Lily and Annunciata, I know you two don’t have much use for “behavioral sciences” or psychiatry, but could you please try to consider that maybe, just maybe, this person could benefit from both a physical and a psychiatric evaluation? I did see “depression” listed as one of the traits, did I not? If this is the case, the person definitely needs to see someone. Depression, in the medical sense, is not just “feeling down”–it is a specific cluster of symptoms which are multifactorial in nature, have a definitive time frame (i.e., consistent over at least two weeks), can persist, can recur, and may or may not respond to any given treatment–and needs real professional diagnosis. I do agree that just saying “depression” doesn’t necessarily indicate the person has actual clinical depression–it’s become one of those “catch-all” words, like “gentleman” or “Christian”, that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
I’m glad for you that you are secure and confident in your own physical and emotional health to be aware of your personal idiosyncracies. After all, any type of behavior is on a continuum. . .for example, energy can range from complete lack (catatonia) to cycling manic. Very few of us are at those two extremes, and most fall in or near a narrow “middle” range. To those on the “high” end of that “middle” range, a person on the “low” end can appear “lazy”; to those on the “low” end, a person on the “high” end can appear frenetic, while two people each relatively “high” or “low” find each other “normal”.
I think you two ought to consider that Mamageek is not saying that the person has always been this way. The fact that she enumerates areas of concern indicates to me that the person has, if you will, “moved” out of his or her usual area of the continuum.
My older daughter has always been on the “untidy” side in her room, for example, but meticulously tidy in her books and personal appearance. If she suddenly began to become less and less tidy in the latter, it would be indeed a concern that something “normal”–her room untidiness–had spread to become “abnormal”–her personal untidiness.
We all have personal idiosyncracies that we can handle more or less well. We all have “bad days” or “difficult periods” and most of us–and I think Mamageek seems to be a reasonably intelligent person–can distinguish between someone being a little “more” or “less” in her usual traits and somebody exhibiting new, prolonged, or spreading behavioral “quirks”.
And the reluctance to have a “professional” evaluation shows that the “stigma” of even “appearing” to consider that one might have “mental issues” is still in full force for too many people today.
Key thing here is I knew when I needed help, I didn’t need someone else to decide for me based upon what seemed to be so callled symptoms of mental illness. GB, Annunciata
