ahh!", the mainstream can reassure themselves, "It was a Mental Health Person that did this! Of course!".
- awesomeMilou 2y ago
  I'm not sure I follow? If you rule out any other motive, someone stabbing someone else in broad daylight, unprovoked may be attributed to mental health issues.
  - crtified 2y ago
    But everyone has mental health. If you have a mind, then it's in some form of health. An extremely broad, arguably meaningless, classification. All it does in this context is reinforce the public stigma towards the millions of perfectly good people in the community dealing with hugely diverse situations from depression to autism and far beyond.
p_j_w 2y ago
> Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. Are you suggesting rebelliousness and non-conformity should be considered mental illnesses, defects to be cured?
- deanresin 2y ago
  You cherry picked one sentence and stripped away the entire context and meaning of my post.
  - p_j_w 2y ago
    Because I take issue with that sentence.
- matrix87 2y ago
  it already is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder
  - p_j_w 2y ago
    That's not what that page says ODD is.
    - matrix87 2y ago
      it does, just your ODD keeps you from realizing that :)
    - worthless-trash 2y ago
      The page does say it, I'll agree with that. But I think that the classification as of the disorder basically is a method of classifying people who generally have real life experience with life going wrong, they have reason for behavior which doesn't make it a disorder but instead self preservation. They are classifying the symptom, not the cause. "Treating" it is fixing their environment and not the person. Too bad drugging the individual is the cheapest solution to create compliant individuals who won't take action.
bitwize 2y ago
"Mental illness" alone is not a defense. The defense is insanity, which term in law means that your mental condition was such that you had no way of knowing what you did was wrong. If you're schizophrenic, say, and you kill someone, but you are compos mentis enough to understand that you killed a person and that is wrong, you don't get to plead insanity. If, on the other hand, you were under the delusion that you were killing an alien or a demon or something, then a plea of insanity might work. I know that this is Hackernews, and the perspective that there's no such thing as responsibility for our actions, because we are all products of our biology and environment; and hence no such thing as evil, is popular here. But whether and how mental illness absolves, or does not absolve, you from criminal culpability is a fairly rigorous area of law.
- Lord-Jobo 2y ago
  I think a lot of people have a hysterically warped perspective on the insanity defense because of American legal/police media. People don't understand how near impossible it is to deploy successfully in trial, in the US.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    Indeed. As I understand it (ianal), insanity is a positive defense, meaning that you have to prove to the judge/jury in court that you were insane, i.e., that you were functionally incapable of distinguishing right from wrong at the moment you committed the crime. This is because a mens rea, or guilty mind, is necessary to establish guilt and thus criminal culpability, in addition to the actus reus or the criminal deed itself; you have to be in a state where you know, or could/should have known, not to do what you did. Proving a negative, especially when it comes to this, is extremely difficult. You will have to undergo an extensive psychiatric evaluation by a psychiatrist and they have to come to the very strong conclusion that you were well and truly out of your mind at the time of the commission of the crime. Otherwise, just the evidence that you did the crime is enough to establish guilt. Oh, and if you somehow successfully plead insanity, you will spend quite possibly the rest of your life in a mental institution instead of prison, which isn't much better. And yes, it's good to remember that police procedurals are to criminal justice what Hackers (1995) is to hacking: a lot of stuff is distorted to make good cinema/television. In the UK, judges on cop shows use gavels (that is strictly an American custom); how can we expect them to get the details of rare events like an insanity defense right?
popalchemist 2y ago
Defining mental illness in terms of deviance from law is actually an insane idea. Were the opponents to Nazis mentally ill, simply because they did not adhere to Nazi law? Think about the implications.
