Ahh. Thank you, that actually solved my confusion. I was thinking about solving the problem, not how to solve the problem. I shall have to look through my responses to other thought experiments now.
riparianx
Karma: 144
Can we talk about mental illness?
That’s sometimes a very frustrating thing to read- the “get rid of environmental triggers” thing. Speaking solely for myself here, my triggers are either really, really difficult to do anything about (financial difficulties) or a bad idea to try and get rid of (my academics). Sometimes you’re just stuck at a point in your life where you can’t fix your triggers.
I think there must be more we can do than get rid of triggers, or add more meaningful things. Maybe not as effective, but mental illness is a complex thing. Complex things have weak points. Sometimes I wonder of we’re ignoring the trees and just seeing the forest here. Mental self-help advice is so… formulaic.
That’s true, obviously, but I was looking more for “people seeking out solutions together.” There was a thread a while back where people ated akrasia fighting methods. Anxiety fighting methods could be rated the same way.
Of course. I love yoga. It’s relaxing and fun. But it’s no cure for anxiety. Yoga gives a very short “mental high” and doing it for months had no effect on the anxiety. This approach may work for a lot lf people, but as always, there’s a fringe that needs some new approaches.
Exactly. LessWrongians focus so hard on akrasia that I think they often fall into the trap of ignoring some of the causes of akrasia. If akrasia is your only serious problem, it’s really easy to find ways to help. If you have akrasia because the idea of doing your work is terrifying, LessWrong isn’t much help. So people like us get left shafted- too on the fringe for the majority of help to help, too in the middle for the rest to help.
To my frustration, the majority of the results I found were not scholarly. Then again, the only database I have access to is Google Scholar, which is utter crap for finding specific results.
If anyone has access to a decent scholarly database, I’d much appreciate a quick search. It seems possible that this idea “mental illness is highly correlated with intelligence” is just another Lucy-esque pop psych idea with little truth.
I think my point still stands- mental illness is still really common. And I know a lot of intelligent people have a mental illness. I don’t think we should ignore the skewed thinking of mental illness even if the ratio of metally ill to mentally normal people is exactly the same in average versus above average populations. The statistic I’m finding there is 1 in 5. I’m not finding anywhere that’s properly sourcing that statistic, though. The article I read sourced the older report (in 2012) but didn’t link to the newer one.
So you think the idea of a rational support group could work? I’d certainly be interested in one. Any idea how one could be set up? Meetups are a little too far and few to be really effective, I think.
Mayoclinic defines mental illness as such: “Mental illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions — disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behavior. Examples of mental illness include depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors.” This seems to be the standard definition.
The statistic of 1 in 5 that I used seems to pretty much only refer to diagnosed people with specific, named disorders. I don’t think it was including “I feel sad sometimes” as a mental illness. And considering it was only used statistics based on diagnostics, it seems pretty clear to me that a LOT of people got left out. Many people can’t get help. This also only covered the U.S.A., and statistics could vary widely in other areas of the world and based on methods.
If you like, we can taboo the “mental illness” phrase and instead use something like “badly defined and illogically based thinking patterns.” That would cover the schizophrenic fantasy/reality disconnect, anxiety, depression, etc. Then it becomes pretty clear that “badly defined and illogically based thinking patterns” are really common and often not as specific as biases. I don’t think anyone would claim mental illness is rare. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 12.6 people out of 100,000 successfully committed suicide in 2013. That means over 41,000 people died, in one year, in the U.S. alone, not counting the suicides ruled as accidents or disappearances. The AFSP says it’s not easy to get a good number for suicide attempts, but they believe based on self-harm caused hospitalizations that it easily exceeds 600,000 people a year. And that’s just the people who want to die. Eating disorders are gaining attention as one of the more common kinds. Addictive disorders are so common almost everyone knows one or more people struggling. Depression, the same. There’s a trend among students where anxiety and stress are causing serious issues.
Also, there’s a difference between commonality and normality. Urine fetishes, for instance, are considered abnormal and uncommon. BDSM would be considered normal but uncommon (though 50 Shades of Grey seems to be making it a more common thing.) The urge to eat is normal and common. Mental illness, I would say, are considered common but abnormal.
Honestly, I can’t think of a single definition of mental illness that would say it’s uncommon. I may be misinterpreting your meaning, but it kind of seems like you’re focusing on semantics when the problem here is that common diseased thinking patterns are killing, sickening, and limiting lives.
Thank you! I’ll see if I can start compiling resources like this. If you think of any more, I’d appreciate it if you could message me.
You’re right that LW is definitely not going to be a cure-all, and obviously I’m not asking for everyone on LW to band together to fight this one problem. A lot of the people here have their own projects. But I think that LW could be a great help to people who are trying to get help and can’t- either because they can’t afford mental health care, or because their health care isn’t helping. LW is a brilliant educational place that bases a lot on science and cognitive studies. I think this could easily extend to helping with mental illness.
Mental illness is a complex thing, and everyone who has one is complex in a different way. That’s why mental illness is so hard to treat. Most of the theories about what the causes are (genetics, brain chemistry, etc.) aren’t supported well enough by science to help. It can take years to find the right cocktail of drugs to fight a specific mental illness a person has, and that same cocktail won’t work for someone else with the same problem. LW sort of has a talent for sorting out bad science.
