The Insanity Paradox

Is is possible to know you are going insane? Or by know you are not going insane by the fact you are questioning your sanity and are therefore (likely) sane?

Surely there very few insane people who believe they are insane, part of insanity would be believing everyone else is the problem.

edited 12th Apr '11 6:02:48 PM by MCE

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Insanity is a subjective quality determined by a value judgement of how unusual someone's actions/apparent thoughts can be before they are considered mentally incompetent. It is not really objectively quantifiable; there are certainly cases where the majority of people would dub someone insane, but the precise dividing line between sane and insane is impossible to nail down objectively.

So I guess the answer to the OP questions is: "It's all in your head."

Thats not a paradox. Some people can tell somethings off. Thats all I know.

Schizophrenia.

edited 12th Apr '11 6:00:40 PM by TheDeadMansLife

Please.

Bananas.

Why are we making one-word statements?

You can quantify schizophrenia. Objectively.

edited 12th Apr '11 6:04:10 PM by TheDeadMansLife

Please.

But could a person with schizophrenia know they have it, without being told by someone else?

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Depends. Some people can not except the truth. Some can.

Oh wait. Schizophrenia. No.

edited 12th Apr '11 6:07:53 PM by TheDeadMansLife

Please.

"A person diagnosed with schizophrenia may experience hallucinations (most reported are hearing voices), delusions (often bizarre or persecutory in nature), and disorganized thinking and speech. "

While hallucinations can be objectively identified, all the rest of that is subjective, and a person may be diagnosed as schizophrenic without hallucinations.

Admittedly, though, hallucinations are an objectively quantifiable form of mental instability that I had not considered.

So are delusions. Unless you want to go into the meta-physical nature of the universe and perhaps napoleon has returned. The last symptom is just cream on the cake, not a sole symptom.

Please.

The line between a delusion and a simple incorrect idea is subjective.

Delusion

According to wikipedia: A delusion is a belief that is either mistaken or not substantiated that is held with vehemence.[1] In psychiatry, it is defined to be a belief that is pathological (the result of an illness or illness process) and is held despite evidence to the contrary[1]. As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, dogma, stupidity, poor memory, illusion, or other effects of perception.

According to dictionary.com: Psychiatry . a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact: a paranoid delusion.

According to webster: a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary; also : the abnormal state marked by such beliefs

A delusion does not mean believing in something wrong under ignorance.

Please.

Muddying the water a bit, hallucinations are actually fairly common.

edited 12th Apr '11 7:27:14 PM by BlackHumor

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

Well 10% of the population has a mental disorder. I had a hallucination once.

Please.

It's certainly possible to know that you don't think in the same way that other people (though some of the scarier madmen I saw in documentaries in psychology class thought everyone had hallucinations like they did.)

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I don't think it is possible to be completely sane, as sanity is a scale. But maybe it is possible to be completely insane.

That and if a person was complete rational they would lack any emotional responses, which in itself would be an indication of a defect.

Then you throw things into the mix like single mothers and homosexuals used to be treated as insane and the definition gets even more blurred. I believe most people have a good reason for doing things, even if that reason only makes sense to them.

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Despite Colonel Cathcart's opinion, I think it's entirely possible for you to realize there's something wrong with your own thinking.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

"I think it's entirely possible for you to realize there's something wrong with your own thinking."

It's certainly possible for some thoughts to think that other thoughts are wrong. But how do you justify a global judgment of "not insane" from the 'same person'?? Well?

edited 13th Apr '11 4:44:54 AM by LoveHappiness

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Since sanity is the acknowledgement of reality, one's own madness can't be noticed, ipso facto.

Eric,

"Insanity" is a ridiculously imprecise term. But for example, all accounts I have read about OCD (including some on this very forum, I think) make it clear that people with OCD are perfectly aware that their compulsions are irrational and make no sense whatsoever. So this is an example of people going... well, "insane" is probably too strong a word for most cases of OCD, but you get what I mean, while being aware of it.

Or, to make a bleaker example, during the first stages of Alzheimer's Disease people can be entirely aware that their cognitive functions are steadily getting worse.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

If you think you're going insane, you're still relatively sane at that point then. Makes me kind of wonder where the crossing point is.

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Eric,

If your ability to function in society is sufficiently impaired (which depends partially upon the society you happen to be in), you tend to be "ill" enough for an official diagnosis. That's the only meaningful crossing point. "Insane" is a uselessly versatile word prone to all sorts of made-up bullshit definitions. If you want to know anything, you're better off talking about specific disorders. e.g. I've known bi-polar people who knew and acknowledged that they were bi-polar, though that was no guarantee that at any given time they would recognize when a particular behavior or thought of theirs was a product of the disorder. From what I hear, it's possible to know that the voices in one's head are caused by a disorder. You can know that your memories are distorted without knowing what your real memories were. I know the irrational bases of my phobias, my learned helplessness, and my depression, despite still being subject to them. People speaking Word Salad don't seem to understand that they're doing it, though. The same probably goes for various other thought disorder symptoms.

I think it's very possible to know you're going insane. At the very least, I'm sure that you can know that a hallucination isn't real. I know this from personal experience.

Awhile back, I had a hallucination of a dark presence in my room along with intense fear. I knew it wasn't real (shadow creatures don't really exist), but that didn't stop it from being utterly terrifying. The fact that I was unable to move added to the terror.

However, this is a non-insane example since the cause of the hallucination was sleep paralysis not a mental illness.

Since hallucinations are sometimes signs of mental illness, I'd imagine that you could be aware that you were going insane (or at the very least that you're experiencing things that aren't real). Quite frankly, I think that knowing there's something wrong with you and being powerless to do anything about it would be worse than not knowing you were insane.

I thought this thread was going to be about that thing where you can't prove you're sane to an asylum, and trying to do so makes them mark you as insane.

It should be noted that *

"insanity" isn't a medical term, but a legal one, effectively meaning "having a mental defect such that they are unable to tell right from wrong."

On hallucinations- While it's possible to know that hallucinations aren't real sometimes, others it takes a bit more than just "there's no such thing as _____". I remember last semester, after staying up all night and only sleeping for like 20 minutes before going to class, I thought we'd gotten (much needed) new shower curtains in the dorm bathroom. Even after looking away from them and looking back, they were still there. It took going back in there after I'd gotten some sleep to see that there was never anything there.

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