Insanity

The topic of insanity has always held a somewhat morbid fascination for me and I'm curious as to how you define someone as being insane.

I've never met anyone classified as mad, but it turns out that some non blood relatives of mine seem to have a family trait towards losing the plot in later life.

Can anyone here give me a decent definition?
Has anyone here ever been medically classed as insane?

I think if you hang around here too much you could be classified as "insane" eventually. jk

They made me see a shrink one time after a particularly violent episode. The shrink said I was perfectly sane and my action was proper considering the circumstances. So, no, I'm one of the normal people.

Ask Net Chicken. I have my doubts about him!

hehehe I don't always trust shrinks - some of them can prove anyone insane depending on the criteria they use.

The only facet of insanity I've had any familiarity with (as a care worker not personally) is with those who are psychopaths. These people have lost the ability to see others as seperate individuals. A sign of this is the depersonalisation they use - referring to others as 'it' for example.

very often, movies with mad characters are

fight club, las vegas parano...

My ex-wife works as a registered nurse in a psychiartic hospital. The standing joke there is that the only way you can tell the staff from the patients is that the staff has the keys.

But I really feel there isn't a definative answer...certainly a doctor could classify someone as being insane, but are they right? Well my grandmother was classified insane, but that was before they bothered to run test to find out she had a huge and rare tumour growing within her brain...so they had her on all sorts of medicine prior. I thought she was too..because when a grown woman wakes at 3am and boils 2 dozen eggs for NO reason...well..that's a little off the wall!

I think for the most part you aren't considered normal if you don't think like everyone else..but has society done this to us? Do we really all think 'crazy' thoughts and only few actually share or talk about them? I know there are times when we all think of something and say " That's just crazy, I need to not even think about that"...but the question is...why? Because 'others' would think you had gone over the deep end, or it's so imbedded in our heads that thinking abstractly could 'clinicly define us as nuts'...

I have studied insanity and all the classifications as well and seriously, with everything said and written..we are all nuts, some just worse then others..some cannot control themselves and some can, that's my opinion anyway..

I can look at every single person that I've ever known and find something 'crazy' about them(as far as books and doctors go) Get this..I read that if you drink coffee..your crazy or if you smoke or if you get angry when you drive..or if you have nightmares or if you don't like certain foods, the list goes on and on arc, and this was in a medical book, written by 'doctors'...

Good topic though arc and also one of my favorites..
Magestica

I thought "insanity" is when you are incapable of operating in public with others; you lose touch with reality to the point that you have to be taken out of harm's way.
You know, one step beyond that little touch of neurosis we all enjoy.

Originally posted by arc
Can anyone here give me a decent definition?
Has anyone here ever been medically classed as insane?

I think even psychiatrists would struggle to give you a decent definition of what constitutes 'insanity'...of course you could always go with their principle tool of diagnosis, being the 'light reading' *sarcasm* DSM-IV...

...but then reading through that ya can see that pretty much every person, at some point or another in their life, could well find themselves a little category in the DSM-IV.

Heck, I've worked in the field of Mental Health for over 6 years now...and wouldn't even attempt to give an all inclusive definition of 'insanity'...as too many factors enter into it...culture being a strong one (which thankfully is taken into consideration - somewhat - during assessment/diagnosis phase)...that alter the perceptions/judgements and boundaries/definitions of whatever 'mental illness' that person is supposedly deemed to have.



Peace,
ALIEN

thanks everyone for your input, much appreciated. I realise it's not an easy thing to classify and will depend on exactly whom is doing the judging.

I always believed that if you were concious your way of thinking was a little awry then you probably weren't insane, because if you were then it wouldn't occur to you that there was anything wrong with those thoughts.

Also that there can be a degree of 'normal' behaviour thrown in too. I have heard a definition of depression being 'normality carried to extremes'