The crazy, it is no stopping!

[tagryn]

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2008/11/20/111855/94

I have known since very early on that I have an insight into the minds of other mentally ill folk that very few others possess. While psychiatrists and therapists can acquire it, many years and a great deal of very hard work are required. But it seems I was born with this insight.

I have never actually met anyone else who possesses my ability, but some of the mental health professionals I've discussed it with understood very well what I was doing, and were able to explain it to me, so the phenomenon is at least known to medical science. While I have mentioned it, I haven't discussed it much with my many Kuron friends. But I have demonstrated this insight many times to others, and for many years, and have discussed it at some length with many of the professionals I have known.

One example is that I can make schizophrenics stop hallucinating. But I have never tried to actually heal anyone, only to offer a little temporary relief. What I don't understand is how I gained this insight - it was never anything I ever studied. The first I ever noticed it in myself, it was already fully developed. To wield the power this insight gives me is no more difficult for me than it is to have brown hair.

"I have insight...that few others possess." "I have never witnessed anyone else do what I can easily do." Messiah complex, much?

(UPDATE: But then, I should be charitable and remember Heinlein's advice about braggarts: "This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.")

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

It's certainly POSSIBLE to have a greater insight than most people into the thinking of the mentally ill, and have it "from birth" so to speak. One way is to be raised by or around them, another is to be one.

The writer says "I have known since very early on that I have an insight into the minds of other mentally ill folk" ... emphasis mine. And, Messiah Complex? Maybe, maybe not, certainly an element of smugness and arrogance which I definitely recognize from people who weren't what you would call 'healthy' mentally.

[tagryn]

Messiah Complex isn't quite the right term - he isn't trying to save the world, just individuals - but I didn't feel like spending a lot of time trying to Google up the correct one. Idea being, the need to feel "I'm unique, I'm special, I have these powers that no one else has, etc."

From the comments in the fellow's diary there, it seems like he's been down this path before, and the commenters are warning him that he's showing symptoms of sliding back into illness (one symptom of which for him apparently is creating long, rambling entries), but he's in denial. Sad, really, and I realized it was uncharitable of me to post this after reading through his stuff more, hence the bottom update to the original post.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he seems to need his meds. In his case it isn't good to empathically model mental illness.