I take atypical antipsychotics (quetiapine to be exact), the first couple of weeks is horrible, after that it's not _that_ bad, but you definitely don't want to take them if you can possibly avoid it.

So the fact that there's discrimination in other countries makes it OK?

The point that I was attempting to convey was that tolerance needs to be a part of both cultures. We as westerners cannot be reasonably expected to treat Islamic culture as equal to Western culture if we treat it with 'kid gloves', or make meaningless accommodations in the name of political correctness.

I am not afraid to say that I have a relatively low opinion of the current Islamic culture. Sure it may have been great 1000 years ago, but with the executions for homosexuality, stoning in Pakistan/Afghanistan, and murder of westerners [Theo van Gogh et al] not to mention the horrible treatment of women, it honestly just pisses me off. Mabey in some parts of majority-Muslim nations it isn't that bad after all, but it doesn't really matter as I am unlikely to have much contact with strict Muslims in the first place.

But the person who wrote this article was presumably playing the part of an American Muslim, so what do other countries have to do with this at all? It's OK to be prejudice against Muslims from your own country because some Muslims in other countries aren't nice people?

Did you even read my comment?

It has everything to do with Islam and Islamic culture, which are two different things, both of which have different presences around the world.

For the record, I don't like Islamic culture. I don't judge individual people, but I believe that a religion that was founded by a pedophile [aisha] and murderer [jews and others] should not have any influence on the world today. The best way to get rid of Islam is to stop believing in it, but oddly enough Muslims have a habit of stoning apostates.

I'd be astounded to actually see a case of an honour killing which was caused by fleeting eye contact, none of the ones in that article are, why not just treat them the same as you would anyone else?

Don't you think that your thinking that she might be killed for you looking at her is prejudicial against Muslim men? Seems offensive to me if you won't look at someone because you assume a man will kill her for it...

Do you not look at all women because they might have insanely jealous boyfriends who will then kill them for that too, hey it's technically possible right, so you should err on the side of caution?

I tend not to. Yes some may have insanely jealous boyfriends, but it's harder to tell in the absence of visual clues. Typical muslim garb is a signal which does tend to stand out in some circles, and that's one of the things I infer.

No, I don't think every time I look at a woman in a hijab she will be killed, but it does come in to the back of my mind more often than it does when seeing other women in local shops/stores/malls.

Is it prejudicial, as in pre-judging? Yes. People wearing certain types of garb send out signals intended to portray specific meaning. Sometimes extra meanings they didn't intend are also inferred.

Maybe it's useful because you might hire staff or have co-workers who happen to have a mental illness and being informed about it is a good thing?

It can be treated if you're in the lucky few who happen to have medication work for them and are able to tolerate the side effects (glad I fall into this category). Treatment's by no means guaranteed to work.

Isn't that sort of information confidential between the counsellor and the patient? Even if it's not legally protected I don't think many counsellors would be happy telling you that sort of thing

You can always ask for copies of the bill.

They don't need to know the original password, they first check if your supplied password (which can be greater than 16 characters) when hashed matches the hash they have in the database currently, then if it does and it's greater than 16 characters truncate the length of the password you supplied to 16 and then hash that and update the database with it.

I can't really tell if your position is "there's no such thing as mental illness" or that you just think that the current system gives anyone who wants one a label they can use (though to be honest I haven't met a psychiatrist yet who used the DSM as a reference for diagnostics). Care to elaborate?

what do they use then? intuition?

a bit of both maybe, everything around mental illness and disorders is full of blind spots.

There's big money involved, there's big holes in the reasonings, history shows it's been misguided/abused more than once... how can it be trusted?

a lot of living beings in the world have brains, they've come a long way of evolution to get to where they are here...how come all of a sudden, ours started breaking in every possible way since like 20 years ago? and it also so complex that although it sounds like bullshit it's not and you introduce brain-shrinking toxins(that brains would never produce themselves) to get them fixed.

There's too much bs smell IMO

It's not like the DSM is the be all and end all of psychiatric diagnosing, they spend years (just like any other doctor) at university and in residency etc.

None of this has happened in the last 20 years really, before then people with serious mental illnesses were living on the streets, in prison (well, many still are in these two categories) and in psychiatric institutions (that have since be deinstitutionalised), away from the general populace.

Maybe what you're seeing is that instead of being hidden away and falling through the cracks in society people are now actually able to receive treatment and (a lot of the time) able to function properly in society, so it seems like mental illness is more prevalent.

Yeah the treatment sucks (and from what I've heard it's ridiculously expensive, though I'm in the UK so that's not really an issue), but it's very rare for people to actually be forced to take it, so I think it's safe to say that it's a net gain for a lot of people.

To be honest I think it's pretty unfair on a massive segment of society (on both sides of the fence) for you to dismiss them based on what seem to be fairly weak arguments.

Maybe the problem's that for a lot of mentally ill people you can't actually see what's wrong (compared to a physical ailment), so unless you see/experience it for yourself it's hard to be convinced that it's real?

As a schizophrenic myself (fine now with medication) it makes me sad when I see comments like this. The stigma is immense, I've yet to tell someone I know without being treated completely differently by them.

Edit (just thought I'd expand a bit on the comment): Schizophrenia's a ridiculously wide disease, if you ever look at the symptom list in the DSM you'll see just how many symptoms are possible, personally I spent 2 years doing essentially nothing (i.e barely any social contact, no programming etc.) and only hallucinated a few times. The problem with treating schizophrenia's mainly the drugs that can help (antipsychotics) are a) expensive and b) really hard to comply with due to the side effects (personally I can easily sleep 12 hours a day due to mine and you're always at risk for tardive dyskinesia).

It'd be nice to live in a world where having a mental illness wasn't seen by a lot of people as a personal failing of some kind, but we're nowhere near there yet.

I bet you get that question a lot, but I just read http://lesswrong.com/lw/e25/bayes_for_schizophrenics_reasoni... and was wondering if it was possible for a schizophrenic to tell whether he is hallucinating. Also, would be really nice to hear your thoughts on that article. Thanks!

My worst hallucination was when I thought people were breaking into the house I was living in at the time. For me at least there was absolutely no difference between the people I was seeing who weren't there and the police I called because I thought people were breaking in. Eventually the police ended up essentially walking me around my house proving to me there was no one there and even then I was still "making up" lamer and lamer pieces of evidence for the break in in my mind.

I told them several times I wasn't hallucinating and I think they were pretty freaked out about the whole thing until they found my meds and realised I wasn't high or abusing some other drugs.

Retrospectively it's pretty easy to see the point where I started seeing things but at the time (at least for me) it was a really slow and insidious process.

I read the article but luckily for me I was never really delusional for very long at all, aside from a couple of incidents like the one above I wasn't really hit by the hallucination/delusional side of schizophrenia so I'm not really qualified to talk about what it's like but I've read before that (sort of like bipolar patients) a lot of schizophrenia patients simply refuse to believe anything's wrong at all, which is one of the big challenges when trying to gain medication compliance.