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Arjuna Nagendran

Doctor,

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What experiences have made you more comfortable with mental health disorders?

What things make you fearful of mental health disorders? And what experiences have made you more comfortable with it?

In the quest to dispell stigma, how can we help our society grow out of its fear?

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Topics: Education. society Psychiatry mental health society stigma
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  • Grant Sutton

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    Oct 15 2012: Just because a person brain operates differently does not mean they have a disorder. Labeling these different in the negative undermines the power of whatever brought us to this point, and while it's human nature to look for ways we are better than our fellow man time and time again when we look in history the one we are trying to get rid of has incredible value. I wish we had better ways to diagnose and support healthy minds rather than looking for cures for phantoms aliments.
    I think the people in the mental health community should have to show that harm is happening before suggesting it is a disorder. Their reward though tends to favor them finding something wrong to treat. Often like most humans when they see that they focus on that and not the whole individual that it came from. This is like trying to draw a map of the world by only focusing on one tiny room inside it. That too me sounds unhealthy.
    I do believe there are mental disorders that need treatment and study, my friend that tried to cut a microchip from his nose needed help, but i think that we need to define healthy differences between brains and brain patterns as well. Just because there a different pattern doesn't make it inferior. Lots of our art, music, and literature was written or created by people who had different patterns in their brain than we do, and I don't want to find a Soma pill for that.

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