the bright green eyes / mental illness

[SteveE]

No: HPFGUIDX 188733

Steve replies:  Shoulda been bit more specific about what I meant by mental illness. I was more concerned w/ more neurotic (old school term, I know) behavior, especially addictive behaviors like alcoholism and drug abuse, gambling and sexual addictions, etc. These kinds of behavior as well as the antisocial personality disorders do often begin w/ conscious choice and then escalate thru repitition to become more serious addictive illnesses.  And of course I realize  that schizophrenia, bipolar, clinical depression and some other serious mental illnesses have chemical or other physiological causal factors.  

With some less serious kinds of depression that are more situational conscious choices factor in more predominantly.

<catlady at ...> wrote:
>
> Ceridwen discussed CoS Chapter 1 in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/188708>:
> 
> <<4. Who, or what, did you think the eyes in the bushes belonged to?>>
> 
> As best I can recall, I thought the bright green eyes in the bushes had something to do with Lily's and Harry's green eyes.
> 
> Steve Winterfell wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/188716>:
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> << It's repetitive abnormal behavior that starts out w/ conscious choices that form patterns of behaviour that can result in mental illness. >>
> 
> I hope you are referring only to when the mental illness under discussion is antisocial personality disorder, and not to when the mental illness is bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. My strictly amateur knowledge is that those mental illnesses begin in the brain, and from the brain they affect the person's perceptions. Abnormal behavior then results from abnormal perceptions, not from conscious choices to behave abnormally. 
> 
> Even further away from being a conscious choice to behave abnormally are the anecdotal reports of people who were diagnosed with some mental illness like schizophrenia and even hospitalized for it for a long time until their doctors discovered that their symptoms were actually caused by epileptic seizures, which is defined as not a "mental illness".
> 
> Also, the first-person narratives of famous successful people who suddenly came down with major depression don't sound like they consciously chose abnormal behaviors.
>