Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-5825217-20131020030042/@comment-6761334-20131119002752

A-Lord-Over-Birds wrote: Danatblair wrote: The only area I'd disagree with is splitting mental illness into smaller categories. Mental illness can be temporary or permanent, so just because soemthing is fleeting would not prevent it from qualifying. Also, pastas already have a fairly hollywood understanding of mental illness. It's all serial killers, descents into madness, and unreliable narrators anyway.

While I would love for more accuracy and less sensatoinalism in regards to Mentall Illness and its' portrayls in the media, I don't think seperating it out into a billion different type of mental illness will do anything but create more abused and misapplied mental illness categories as the lay person can't generally tell the difference or knows what a particular disease actually is. While I get where you're coming from, the argument against this is:

1) Mental Illness is already misapplied as a sort of blanket category for anything remotely involving the mind. Splitting it up might help remedy that, because hallucinations brought on by entities or drugs are not mental illness (unless the entity itself is the product of a delusion, in which case it would go under Delusions AND Hallucinations).

2) Not all mental illnesses are serial killers, descents into madness, and unreliable narrators. I know people with mental illnesses, does that make them psychopathic murderers?

But I digress. Mental illness pastas may not always encompass serial killers and the like. Perhaps they're about someone who works at an asylum or has a mild mental illness that contributes to elements of the story.

Anyway, this thread is tentative, so if something sounds good in theory but doesn't work out when put into practise, it can always be retracted and modified. At least on the wiki.

I actually argued point 2 in what I said. My point is that writers have turned mental illness as a trope into a very narrow definition. I am against splintering it into a buch of definitions because people are already unable to grasp what mental illness is. Giving a bunch of inexperience writers a dozen different categories to fail to understand is not better then there being a single category that is used as a blanket for all mental illness. Writers already are about as sensitive to the concerns  of any one suffering a mental illness or disability as an elpahant is to an ant hill. The bulk of the writers making creepy pastas are not going to actaully grasp the nuances between different medical diagnosis. Heck, there are people still arguing that it's okay to call people "retarded" in chat. I don't see the need to present them with the ability to offend each group individually. I think what is actually unworkable, but sounds good in theory, is trying to come up with subheading for mental illness. Are we going to try to sort every story into an accurate diagnostic heading? That sounds like minefield waiting to happen.