A meetup sort of requires more than one person. There aren’t even any other HPMoR readers in my area, except the person I introduced to it. I’m sure this is a problem for others, too. Being the sole LWer in your area that you can find is frustrating. I’m in central Oklahoma, and according to surveys and the like, I’m pretty much the only Oklahoman here. And I’m pretty sure this is a common plight- Berlin is a big city full of interesting people with interesting viewpoints. What if you’re from, say, Ukiah, Oregon, or Mobile, Alabama, or a place even smaller or further out of the way? Physical meetups are most effective, but kind of a luxury.
Because not everyone has the practical ability to live where they want? If it were practical to do so, I’d be living in one of the Chicago suburbs by now. But finances, family, my current academic path, the people I care about, etc. are all here. I don’t even have enough gas money to get TO Chicago. Much less enough to start a life there.
Semantics matter to the extent that everyone is on the same page. Mental illness is pretty clearly defined.
It’s awesome that you’re able to help people so well. At the same time, though, I get the feeling that you’re falling into the trap of other-optimizing. In-person support is probably a lot more helpful than internet-based support, I suspect. But when the right people aren’t around you, and you can’t go to them, having instant communication over the internet is a good second-best. Certainly over the internet there’s things you can’t do, like determine a physical state. But if people refused to use any method but the absolute best, we’d spend more time trying to find optimal strategies than anything else, and humanity would die out because we’d be too busy designing soylent to eat.
I’m aware. I do study psychology, although my personal passion is microbiology. The question Lumifer raised was if mental illness is really that common. It’s pretty hard to find any evidence saying it’s uncommon, and a LOT of evidence saying it’s common. I’m curious- from your comments here, you seem to have a differing point of view than I do. Could you explain what you think mental illness is, and your related opinions? I think that would lead to a more productive discussion.
Anxiety transcends a normal thing and enters mental illness when it becomes pervasive and unreasonable. My anxiety about having used a wrong word in a conversation I had last year is unreasonable. My constant feeling of dread is unreasonable because I’m not constantly in a situation that should inspire dread. Mental illness is really hard to define properly- there always seems to be something left out, or something that’s implied to be illness when it isn’t.
Honestly, I feel like the discussion has been derailed a bit- we’re focusing on defining a very vague thing that we don’t understand yet. I can’t offer answers at to how we should define mental illness because that’s a question that would take years to answer. And it seems like one of those questions no one will ever agree on, either. As a utilitarian, I think mental illness is a thinking pattern that causes unhappiness or harm over a period of time, or that blocks someone from being able to view the world realistically. Someone else might have a different set of values that has an entirely different set of “bad thinking patterns.”
But people ARE suffering, we know that there ARE diseased thinking patterns, and we know that people want help. Maybe “mental illness” is a bad frame, but at the moment, do we really have another to work with? I don’t think so, which is why I think that this is an important question. All of the answers we’re getting are mysterious, and thus not answers.
Yes, I want to do change work, and I think that it’s impossible to do anything if we refuse to start helping because we don’t have a good frame yet. Sometimes you have to explore a problem for a while to even start to figure it out. We have an extremely flawed and basic understanding, and saying, “well, what can we do then?” is like throwing out a hypothesis because of one inconclusive experiment.
Oh, sorry. I misunderstood.
I should hope not, that would make me seriously question a good deal about history and biblicism. That’s very true, but narrowing the problem too much causes the same kinds of problems as opening it to everyone. If you give everyone with upcoming life changes a Xanax, you’re not letting them learn how to cope. If you refuse to help someone unless their illness is ruining their life, you’re letting a lot of people live seriously suboptimal lives. We don’t have a good entry barrier for determining if someone is mentally ill or not. We simply don’t know enough to make one.
My opinion is that saying that all mental illness falls into one camp is oversimplifying. Someone who’s schizophrenic is definitely in the brain category, according to the current consensus I’ve seen. Depression is moving into that camp. Anxiety is on the fence- it can be chemical or mental.
If I were to answer “is mental illness a mind thing or a brain thing?” my answer would be “neither, both, one, or the other” because the brain is a complex thing and breaks in a lot of different ways.
Anxiety, for instance, is typically treated with temporary medication and long-term therapy. We treat it as “mostly mind, hint of brain.”
Depression is treated with long-term therapy AND medication, or just medication. It can be a product of thinking patterns, but the consensus now seems to be that it’s mostly a hormone thing.
It feels, to me, like if two groups were arguing “grass is yellow” or “grass is blue” when most grass is green but there are weird variants that are yellow or blue.
It’s possible we could. I certainly hope so. But it’s such a complex question that, at the least, we probably can’t have a simple universal answer.
Maybe I’m missing something (I’m new to Bayes), but I honestly don’t see how any of this is actually a problem. I may just be repeating Yudkowsky’s point, but… Omega is a superintelligence, who is right in every known prediction. This means, essentially, that he looks at you and decides what you’ll do, and he’s right 100 out of 100 times. So far, a perfect rate. He’s probably not going to mess up on you. If you’re not trying to look at this with CDT, the answer is obvious: take box B. Omega knows you’ll do that and you’ll get the million. It’s not about the result changing after the boxes are put down, it’s about predictions about a person.