/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12305558

anxiety disorder is useful if you absolutely don'w want to get eaten by a bear.

depression is trickier, in your cavemen age you didn't have that many chances to lose and keep losing like you have today, so it's pretty different.

alcoholism wasn't even an issue because alcohol hasn't been cheap for a long time

drug use was probably for ritualistic issues

bipolar means you were just seen as a dick

schizophrenic people were great shamans since they always heard the voices of the gods/deads

eating disorder, yeah right, all those supermarkets in 2000 BC.

>>12305558
Heritable mental illnesses clearly haven't caused enough of a problem to hinder the reproduction of those afflicted by them. However, it's worth noting that a lot of mental illness is the result of environmental factors rather than genetic. The relative ease of life in industrialized societies seems to increase the prevalence of depression and anxiety.

Also, many things that would be considered personality quirks (mild depression/anxiety, high functioning autism/Asperger's, ADHD) 100 years ago are now classified as illnesses, further raising the perceived number of mentally ill people.

>>12305576
>many things that would be considered personality quirks (mild depression/anxiety, high functioning autism/Asperger's, ADHD) 100 years ago are now classified as illnesses, further raising the perceived number of mentally ill people.

This. Schizophrenia and many other mental disorders were framed in the context of mysticism before industrialization. It was only recently that humans fully embraced the idea of rational explanations toward mental phenomena.

>>12305558
What about the numbers are so high because people get paid for diagnosing it, and numbers are fiction and you wouldn't tell persons with those disorders apart from others without psychiaters getting paycheck, and deepining symptoms by medication.

>>12305558
Mental illnesses are common because sometimes the brain functions in a way that doesn't work all that right.

It is also important to note that the only reason they're identified as a mental illness is because the person had a major hinderance in modern society.

Back in the day, you barely survived, sought stimulation, and lived in very small groups. Nowadays, you're surrounded by things you want, are constantly stimulated, and your social group is now unlimited.

It's also important to note that due to better, or perhaps more specific, testing, professionals are able to pinpoint who actually has a mental illness. A lot of mental illness has actually been around but it was covered up through substance usage or people knew that the person was off but didn't deem them as "mentally ill". The only people back in the day that were deemed mentally ill were people who couldn't function at all. Lots of psychotic disorders fall under this umbrella.

Nowadays, someone could be deemed mentally ill because they get really anxious at such an amount that it impedes with their life. Back in the day, they would probably just drink some liquid courage and be alcoholics.

>>12305568
You're retarded and all of what you said is conjecture. Anxiety disorder is not useful if you don't want to get eaten by a bear, anxiety is useful. The disorder is when you experience those same emotions and chemicals when there is no bear around and you freak out for no reason

>>12305558
Because we live in a society

>>12305943

that's because we live in a society which makes us feel like there's bears everwhere and they keep chasing you even longer than 30 minutes, you uneducated baboon.
the difference between a disorder or not is the appropriateness to a cultural mediated average functioning person, meaning that the concept of "appropriateness" itself is vague and can change in time and even by culture and nationality.
For fuck's sake there's even culture specific psychological conditions.
Anxiety disorder is defined when the anxiety you percieve influences your "normal" functioning in a society, it has fuck all to do with with absolute neurotransmitters and everything to do with environment and percieved risk.
People who suffer from anxiety disorder are perfectly understandable, the mistery is why not everybody suffers from anxiety constantly considering the wildly blind risks we take everyday.

It's like people being afraid of an elevator, the true question is why shouldn't you be afraid to get into a steel coffin which hangs by a steel thread whose safety and integrity has been checked by another human which is stupid as you are and you are dangling over certain death hoping that every single part of that machine keeps functioning when it needs to.
And the only answer you can have is a probability estimate of how frequent is a catastrophic equipment failure, too bad your individual experience is not reconciliable with statistics since you can't live multiple lives and if you die that's it.
So you do, as most humans do, a marvelous operation of mental gymnastic which is to ignore every rational consideration regardin pretty much everything and constantly bullshit yourself into thinking "why should anything bad happen anyway".
And that's what you mean when people "don't suffer from an anxiety disorder".

>>12305968
>that's because we live in a society

>>12305968
>that's because we live in a society which makes us feel like there's bears everwhere and they keep chasing you even longer than 30 minutes
>Where did i obtain this theory? My asshole of course!
I don't care what broad general theory about something you haven't looked into is, literally everything you write sounds like someone who's heard of the word anxiety and has never looked at any literature or talked to anyone with it so you can make up whatever you want about "oh my god why doesn't everyone have le anxiety" but it's retarded drivel most likely just based on what you've read on this board about it

>>12306036

look, being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder is only the start, the issue is understanding the psychodynamics and then trying to fix it.
You can't approach it with a pure farmacological approach because it just won't work, and it's the same with every psychological disorder.
Now, since I've never linked any literature an neither did you, the discussion is pretty sterile but what do you expect on this site?
Take it for whatever it is.

>>12306058
You don't have to link any literature for me to believe you, I just KNOW that you haven't read any of it because of these crazy assumptions and obseletes you're making, like someone who's never studied physics talking about the main elements being fire, water earth and air. It just sounds retarded when there is so much available information out there for you to read about anxiety before you start spouting off drivel

>>12305558
Because humans are not evolved to take in negative news every minute of waking hour. This is what our social media/news does to modern humans now. Good portion of people reading hourly news/checking social media is likely to be suffering from PTSD, literally due to the amount of negative exposure they recieve daily. This is why we get heightened shit like "trigger warnings"/"racist" calls for every little thing. Most humans can't adapt to modern life fast enough and most humans don't understand what is making them act like deranged.

a bit /his/ but mental illnesses were invented only about 200 and classified 100 years ago. e.g. schizophrenic psychosis was seen as a positive thing, non severe anxiety or depression was just a character trait, etc

See Foucault and other anti-psychiatry movement