I've jokingly referred to Wikipedia moderators as autistic for, for example, diligently reversing changes to articles even when done by experts in that field. I guess I'll try to come up with something else...
Sometimes an asshole is just an asshole.
> And I don't believe there are many assholes around.
okay, I don't have any research so I'll accept this for a moment.
> Most people that act like assholes regularly are just affected by some illness, even if it's only a depression.
Neither of us have any research, so I wonder how strongly you feel that?
And maybe if you swap "depression" for "stress" I guess I'll agree.
> Nobody wants to be an asshole, believe me
Wait what? Plenty of people who don't have anything like a diagnosable mental illness enjoy being assholes just because. I guess we're disagreeing about definitions of asshole and mental illness here though.
"A serious developmental disorder that impairs the ability to communicate and interact." Would you not call that an illness?
> Neither of us have any research, so I wonder how strongly you feel that?
I feel it very strongly, as someone who has been affected by it.
> And maybe if you swap "depression" for "stress" I guess I'll agree.
I agree on that too.
> Wait what? Plenty of people who don't have anything like a diagnosable mental illness enjoy being assholes just because. I guess we're disagreeing about definitions of asshole and mental illness here though.
I don't believe in that. Someone who is a chronical asshole is probably depressed, stressed, an autist, a psychopath, etc.
First that is not an appropiated definition that would cover the whole spectrum. It is not "serious" for people with High Functional Autism (Umbrella term that covers deprecated labels as Aspergers, PDDNOS, etc).
Second, "Illness" is not the preferred term in this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease#Concepts
"(Medical condition) As it is more value-neutral than terms like disease, the term medical condition is sometimes preferred by people with health issues that they do not consider deleterious. On the other hand, by emphasizing the medical nature of the condition, this term is sometimes rejected, such as by proponents of the autism rights movement."
Serious question: what do you mean?
So you tend to see the group of people who treat mental illness also treat autism, and learning disabilities, and dementia, and etc. This is probably a result of our previous lack of knowledge and slow-changing institutional cultures.
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Autism/Pages/Autismoverview.aspx
> Autism is a lifelong developmental disability. On its own, autism is not a learning disability or a mental health problem. But some people with autism have an accompanying learning disability, learning difficulty or mental health problem.
This site provides a nice counter - that people wanting to get distance from "mental health problem" are possibly using stigmatising views of mental illness. "This isn't in his head. It's real!"
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-practice/200807/dear...
The difference with autism and mental illness is that you are born with autism. That's probably not the case for eg schizophrenia or bi-polar, although there's probably genetic factors pre-disposing people to these illnesses for many cases.
This seems a very odd way to differentiate what is and isn't a mental illness. Consider that the brain is a growing organism that is undergoing massive changes from soon after conception til near one enters middle age (28) with some minor changes after then, to define the point at birth as some baseline seems arbitrary. Take schizophrenia, while not present at birth there are some theories about how it works that would indicate it is there at birth but doesn't activate til late teen/early adult years (it has been a few years since I last read heavily into it). Or consider sexual orientations. Are you born with it? Well you aren't likely born attracted to one gender. You probably don't even have a concept of gender. But you may be born with an underlying structure that would give a really high predictability as to which you orientation you will even up having. (Note: I'm not saying any orientation is a mental illness; I'm only using it to give an example of something which you may or may not be born with depending upon how you view being born with something.)