If anyone is interested in actually being part of a support group of sorts, let me know- if enough people are interested, I'll see if I can find a good way to do it.

Just getting rid of stuff is one way to stop a trigger. Building up a way to deal with it is another. Like, you could come up with a plan for your finances, and practice bringing up your finances and saying that plan, so you build another association with your finances that isn't a loop of anxious thoughts. Like role-play therapy, where you plan out and practice your reactions to someone saying something before hand.

I am assuming a heluvalot about you with that advice though, sorry if that doesn't even make sense.

It's not like I don't give out any internet based advice.

In this thread I did make a point to recommend gratitude journaling. It's good even if you don't do it in a group. I haven't heard from anyone messing themselves up with gratitude journaling.

Another recommendation would be meditating. Meditating is more risky. It makes suppressed emotions come up and you have to deal with them. I have no way of judging to what extend a person like you will handle that, because I don't know much about you. I know that on average meditating is great, but it's not without risks.

The standard advice would be to find a good local meditation teacher but I can't say anything about the quality of your local teachers.

I don't think it's impossible to give good advice via skype in principle but it's not a skill in which I'm well trained.

Anxiety transcends a normal thing and enters mental illness when it becomes pervasive and unreasonable.

If the thought of asking out a woman for a date raises anxiety in me I don't care at all whether or not that's "reasonable" or "normal". It's a trigger that I don't want to have regardless of whether it's classified as a mental illness.

Maybe "mental illness" is a bad frame, but at the moment, do we really have another to work with?

Yes. I have multiple different one's.

In Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy an answer might be: "You have problems with anxiety and worry about what you said last year because you constantly feel that you have to prove that you exist. If you would have a strong feeling of existence, your issues with anxiety would simply clear."

In NLP it might be: "There are a bunch of situation where you are ineffective triggers that produce unproductive emotions. Let's do the Fast Phobia Cure on all of them and get done with the problem."

Lefkoe Method would say: "You might have 40 limiting beliefs that produce that problem like "I'm not lovable", let's go and clear those beliefs by spending 30 minutes on each of them with the Lefkoe Method."

I haven't been at a CFAR workshop so I don't know their exact answer, but part of it seems to be: "Let's get clear about how our emotional desires differ from our intellectual one's and train comfort zone extension."

That's no complete list.

But when we go back to how to discuss the issue on LW, framing the issue as being around anxiety is likely more productive than framing it as being about mental illnesses in general.

It's hard to give good advice on the topic of mental illness without falling into the trap of Other-Optimizing.

I think cognitive delusions often maintain themselves by being non-falsifiable, and an explicit knowledge of epistemology might help people better use logic to compensate.

I managed to get a schizophrenic acquaintance who had anxiety-causing delusional ideas which originated in mind-body dualism to reject mind-body dualism, after carefully explaining why parsimony is a good way to distinguish between the various non-falsifiable hypotheses and how one can roughly approximate what is and is not parsimonious and why the mind instinctively gravitates to mind-body dualism even though it's not necessarily true. After I finished explaining she kind of laughed and admitted there really was no good reason for her to believe those things. I might be imagining it, but she seemed relieved as well as amused.

We unfortunately lost contact, so I'm not sure if it stuck. This is the most extreme example, but I've seen other, less extreme cases where talking people away from odd beliefs was helpful to them. It's important to be convincing in these talks, and appealing to epistemically sound reasoning (as opposed to just dismissing it as most people do) is a good way to be convincing. Healthy people can instinctively tell that a delusion is silly, but for those whose instincts aren't working properly and take delusions seriously it's important to be able to explicitly explain why it's silly.

Reminder that CBT workbooks for specific problems have been shown to be almost as effective as in person therapies and that you can just buy them on Amazon.

Depression: http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Behavioral-Workbook-Depression-Step-/dp/1608823806/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1425883773&sr=8-4&keywords=CBT+workbook

Anxiety: http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Behavioral-Workbook-Anxiety-Step-/dp/1626250154/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1425883773&sr=8-5&keywords=CBT+workbook

referral link is for Slate Star Codex if you're wondering.

May I ask a stupid question? How do people find out they are mentally ill? Obviously, I mean the not too severe cases. Let's take this GAD or tamer panic thing. During your childhood and youth you have reactions that people call "timid", "nervous", high strung" or "cowardly", depending on the situation and on them. I see four possible courses there.

A)One is you don't give a damn, you just accept it. It makes you less than happy but why would you ever expect to be happy? So you just accept some aspect of your life sucks.

There are two possible sub-courses here. As it is hard to put up with suffering in the long run A1) you can end up with self-medicating with drugs or booze A2) you become a "compensation monster", constantly climbing rocks and suchlike to show yourself and others you are not timit or not a coward.

B) You hate yourself for it, because you consider yourself screwed up and less worthy than others, but you don't realize this is something doctors may be able to fix, because you are used to people being very judgemental about this. I.e. instead of seeing someone who needs help, they see a person who is a bad and should feel bad.

C) You realize (or maybe your parents did) that it is fixable by doctors. This is obviously the best solution although A2 is doable too, but how do people get to this?

Just yesterday, I had a little shock, my wife told me that things like me being unable to dance coordinatedly, beat out a simple drum rythm, or draw beyond kindergarten level, or even to write cursive readably, is not simply "ha ha I am clumsy" thing but probably a childhood neurological, neuromotoric (or maybe ADHD) development issue and if my parents paid attention and seeked help it may have been fixable .I am still dealing with this idea that I am not simply clumsy but in a certain sense "ill".

To me the whole thing is a bit confusing. I associate illnesses with people being in bed and having fever. To understand other conditions as not screwed-upness, inadequacies, things other kids point a finger at and laugh because you are worse than them, but as medical conditions, is quite new for me.

Mayoclinic defines mental illness as such: "Mental illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions — disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behavior. Examples of mental illness include depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors." This seems to be the standard definition.

Actually, I think the "standard" definition is provided by the current DSM. The Mayo Clinic definition is way too vague and general to be of any use.

If you like, we can taboo the "mental illness" phrase and instead use something like "badly defined and illogically based thinking patterns." ... Then it becomes pretty clear that "badly defined and illogically based thinking patterns" are really common and often not as specific as biases.

Sure, but then you are defining stupid people as mentally ill. Are you willing to do that for everyone with, say, the IQ under 85?

Honestly, I can't think of a single definition of mental illness that would say it's uncommon.

Go back a hundred years, for example. Under the definitions used then, was mental illness common?

common diseased thinking patterns.

"Diseased thinking patterns" is a dangerous concept. In the Soviet Union disliking communism was a diseased thinking pattern and people were actually put into mental hospitals for that. Not long ago being attracted to people of the same sex was considered to be a diseased thinking (and feeling, and behavioral) pattern, to be treated as a mental disorder. If I want to lose weight, is that a diseased thinking pattern and who will judge that? If I feel dissatisfied with life, is that a diseased thinking pattern and what kind of a pill will I be prescribed?

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?