Re: Pedophilia + mental illness

Well, you said an awful lot there.

The whole field of mental illness is a tricky one. If one has a physical ailment, it is usually easily to tell: one's leg or one's arm hurts or doesn't function properly - but if one's thoughts or emotions aren't quite right, who is qualified to be the judge?

If one is depressed all the time although everything is going right in life, one may have depression - but if one is depressed because they just lost a loved one, that is a perfectly normal reaction - and if one is depressed all the time because the laws and society conspire to prevent the expression of love and affection in one's life, which category of depression does that belong to?

Likewise, if one believes that there are sinister forces out to hurt you or destroy you, one might be paranoid ... or one might simply be a pedophile. I have heard that the mental health professions do not count justified paranoia as mental illness - a possibility that came to their attention thanks to the Church of $cientology, but which is equally applicable to our situation.

As for youth and violence: by all measurements, youth are doing better than ever, and violence has been steadily decreasing since about 1990. No one is sure of the reason or reasons for the sharp increase in violence from about 1960 to 1990, but I can think of several likely factors - including a reduction of lead and other pollutants in the environment and fading antagonisms from the civil rights era.

As for the rise in mental illness in recent decades, it is probably entirely the result of increased diagnosis - and calling things mental illness which used to be merely eccentricity or moral deficiency. I suspect that actual mental illness - or neurological illness as qtns rightly names it - has probably actually been declining for the past century as general nutrition and health have improved.

As for an intersection between pedophilia and mental illness - I haven't seen any reason to believe there is one. We can point to individuals here who exhibit signs of mental problems, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that this is more common among pedophiles than among non-pedophiles. We also have a number of quite remarkable posters both at GirlChat and at BoyChat who are clearly in good mental health - there is certainly not a necessary connection.

On the other hand, among our enemies we regularly see cognitive distortion, antisocial behavior, and sadism. There is probably not a connection between mental illness and non-pedophilia, but there is certainly a connection between neurological dysfunction and anti-pedophilia.