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Health and Illness

20:49 / 02.03.06

The 'psychiatry' threads have resurfaced, and this seems central.

A) What do you understand by 'health'?

and

B) What do you understand by 'illness'?

Extra points for those who don't simply quote online dictionaries.

22:12 / 02.03.06

great question ganesh. i used to know the chief health officer of the area in which i live and recall a discussion on this once. basically, the concept of 'health' is actually a difficult one to describe and define and usually relates to an absence of anything you would call 'illness'. so it is a state defined by a lack of anything that impinges on it.

seems inadequate to me, then and now, but i can't find an answer [then or now!]. but i often 'feel healthy' when asked. but perhaps one can confuse 'health' with 'vitality'?

22:38 / 02.03.06

Physically (and, possibly, psychologically) feeling healthy is probably like seeing clearly - you notice it the day AFTER you've been sick (Wow! I feel great!), or you recognize its absence.

Illness, then, would be a bodily condition whose symptoms impair the body's functioning. Adjusted for context, &c.

So mental illness would be a mental condition whose symptoms impair the individual's funtioning (in society).

01:14 / 03.03.06

I'm wondering, Iconoplast, if you'd maybe consider cutting and pasting everything from the fourth paragraph down into another thread. I think it's interesting, but probably a discussion for elsewhere.

01:49 / 03.03.06

I was worried about that. Sure thing.

Phex: Dorset Doom

01:57 / 03.03.06

I'll take a wild stab at this one (and it should be read as such), by saying that Health, both mental and physical, has to do with control and the meeting of needs.
For example, if I want to go outside but cannot because of Agoraphobia, then I am 'mentally ill' (the term is a bit nasty I know, but it's also fairly broad) and can seek recieve treatment. Similarly, if both my legs are broken, or if car fumes are likely to kill me etc. I am physically ill and can also recieve treatment which will restore my ability to enact my will, that is, to go outside.
There's also Maslow's hierarchy of needs to consider:

You could say that anything affecting your ability to satisfy those needs could be classified as an illness, as would an imbalance (if my need for safety was so great that I couldn't leave the house then we could also term that an illness).
Essentially, I'd propose, at least as a step along the way to a better definition, that an illness is a factor affecting the bottom four steps on the pyramid, preventing the control over one's circumstances necessary for the pyramid's apex.

03:42 / 03.03.06

Maslow's hierarchy includes things like physical safety, though, doesn't it? Given the relationship of health and illness, would lack of a secure dwelling place, for example, equal 'lack of health' or 'illness'?

Phex: Dorset Doom

04:07 / 03.03.06

Funny, I thought the exact same thing a second after I pressed the 'Post Reply' button. I'll have another crack at this question once I've worked out exactly what I'm trying to say (thoughts can be funny like that sometimes) but for now I'll leave the thread in more capable hands.

04:12 / 03.03.06

I think Maslow's a useful jumping-off point, certainly.

11:39 / 03.03.06

Illness refers to ill health and the WHO say, "health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity," which leaves us, sadly, with a rather unrealistic definition of illness.

Clearly not all ill health constitutes illness. There must be some lower bound to the degree of discomfort or impediment experienced by either the subject or her environment. However, the pain and discomfort George W. Bush causes his environment is extreme, yet we don't consider his condition an illness. Obviously either the suffering or the disability caused to the subject is the relevant factor.

Where do we set that lower bound? Well, anyone physically injured and in pain is clearly ill, as is anyone suffering the effects of a debilitating infection, and likely anyone suffering an infection at all. This is what we mean by ill, casually. But is a very unfit person ill, or an obese person? Is a drug addict ill, or a fetishist? We might well agree that someone suffering clinical depression is ill, or someone suffering a neurosis, but what of a schizophrenic or a transsexual, someone who may possess a completely different internal model of part of reality? Are these people ill or just different and suffering the consequence of that difference, as an extremely tall person might? Is being extremely tall an illness? Being extremely tall might lead to illness and might well require help to prevent illness.

I hope this last example makes it obvious that I don't think this matters. Ill or not, people have problems that ought to be fixed or at least ameliorated, if possible, all willing. I think ill is an appropriate description of someone injured, someone suffering an infection, and possibly of someone suffering a neurosis. Otherwise I think one is dealing with someone who needs help, and nothing more. One might say the person is needy, but that sounds even worse than ill and would often be unfair.

I guess this is pretty much what iconoplast is saying too.

Is this important? For instance in the anti-psychiatry thread?

13:14 / 03.03.06

Are these people ill or just different and suffering the consequence of that difference

Ooo. Right. Good point. How can we talk about illness in a descriptive sense without talking about a certain kind of health in a normative one?

This normative/descriptive thing doesn't seem as ugly as in physiological diagnoses as it does when it crops up in psychological ones. Is there a way to talk about illness without making it sound like a moral judgement?

I mean, as far as I know, schizophrenics don't get treated because they're different, they get treated because they're suffering.

13:41 / 03.03.06

Hi iconoplast,

as far as I know, schizophrenics don't get treated because they're different, they get treated because they're suffering.

I don't know anything about psychology/psychiatry, but I did live with someone who it later turned out was schizophrenic. He was suffering, indeed. I was good friends with a another man, about the same time, who was almost certainly schizophrenic too, but in his case there was little or no suffering involved. He just living a mad, chaotic life. Only a little more chaotic than my own back then, too. He was really on top of it, in a way, and very creative. He wasn't in treatment.

I think there is more to helping people, in the medical sense, than alleviating suffering. One need only look at the WHO definition of health. Perhaps that's it, one ought to look at improving health rather than curing illness if one wants to move beyond the most simple definition of illness.

But I don't know. As per usual.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

17:08 / 03.03.06

illness, ailments, disease, afflictions, imbalances, all of which lead away from the ideal of health: a robust, energetic, capable person in all their faculties: body, heart, mind, spirit.

how to recognize/define robust, energetic capability? not so easy, indeed.

The old growth temperate rainforest nearby (North Pacific Coast of North America), in which there is a vast diversity of living things (predominantly in the soil), and a very low incidence of disease provides an interesting example.

it appears, that if left long enough to their own devices, living things find symbiotic relationships among one another, leading to an interconnected network of abilities.

in a more social sense, this is a vision of health. The absence of parasitic or imbalanced relationships, or at least a means with which to deal with them quickly. if these symbiotic relationships are as much internal as external, then perhaps therein lies the seed of a working definition. In essence, we look out for one another.

my attempt to add seasoning to the stew of definition:
"health is the state in which an individual's resistance to disease and parasitism is maintained through a tight weave of symbiotic relationships."

--not jack

20:02 / 03.03.06

basically, the concept of 'health' is actually a difficult one to describe and define

Actually, the concept of 'life' is even worse. What's the difference of a living entity and a inanimate object? When you compare a mammal to a rock, it seems easy, burt what about virus? and, if you consider geological timeframe, planets and star and galaxies (mainly galaxies) can be seen as living beings. They move, they grow, they colide with each other and reproduce...

It's easier, I think, to use relative standards. Instead of saying "healthy", and "sick", use "healthier than", or "sicker than". After all, one can always feel better or worse than how one feels right now...

21:09 / 03.03.06

A thread in which we discuss the meaning of health, whether a state can be understood as healthy *objectively,* and what constitutes a disease. In addition, public policy implications are addressed.

Well, that's the abstract, anyway.

21:15 / 03.03.06

Sorry, I think that last comment could be misunderstood. I didn't mean to diminish the contribution of the posts in the other thread.