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Lumifer comments on Can we talk about mental illness? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Not quite. I pointed out that mental illness can be defined in different ways (DSM was not brought back on stone tablets from Mount Sinai) and these different ways will give different answers about the prevalence of mental illness.
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.
Do you think that such an "entry point" could be discovered once and for all, an unchanging truth like a constant in physics, or do you think that the answer will always depend on who's asking?
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.