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Hi everyone,

There are so many interesting thoughts I don't know where to begin! I think the point that Yona and Martin bring up, which the Supplement to the Surgeon General's report also discussed, that whether or not an individual believes that they themselves have a mental illness, plays an interesting role in the diagnosis itself. If a person, by medical standards, has a mental illness, but they themselves are happy and don't feel that their mental health is compromised, do they still have a mental illness? How do the experiential and biological definitions of "mental illness" weigh against each other when they give opposing conclusions? Looking back on my notes from class, I remember being struck by our discussion of culture and its effect on mental health, and wondering how we could possibly come up with a definition of mental health that would work for truly different cultural groups. Certainly some mental illnesses walk the line between mental and physical illness more than others, and thus might be more universally diagnosable, but others seem like they could be entirely culturally dependent. If a certain cultural group doesn't involve elements that bring a certain mental illness to the forefront - perhaps a more laid back society wouldn't recognize ADD as a problem - or even really have opportunity to notice it, is it a mental illness at all? If an entire culture is made up of people who by another culture's standards would be suffering from a mental illness, are they mentally ill? If there are mental illnesses that are entirely experientially defined based on a lack of ability to fit in with a cultural norm, perhaps such a mental illness should be categorized as something entirely different from one with more clear biological causes (schizophrenia, depression, for example).

Similarly, I really like the idea posed in the philosophy paper abstract above that health is necessarily going to be based on a person's own conception of what is "good", and in the case of mental health, what is "happiness" or "normalcy". As Ljones (sorry I'm not sure of your first name!) posted above, we are all a combination of nature and nurture - of our "biological programming" and the cultural norms that have shaped our conceptions of "good" and "happy". Trying to force a purely biological definition on something that is in large part defined by cultural norms seems almost pointless past a certain point! The doctors and the anthropologists need to have a conference.