Mental Illness Summary
There are many diagnoses for mood, anxiety & personality disorders.
Many of which are debated as to whether or not they are valid mental illnesses rather than personality traits & types.
In my own personal opinion, (see http://psychcentral.com/disorders/) I believe that there is no need for the staggering number of diagnosable “disorders” & that while these conditions are valid & do exist, I deny that they many of them are true mental sicknesses.
For example, antisocial personality disorder (AsPD) is an
inability to feel any remorse or shame along with over-inflated self-importance. I believe this is a valid illness.
Also, very similar to AsPD, narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is characterized also by an over-inflated self importance & a haught persona as well as a somewhat lack of empathy.
While I believe that AsPD is something truly wrong with the brain, people with NPD may be hard to deal with but I do not think they are menally ill.
To give a “disordered” label every personality type & pattern of anxious thoughts percieved as “abnormal” is absurd.
We begin to wonder what a normal personality is, everyone has one, some of us may just be narcissists, some of us may be paranoid, but these traits are not a sickness.
There are mental illnesses, they are widely misunderstood & treatment is typically a toss of drugs at the person & many of these illnesses have been over-diagnosed & inflated which cheapens the matter for those of us suffering from serious mental illnesses.
I do not claim to have all the answers, infact I have many questions & things I am not certain about; this is what my blog is about.
I also try to add a dash of my life into the mix while I’m at it, I’m not always the most cheerful person (but I can be! c’mon!), but I promise not to take it out on the reader.
Objective thoughts about the state of our minds.


Some mental illnesses can be treated by cognitive therapy (“arguing with your illness”) and some have to have drugs to straighten out something physical in the brain. My neighbor is a schizophrenic. Without drugs, she hears voices. Twenty-five years ago I read that studies at the University of Michigan show that some people whose Major Depression was not helped by drugs got relief from cognitive therapy. I don’t know how widely that is practiced now.