Sookning

I know right? He was a psychiatrist in the early 1900s. The idea is that people can project all their fears, thoughts, ideas, feelings onto these ambiguous images. It's a form of tabula rasa (a blank slate).

The unfortunate thing is that help can't be imposed. There is research showing that invisible support is very helpful. So you don't need to be in their face about it, but the knowledge that you are there is in itself helpful. Forcing someone to get help is usually quite unhelpful. It's like forcing someone to be healthy usually leads the person to be unhealthy. People don't like to be forced. The problem with free will! *Of course there are situations where that is necessary - the person is a danger to him/herself or to others. *But if that's not the case yet, let your friend know that you are there and be prepared to wait. The difficulty is to continue caring when you are being shut down. The very fact that you won't give up on them means that when they are ready for help, they'll come to you.

Good question. I think I was fascinated by psychopathy which isn't in the DSM-V. Probably the closest you get to it is antisocial personality disorder. I think it's fascinating because that world is so different from mine. I still don't really understand their world TBH.

I'm also quite interested in eating disorders which is more common than psychopathy. Anorexia is one of the only disorders where people "want" the symptoms. For most other disorders: Distress is one of the diagnostic criterions.

Since the cause is unknown, we don't have cures for it. I think that therapy is helpful to examine if there is any discernable contributing factors, to work through the individual's feelings about having these sexual desires, to help the individual to develop ways to cope with his/her feelings and not to act on them.

TBH, I think the DSM-5 upset many mental health professionals. They made some big changes in the DSM, some of which were not even backed by research. I think people use a categorical system to make things easier. I don't know if a dimensional scalar system would complicate matters and therefore make diagnosis much more difficult. Not to mention everything that comes with it - treatment, insurance claims etc. Having said that, I think that a label can be helpful for some people to get well, but not to be fixated on the label to the point that it becomes a justification for maladaptive behaviours.