naasking 2y ago
> Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. No, I think mental illness should be defined relative to a person's capacity to change behaviour volitionally or in response to feedback signals, like a scolding or rehab or imprisonment. People who are mentally ill do not respond to feedback signals like this, they have little volition over their behaviours without significant pharmaceutical or other interventions first. It's like asking someone with Tourette's to stop having verbal tics as compared to someone who just likes swearing. There's a fundamental difference in volitional control and responsiveness to feedback.
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  So is being gay, transgender, an outspoken women, or left-handed mental illness since such people do not, by all appearance and objective measures, have the capacity to change their behaviours volitionally without for instance chemically castrating gay men or lobotomising women? There's two big things wrong with this definition. First is that it makes non-compliance a pathology and assumes society is right and the patient is wrong. Second is that pays zero heed to ethics and what is actually good for the supposedly mentally ill person, it just labels them mentally ill if they don't do what people want without thinking of if that's best for them. Of course, that's not THAT different from how mental disorders are defined in practice.
  - naasking 2y ago
    > First is that it makes non-compliance a pathology and assumes society is right and the patient is wrong. My post said absolutely nothing about society or non-compliance, it spoke only about whether the patient can respond volitionally. Gay people absolutely can choose not have gay sex, it's just wrong to expect that. Outspoken women absolutely can choose to be silent, it's just wrong to expect that. Left handed people absolutely can choose to write with their non-dominant hand, it's just wrong to expect that. There is clear volitional control here. I made this very clear with the example of Tourettes vs. someone who just likes to swear. The person with Tourettes cannot simply choose to not have verbal tics and then enact that choice, but the person who just likes swearing absolutely can. It's just a physical impossibility to regulate behaviour based on feedback or internal motivations. > Second is that pays zero heed to ethics and what is actually good for the supposedly mentally ill person, it just labels them mentally ill if they don't do what people want without thinking of if that's best for them. I have no idea what you mean. There's nothing unethical about pointing out that the mentally ill have a distinct behaviour in that they do not respond to specific kinds of feedback. It is in fact the starting point for ethical treatment of mental illness.
rustcleaner 2y ago
>But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Yes, and it makes punishment in the manners we do it [US] frankly unconsciable for being torturous. What else do you call forcing a man to sit in a concrete and iron box for ten years involuntarily, if he would willingly expatriate instead? Imprisonment should become optional with expatriation. It is assinine that we take away passports from criminals; you should be wanting them to depart for good! Throwing a man in a box completely involuntarily and without any reachable alternative recourse except to wait it out, in lieu of just seizing all assets and kicking them out permanently if they so choose as the prison-alternative, is assuaging what internet trolls would call... your booty-blastedness for him giving you a really bad time.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  This will be interpreted as. "Come to the US, commit crimes until you get caught, then leave instead of jail time". This is not a deterrant.
  - rustcleaner 2y ago
    Does deterrance actually work? Show me someone in the US who doesn't know about jails. Also a secure border was assumed but not stated. This presumes social groups want to be exclusive and are choosey of membership.
    - worthless-trash 2y ago
      > Does deterrance actually work? Show me someone in the US who doesn't know about jails. I don't know how to address this disconnection in logic. Do you assume that knowledge of a deterrent should create zero crimes ? You are right though, maybe deterrence doesn't work and summary execution will be the only long term solution to prevent any possible reoffending. I for one welcome Judge Dredd-like overlords.

