Analysing The Perception of Illness

On my last post I discussed about depression and the reason it is not an illness. Today, I will explain why illness has become such a distorted concept to begin with.

The dictionary definition of illness is described as a condition of being unhealthy in your body or mind. More specifically a specific condition that prevents the body or mind from working normally.

The key words here are "health" and "normally".

Before we see how these two words are interpreted today let's tackle another issue; Death. There is currently a strong movement that wants to treat death as an illness. In other words, immortality becomes the "normal" state. Anything else puts the individual into the category of being ill or sick. We are all sick because we are all dying.

The world entails a myriad of factors upon which someone can be considered sick or healthy. We all go through traumatic experiences whether they are psychological or physical and each and everyone of us addresses those problems differently. What is "normal" and "healthy" is nothing more but the way the average human being reacts to a given situation. What's worse is that what we consider "normal" is the reaction of those who complain to have a problem to begin with. In other words, we only get samples from those who acknowledge that some kind of issue exists.

This is we often get wrong research about nutrition. How eggs once were good, then became bad, now they are good again. Almost every substance under different combinations can cause or prevent cancer — as we have demonstrated in a previous post. How we define illness or "abnormality" simply becomes the state upon which the individual stops complaining. In other words, if enough people agree that death is a disease then we are all considered sick, trying to escape a specific this inevitable condition.

Words are nothing but what the consensus agrees upon. They are not god given or written on stone. Language evolves and changes much like everything else. In our society, the concept of illness has become almost the same with the meaning of complaining. If someone complains about something psychologically bothersome, then that person is suffering from an illness. In their view, they are "abnormal" based on what they have observed around them. This is the main reason why I argued depression is not an illness. If everybody seems happy around you — whether those are fake facebook evidence or your own perceptions about the world — then if you are not the same, you qualify as sick. You are the doctor and the patient.

If you walk in a hospital in a disease driven hut in Guatemala and you feel a bit queasy you might not qualify as sick in that environment as you would qualify in a western hospital. The standards of "illness" are quite different based on how people create a consensus about the severity of an illness. 500 years from now an ill person might be someone who has an acne outburst since no one else would suffer from anything serious. This can also be said about the past. If we traveled 1000 years ago into the past we would probably be one of the healthiest individuals around in comparison even if we suffer from modern "diseases" such as ADHD, depression and everything else in between.

Today we have reached a point where our feelings can become diseases. This creates a rather peculiar situation since anyone at any point can claim anything — even fake a certain behaviour in order to have something go their way. It used to be the same about unexplained back pain but at least today most doctors require a x-ray's, MRI and other evidence to classify someone with that specific problem. In regards to psychology though literally anyone having an issue about life can meet a friend-on-pay (called psychologist) talk about the problem and get referral to either a psychiatrist to get medication for the behaviour or join other groups in order to cope with that behaviour and return back to what the patient (not the doctor) considers "norma". There is no way to prove if someone is faking. No way to falsify it. No way to examine it under an objective scientific scope like we do in much of the rest of medicine.

I am not convinced psychological disorders exist unless we are talking about the rare cases with an obvious brain physiological distortion that can be falsified through specific tests and not mere interviews or questionnaires. Small fMRI deviations don't cut it either since the brain is extremely plastic. Just because our culture complains about the world and just because we see people adopting behaviours of bipolarity, depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism etc it doesn't mean that these are pathological. The biggest evidence for this is non western cultures who don't seem to have as many incidents. If a given pathogen affects a human in europe it can affect another in a similar way across the globe. If we observe though a surge in "psychological illnesses" in the western world we can estimate that these instances are not at all "illnesses" but rather social phenomena where people copy the behaviour of one another.

We live in a world of a fake reality where what is "normal" is almost always extreme. Our tv shows, our social networks, our news, everything presented to us is always the extreme where that is happiness, sadness and what we consider healthy or not. Our perception is massively flawed in regards to the real world because we are ruled by artificial idealised stimuli — not real world perceptions. This is how we have come to believe that our minds are ill or will become ill at some point in the future whether that is "anxiety", "depression" or any other "psychological disease". Imagine being sure that at some point we will all get cancer. If we have come to a point where we know that an illness will affect us in the future then we seriously have to re-examine how we perceive psychological illness.