Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Imaginary friends are quite common among children, and there are processes in some mental wellness practices that invoke imaginary friends.
One of them is the wise mind in Dialectic Behavior Therapy, in which one taps into their adulting conscience (related to the adult in transactional analysis).
If a patient struggles directly invoking the wise mind, they can invoke a fiction, similar to the Christian tradition of WWJD A patient struggling with a home management problem might imagine asking Albert Einstein for advice, and then imagine how Einstein might respond. (Substitute anyone, including darker archetypes: Satan, Darth Vader, Joan Collins, Barbara Bush...)
Given some people who do believe in spiritual or supernatural elements might get the same effect from talking to God, or channeling spirits, they can get the same benefit even if their beliefs can be inconsistent either with modern science, or with their own ministries (who want their parishioners to go to them for direction).
So, no, regardless of whether or not delusions, misinformation or self-deceptions are involved, imaginary friends are not intrinsically dysfunctional or a sign of mental illness.
You are comparing a mental exercise to a belief in an alternate reality. These are not the same. I don't support making excuses for people that lack fundamental logic skills.
I'm totally with you and I get it, and the previous commenter could have written in a kinder tone, but
I don't think therapists usually encourage their patients to claim they actually got the advice from Einstein or Darth Vader or whomever. And I can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant "adults" rather than "humans" when they said people.
Firstly, mental disorders aren't determined by cognitive positions or even behavior. I get that culture in the 2020s still likes to regard mental illness as something worthy of derision or contempt, but it's kinda like shitting on someone for being blind or deaf, and in the meantime, mental illness has real definitions beyond beliefs you don't like.
In the psychiatric sector, mental illness is defined when a given compulsion causes a living dysfunction. If I secretly believed the moon was made of green cheese, while that might be regarded as a provably counterfactual belief, I could hold it my entire life without it once impeding my life. So as much as you can disagree with religious beliefs, or disparage religious identity, equating it with clinical madness not only is inaccurate and ableist, but conflating religious hate movements with people who suffer from mental illness is also an insult to people suffer from mental illness. By far, those of us with diagnoses are actually trying to manage our madness, and be functional, moral people.
That said, having counterfactual beliefs is super common (let alone an internal model of nature that has few embarrassments -- you'd be hard pressed to find someone with a near-perfect internal model). When we talk about mental illness, the psych sector considers what is typical, and counterfactual beliefs are extremely typical, hence the reason newspapers and news sites still have horoscopes.
In fact, human beings contend with a wide range of cognitive and sensory biases that inform how they perceive the world in ways that do not reflect reality. I am confident even you, personally, struggle to grasp the actual breadth or age of the universe, and our place in it. We all do.
And that said, my own path to naturalism involved some not small existential crises and confrontation with not only my mortality but the infinitesimal breadth of my significance. We are tiny and brief, and I will forgive anyone who is not ready to confront how small and alone we are. (Or for that matter, how deterministic the path we carve through time.)
So, you know, you are free to do what you want, but I'm going to think it's a dick move to shit on people for their illusions, especially in a world like ours in which nature and society both teem with life suffering under parasitism.
When it comes to the fellow whose post you're attempting to reframe, I'm done with him. He'll figure things out in his own time -- or not, but I assume he will gain no useful ground through me. And I do understand that religious ministries -- speaking of parasitism -- manipulate people by the tens of millions to their detriment, causing a lot of preventable suffering. But that's something we have to change at the sociological level, not at the psychological. It's about humans having exploitable biases, not about a given person having a character failing by which they discard rationality.