That’s why I’m wondering if it’s a matter of semantics, and we’re not actually disagreeing on much. To me “mental illness” is the term for a biological illness that would have been caused in the person by genes. And “disorder” to me is in the psych context is a term for psychological dysfunction caused by external factors, the whole nature vs nurture thing.
However there is plenty of overlap, such as genetic vulnerability to developing psychological conditions, such as is seen in some research on Borderline PD, and then also how psychological experiences can change the brain, such as is seen in research on PTSD.
If I changed my definition of “mental illness” to mean any symptoms that are originating in the brain organ, then everything including the effects of trauma would be included.
I know I’m probably projecting a lot in this conversation, because one of the reasons I feel so strongly about having Borderline PD is because I feel like it would be an acknowledgement that the way I was treated impacted my brain/psychology.
So @firemonkey almost seems like an inversion of that, as though by considering trauma from bullying for example, to be an illness in the same ballpark as clinical depression, is stemmed from a desire to be immune to the way people treat him.
So yeah lots of projecting probably. I’ve been up all night and am on my first day off of Latuda. Hopefully I have made at least a little sense in this thread lol.
I don’t discount the genetic factor. I think that varying degrees of a genetic predisposition and environmental/social triggers are needed.
While psychosis/schizophrenia can run in families there are also instances of those with it who have no family history.
I have no family history of psychosis beyond a couple of distant maternal relatives that were odd and might or might not have been seen as psychotic if alive today.
I have supposedly(according to pdocs) experienced psychosis.
My brother at 56 was diagnosed with HIV related psychosis. A confounding factor was cannabis(mainly) which had made him increasingly paranoid over the years.
Did the HIV by itself trigger psychosis or is it that gene changes made us prone to psychosis when our parents and sister were not.
You know you can have both sza and borderline right? It doesn’t have to be one or the other… I’m sensing I’ve told you this already. And borderline can be dealt with in therapy. Also, you’re putting the carriage in front of the horses (as they say in my country, meaning your going ahead of yourself), let your pdoc do her job, she knows what she’s doing. You can protest that you don’t have it, but then you will protest that you do, because you just like to protest.
