Was Roxy's mother in a normal mental state?
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Re: Was Roxy's mother in a normal mental state?
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If you read some of the books of Thomas Szasz, a former psychiatrist, you might also be convinced that mental illnesses don´t exist. He uses a lot of clearly thought-out logic to explain why the way in which most if not all societies have formulated and defined most mental illnesses has nothing to do with science. In his books, he describes the concept of mental illness as a tool for social control exercised by political institutions and by whole societies.
For example, we don't say children can't pay attention in class because schools are boring. Instead, we say that children who can't pay attention in class have ADHD and need to be medicated. Not paying attention at school no matter how boring your classes are is socially unacceptable and that is, in my opinion, part of the reason why bored or hyperactive children are accused of having ADHD. The other half of the ADHD story is gluten toxicity: some children are hyperactive and can't concentrate because a protein from bread called gluten might be poisoning their brains.
First of all, the mind cannot be sick independently of the body. You cannot experience mental problems without those mental problems originating from the brain. A diabetic will experience manic mood swings because of hypoglycemia. My father own would scream and become very aggressive when his type 2 diabetes was out of control whenever he experienced hypoglycemia. But my father´s aggression wasn´t the product of a mental illness that did not originate from some physical problem in his body. Once his diabetes lessened and his blood sugar was under better control, his violent mood swings disappeared. I think most if not all of the so-called "mental illnesses" that actually exist and are not figments of the pharmaceutical industry's imagination are by-products of physical injuries to the human body. The exception to this would be PTSD, but even that may be solely caused by some external or internal injury to the human body. I just don't know enough about PTSD to provide an alternative explanation for its cause.
Harvard psychiatrist and medical doctor, Christoper M. Palmer, recently wrote a book called Brain Energy in which he explains how ketogenic diets have resolved a wide variety of so-called mental illnesses. If your supposed mental illness is caused by a defect in your diet, then how could your illness be a purely "psychological" problem?
There is also a long Wikipedia article on the hypothesis that lead poisoning is the primary cause of extremely violent crime in the United States. I've also seen some research papers that suggested that a lot of American serial killers suffered from serious head trauma. It could be these and other physical injuries to the brain that transformed otherwise "normal" (maybe hot-tempered) individuals into extremely violent individuals who could not control their own behavior. Since the start of the industrial revolution, a lot of toxic chemicals from manufacturing plants and cars have poisoned the water, the air, and our food. All these toxic chemicals may be the primary or secondary cause of a wide variety of so-called mental illnesses.
In my opinion, psychiatry is a religious pseudoscience that espouses a dualist perspective. In other words, psychiatry promotes the idea that the mind is a separate entity from the body. If you are a religious person then you have a dualist perspective and believe that the mind escapes the body after the body dies. If you agree with the assertion that both psychiatry and traditional mainstream religions have a dualist perspective, then you have to concede that psychiatry is just one of many mainstream religions in the modern world. Dualism is not a scientific idea and that's why I'm saying psychiatry has to be thought of as another religion.
If you consider yourself a dualist, then let me add that there have been experiments conducted to prove the existence of a literal human soul. You can find some Wikipedia articles documenting attempts to weigh the human soul the moment a person dies. The weight of the tested subjects remained the same immediately after their deaths and that information was used by observers of such experiments to conclude that there was, in fact, no human soul.
And finally, I would like to say that Thomas Szasz famously argued that the concept of mental illnesses is as useful for describing the problems of human behavior as demon possession. In other words, people are "possessed" by mental illnesses in much the same way that other people are possessed by demons or angry spirits. Szasz's reference to demon possessions in his analysis of the phenomenon of mental illnesses was no accident of history. You can find some scientific articles talking about how many of exorcisms in the medieval era may have been instances of priests trying to exorcise non-existent demons from children and adults with epilepsy. Now that epilepsy has become a very famous brain disease, exorcism cases have coincidentally gone down.
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I would have preferred to see Roxy's mother become more religious over time after the deaths of her family members so that the narrative would have a stronger sense of causality.
Nevertheless, I don't think you need to explain her selfish behavior toward Roxy by saying that she has a mental illness. I think her intolerant religious beliefs could be the source of her selfish mindset. I think the narrative best supports the idea that Roxy's mother's religious beliefs have made her so selfish that she is willing to throw her own daughter out of her house. The narrative in no way suggests that Roxy's mother might have a mental illness unless you want to describe Roxy's mother's religiosity as a mental illness.
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I feel that saying that Roxy's mother has a mental illness ignores the fact that the basis of Roxy's mother's actions is her religious prejudice and I think the author's intention was to make readers believe that Roxy's mother's behavior was the direct result of her religious belief.
Is your post's question about the authorial intent behind Roxy's mother's behavior or is it about the plausibility of the mother's behavior?
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