selfie 2y ago

So, this: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/

jalapenos 2y ago

It's definitely a growing profession. It only came into existence fairly recently, and it continues to innovate and develop new approaches. Good psychologists can provide enourmous value to their clients, and contrary to what the drug pushers want people to believe, mental illness isn't a physiological problem but a complex problem involving much more than that.

triumphblr 2y ago

> Also, psychology is a dying profession. A mental illness is described as a set of symptoms manifested from physical biological systems we don't fully understand yet. But once understood, psychology becomes obsolete. That's a fundamentally reductionist perspective and assumes everything is biological in its etiology? For example, you could say we don't need a justice system once we have the biology worked out, or arts, or sports. At some level it's a fundamentally authoritarian argument as well: if you have the biology worked out, what's to keep the holders of power from altering people to whatever norm they want? Having the biology completely worked out won't magically reveal natural disorder states. The biological explication of a behavior doesn't obviate the need to have some norm for intervention decisions. Biology doesn't have norms, psychosocial systems have norms. Non-behavioral medicine is still full of ethics. And that doesn't even get into issues about whether you could ever identify any biological substrate as synonymous with a human experiential state or history.

0xcde4c3db 2y ago
The shape of that argument works equally well for unduly centering psychosocial mechanisms, though. That's how we got pseudoscientific garbage like the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism, the "anal retentive" theory of OCD, "tabula rasa" theories of social behavior, and so on. Maybe what I'm getting at is that double standards abound when it comes to mental illness, and it's fucking exhausting work to even attempt to avoid them. I'm not blaming anybody (least of all you). I suppose it's just one of those Lovecraftian/Cronenbergesque sorts of things where once you see it, the world never quite makes sense again.
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  Regarding the refrigerator mother theory, autism as a diagnosis has expanded over 100x since that was first debunked and I have no idea why people have any confidence whatsoever that bad parenting cannot cause Autism. This was from a time before people as functional as "Rain Man" were the norm. Twin/Sibling studies were used to debunk this but twin studies don't totally control for shared environmental influences. It seems more like a politically controversial thing than something which has been seriously scientifically examined either way. It can't be the smoking gun only cause but I see no actual evidence that it's impossible that parental neglect can't be a contributing cause. I will note that it is more politically convenient to simply blame a child's inherent defects instead of parental neglect, since the children relative to their parents lack political power. I'll also point out that contemporary autism diagnosis relies on parent reports to establish a diagnosis, and people often only get diagnosed if a parent actively seeks out a diagnosis. Autism is also based on observation, if somebody was socially impaired due to neglect, how exactly would an examiner know the difference between that and somebody being socailly impaired due to say epigenetics? I would be rather surprised if who raised somebody doesn't have a rather large impact on if somebody will end up with an autism diagnosis. As in an especially well resourced and attentive parent might mean somebody who would be considered autistic might not be, and somebody who was overstretched and inattentive might have a child who would otherwise not be considered autistic be considered autistic.
deanresin 2y ago

ACow_Adonis 2y ago

Sounds like programmers are obsolete because software will become redundant once we've solved everything in hardware :D

marssaxman 2y ago
A surprising number of people seem to believe this is actually true when they discuss Copilot and ChatGPT!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

crtified 2y ago

> But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mentally ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. A converse is the way public/media perception will use mental health itself as the reason or motivator for major crime. For example, with the just-happened knife attacker in Bondi Australia : the resulting public discourse urgently searches for a cause - "why did this person do this? was it terrorism? revenge? drugs?". But no, soon enough the media latches on to Mental Health, and everyone sighs in relief that the reason is now found. "Ahh!", the mainstream can reassure themselves, "It was a Mental Health Person that did this! Of course!".

awesomeMilou 2y ago
I'm not sure I follow? If you rule out any other motive, someone stabbing someone else in broad daylight, unprovoked may be attributed to mental health issues.
- crtified 2y ago
  But everyone has mental health. If you have a mind, then it's in some form of health. An extremely broad, arguably meaningless, classification. All it does in this context is reinforce the public stigma towards the millions of perfectly good people in the community dealing with hugely diverse situations from depression to autism and far beyond.

p_j_w 2y ago

> Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. Are you suggesting rebelliousness and non-conformity should be considered mental illnesses, defects to be cured?

deanresin 2y ago
You cherry picked one sentence and stripped away the entire context and meaning of my post.
- p_j_w 2y ago
  Because I take issue with that sentence.
matrix87 2y ago
it already is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder
- p_j_w 2y ago
  That's not what that page says ODD is.
  - matrix87 2y ago
    it does, just your ODD keeps you from realizing that :)
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    The page does say it, I'll agree with that. But I think that the classification as of the disorder basically is a method of classifying people who generally have real life experience with life going wrong, they have reason for behavior which doesn't make it a disorder but instead self preservation. They are classifying the symptom, not the cause. "Treating" it is fixing their environment and not the person. Too bad drugging the individual is the cheapest solution to create compliant individuals who won't take action.

bitwize 2y ago

"Mental illness" alone is not a defense. The defense is insanity, which term in law means that your mental condition was such that you had no way of knowing what you did was wrong. If you're schizophrenic, say, and you kill someone, but you are compos mentis enough to understand that you killed a person and that is wrong, you don't get to plead insanity. If, on the other hand, you were under the delusion that you were killing an alien or a demon or something, then a plea of insanity might work. I know that this is Hackernews, and the perspective that there's no such thing as responsibility for our actions, because we are all products of our biology and environment; and hence no such thing as evil, is popular here. But whether and how mental illness absolves, or does not absolve, you from criminal culpability is a fairly rigorous area of law.

