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I've had this same thought for a while now. Mental illness (and I am not using this term judgmentally) is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality: for example, you're under the impression that you're fat when in reality you're nigh emaciated.

If that's a correct characterization, is depression really a mental illness? If people perceive their lives to be dreadful, whereas in reality their lives are dreadful, where does the misconception come in?

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This is too simple. A lot of depressed people know that the world is not as bad as they feel but they still feel bad. People with OCD know that the world won’t go under if they don’t count the number of traffic lights in the way home but the emotion is still there.

Only people with hardcore mental illness don’t even know that their perception of the world is not correct. Most people know but still can’t do anything about it.

I think actually, knowing your perception of the world is not correct is the really hard part, because then you can’t just go through your day comfortably, you have a constant mental struggle against a faulty autopilot.

Imagine driving a car with misaligned steering that pulls sharply to one side. You could do it, but it would get tiring, and it would feel dangerous to go on a long road trip because if you lost focus for a minute you could crash.

My own experience with mental health issues is that it feels about like that.

Sorry, but that's a pretty terrible definition of mental illness. Mental illness can be any case where your mind has fallen into a pattern of being chronically unhelpful to you; this can mean it doesn't report on reality correctly, or that it sends incorrect (or merely destructive) emotional signals, or whatever else.

That said, this is one of the reasons I like to think of it as "mental health" rather than "mental illness". It's more like weight/nutrition, where a person doesn't simply have a problem or not have a problem; it's a sliding-scale. Everyone's mind benefits from care, the degree of one's challenges just varies based on personal history and genetics.

There’s actually some evidence that depressed people perceive the world more accurately:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x9j3k/depressed-people-s...

Happiness might be more a form of delusion, albeit a productive and even necessary one.

It's been my experience that the human psyche fundamentally needs a certain amount of self-delusion (or at least suspension of disbelief) to be able to function. Any hopes or dreams or beliefs are in some sense disconnected from reality, but are also extremely necessary. We must be able to step outside of reality, without losing track of it.

Aren't both of those examples special case of my definition though? "[i]t doesn't report on reality correctly, or [...] it sends [...] incorrect signals."

But what if the mind is reporting on reality correctly, and the signals it's sending are correct, it's just that we do not like them very much?

Can a signal be entirely correct, but destructive? If so, it just seems like a special case of the expression "the truth hurts". It's not my mind which is defect by informing me of the present state of affairs, it's the present state of affairs which are regrettable.

> Mental illness... is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality

I don’t think that’s correct. I’ve had depression and anxiety my entire life, and I’m well aware that sometimes things aren’t as awful as my mind makes them out to be (and sometimes they are), but the conflict with reality isn’t what fuels my despair and angst. If it were then I think it would be a lot easier for people to just think or reason their way out of the “pit of despair” that is depression.

> If that's a correct characterization, is depression really a mental illness?

I don’t think it’s useful or helpful to try to define our way out of the problem. Changing the definition of a thing doesn’t really help the people who are suffering and trying to just get out of bed in the morning.

Depression is much more than perceiving your life as being dreadful.

> Mental illness (and I am not using this term judgmentally) is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality

This definition is not even remotely adequate.

That's psychosis, i.e. when perceptions don't correspond to reality. Mental illness is a much larger concept than just psychosis.

Okay, so what is hearing voices that aren’t there?

It’s an organic psychological phenomenon that is actually very socially and politically determined in how it is experienced:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mad-in-america/20100...

The incongruity comes from the collective ideological demands of Capitalist societies (that they are sustainable, don’t lead to ecological collapse, endless war, devolve into fascism in their periodic crises, etc) and the lived experience that, yes, they do actually do all of the things their ideology denies.

As a kind of society-wide psychological complex, Capitalism can’t function without massive amounts of this denial and projection. But the threadbare nature of those defenses is everyday more exposed, and inwardly directed, especially following the collapse of the USSR (which existed in a similar, but differently conjugated state).

Mental illness has nothing to do with political systems. It exists in all systems.

Existing in all systems is not the same as it having nothing to do with political systems - especially political systems that occupy all of daily life, as they do. There is no aspect of urban daily life that is free from the compulsion to use one's time to make money, either to survive or accumulate, and nobody - neither the capitalist nor the worker - is free from that concern.

What political system would avoid mental illness?

You’re continuing to elide both my and the parent’s point not that any political systems are free of mental illness, but that they result in different rates, experiences, and forms of instantiation.

This isn’t even contested in the psychological literature. For example, go read about how schizophrenia manifests and is experienced in the developing vs. developed world. Or how depression and rates of suicide increase in the wake of economic crises.

Monarchy with a perfectly just King and Court (only half serious).

I am sure even there people would find ways to be unhappy. Same for perfect communism. A lot of people would be happy but then you also would have people who think hey are better and would try to get ahead of others.

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