cacman
10 years ago

Somewhere, there is a line between life style choices and mental illness.

8trackdisco wrote:


Or maybe it's a lifestyle choice based on a mental illness?
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fiddler898
10 years ago

To some extent, anything that is not within the immediate range of "normal" becomes classified as a mental illness. Transgenders, homosexuality, bisexuality..... or to strike a little closer to home, obesity, addiction... anger....

victor809 wrote:



First, "normal" is a subjective term, subject to individual (in this case, the OP) or subject to culture. Many gay men and women are perfectly normal regardless of others' opinions of their orientation. And second, grouping together the traits that you do does a better job than I at revealing their dissimilarity, thereby suggesting it is nowhere near as simple as establishing a false continuum and then saying there should be a line somewhere.

Sorry to have been so vague.
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victor809
10 years ago

First, "normal" is a subjective term, subject to individual (in this case, the OP) or subject to culture. Many gay men and women are perfectly normal regardless of others' opinions of their orientation. And second, grouping together the traits that you do does a better job than I at revealing their dissimilarity, thereby suggesting it is nowhere near as simple as establishing a false continuum and then saying there should be a line somewhere.

Sorry to have been so vague.

fiddler898 wrote:



Ah,
I'm sorry. I should have been clearer. When I said "normal" I should have said statistical "mean" (in as much as one can create an average in sexuality)... one would state that anyone fitting within x Standard deviations of wherever the majority hits is "normal" in this case. What I'm getting at, is I don't use the normal in any cultural or moral manner, just whatever is close to the largest percentage of humans.

One could make the following statements in that case:
Absolute honesty is not normal, and possibly a mental illness (not just "honest"... but an outlier in terms of honesty)... just as pathological lying is a mental illness.

Asexuality, and nymphomania then become mental illnesses, as they bracket the norm.

Extreme piety can be classified as a mental illness, as could extreme atheism.
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