Lord-Jobo 2y ago
I think a lot of people have a hysterically warped perspective on the insanity defense because of American legal/police media. People don't understand how near impossible it is to deploy successfully in trial, in the US.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Indeed. As I understand it (ianal), insanity is a positive defense, meaning that you have to prove to the judge/jury in court that you were insane, i.e., that you were functionally incapable of distinguishing right from wrong at the moment you committed the crime. This is because a mens rea, or guilty mind, is necessary to establish guilt and thus criminal culpability, in addition to the actus reus or the criminal deed itself; you have to be in a state where you know, or could/should have known, not to do what you did. Proving a negative, especially when it comes to this, is extremely difficult. You will have to undergo an extensive psychiatric evaluation by a psychiatrist and they have to come to the very strong conclusion that you were well and truly out of your mind at the time of the commission of the crime. Otherwise, just the evidence that you did the crime is enough to establish guilt. Oh, and if you somehow successfully plead insanity, you will spend quite possibly the rest of your life in a mental institution instead of prison, which isn't much better. And yes, it's good to remember that police procedurals are to criminal justice what Hackers (1995) is to hacking: a lot of stuff is distorted to make good cinema/television. In the UK, judges on cop shows use gavels (that is strictly an American custom); how can we expect them to get the details of rare events like an insanity defense right?

popalchemist 2y ago

Defining mental illness in terms of deviance from law is actually an insane idea. Were the opponents to Nazis mentally ill, simply because they did not adhere to Nazi law? Think about the implications.

naasking 2y ago

> Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. No, I think mental illness should be defined relative to a person's capacity to change behaviour volitionally or in response to feedback signals, like a scolding or rehab or imprisonment. People who are mentally ill do not respond to feedback signals like this, they have little volition over their behaviours without significant pharmaceutical or other interventions first. It's like asking someone with Tourette's to stop having verbal tics as compared to someone who just likes swearing. There's a fundamental difference in volitional control and responsiveness to feedback.

faeriechangling 2y ago
So is being gay, transgender, an outspoken women, or left-handed mental illness since such people do not, by all appearance and objective measures, have the capacity to change their behaviours volitionally without for instance chemically castrating gay men or lobotomising women? There's two big things wrong with this definition. First is that it makes non-compliance a pathology and assumes society is right and the patient is wrong. Second is that pays zero heed to ethics and what is actually good for the supposedly mentally ill person, it just labels them mentally ill if they don't do what people want without thinking of if that's best for them. Of course, that's not THAT different from how mental disorders are defined in practice.
- naasking 2y ago
  > First is that it makes non-compliance a pathology and assumes society is right and the patient is wrong. My post said absolutely nothing about society or non-compliance, it spoke only about whether the patient can respond volitionally. Gay people absolutely can choose not have gay sex, it's just wrong to expect that. Outspoken women absolutely can choose to be silent, it's just wrong to expect that. Left handed people absolutely can choose to write with their non-dominant hand, it's just wrong to expect that. There is clear volitional control here. I made this very clear with the example of Tourettes vs. someone who just likes to swear. The person with Tourettes cannot simply choose to not have verbal tics and then enact that choice, but the person who just likes swearing absolutely can. It's just a physical impossibility to regulate behaviour based on feedback or internal motivations. > Second is that pays zero heed to ethics and what is actually good for the supposedly mentally ill person, it just labels them mentally ill if they don't do what people want without thinking of if that's best for them. I have no idea what you mean. There's nothing unethical about pointing out that the mentally ill have a distinct behaviour in that they do not respond to specific kinds of feedback. It is in fact the starting point for ethical treatment of mental illness.

rustcleaner 2y ago

>But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Yes, and it makes punishment in the manners we do it [US] frankly unconsciable for being torturous. What else do you call forcing a man to sit in a concrete and iron box for ten years involuntarily, if he would willingly expatriate instead? Imprisonment should become optional with expatriation. It is assinine that we take away passports from criminals; you should be wanting them to depart for good! Throwing a man in a box completely involuntarily and without any reachable alternative recourse except to wait it out, in lieu of just seizing all assets and kicking them out permanently if they so choose as the prison-alternative, is assuaging what internet trolls would call... your booty-blastedness for him giving you a really bad time.

worthless-trash 2y ago
This will be interpreted as. "Come to the US, commit crimes until you get caught, then leave instead of jail time". This is not a deterrant.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  Does deterrance actually work? Show me someone in the US who doesn't know about jails. Also a secure border was assumed but not stated. This presumes social groups want to be exclusive and are choosey of membership.
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    > Does deterrance actually work? Show me someone in the US who doesn't know about jails. I don't know how to address this disconnection in logic. Do you assume that knowledge of a deterrent should create zero crimes ? You are right though, maybe deterrence doesn't work and summary execution will be the only long term solution to prevent any possible reoffending. I for one welcome Judge Dredd-like overlords.