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Originally Posted by Tomkat
It's similar to people now claiming that obesity is an "illness" and that fat people should receive medication that inhibits their food cravings. It's ridiculous.
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I'm not sure if youre serious, but I doubt it. If fatties have a willpower problem and cant stop eating, then I dont really see the problem with them taking medication that supresses their appetite, other than that its unlikely to be a longterm solution. It makes sense; if you want to eat less but you have an appetite that makes you want to keep eating, then taking something to minimise your cravings is a fairly obvious thing to do (although unless you also work on willpower-building exercises and make lifestyle changes, youre likely to relapse into eating lots when you stop taking them). Similarly if there were a drug that eliminated people's desire to play roulette without having any side-effects (eg wiping making them highly risk-averseness dull), then it could be a good idea for gamblers who wanted to stop to take it (while also trying to build willpower at the same time etc).
But none of this means that addiction/obesity is an 'illness' - it just means that taking drugs to help change your behavior/mental state can be a useful thing to do. If I had a long-term girlfriend and she got killed a car-crash, then I'd probably feel really devastated for a few months afterwards. And its possible that in the future there could be drugs that would minimise my bad feelings without making me die on the inside, and if so, I may consider taking them. But this wouldnt mean that "being sad" was an illness - it would just be a mental state that I'd want to change via drugs. And it's silly to define an 'illness' as being "any mental state that a person wants to change", even if you modify this with some highly culture-subjective disclaimer about the 'impairment of normal function', with 'normal' being defined by reference to some collection of social norms. For instance, I think that religion has an extremely bad effect on many of its practioners lives, and there is some evidence to suggest that certain people may be more prone to fundamnetalism than others, but I doubt that 'religious belief' would ever be classed as a mental illness. And the reasons for this are entirely political, not scientific. Another example is paedophilia being classed as a 'disorder' by the
DSM while homosexuality isnt (although it used to be). There are absolutely no scientific principles at work here, its entirely politics - namely the attempt to construe a socially undesirable behavior as being an 'illness'. Even if it were shown that paedophilia and homosexuality had the exact same cause (eg genetics), were widely prevalent in animals, and so in, this would not change the classification - only one would be classed as a 'disorder'. And this can only mean that the real criteria for 'mental disorder' here is essenetially 'we dont like paedophiles, but gays are ok!'.