My apologies, I was thinking in Spanish. My grandmother still does refer to convulsions as el baile de San Vito.
And only because something has been identified medically, that doesn’t mean laymen know about it. The notion that “some crazy people are happy to be crazy” isn’t exactly medical terminology, we’re very much talking about a layman’s point of view.
Dr. Drake, the problem here is that “illness” has very fuzzy definitions. Middlebro and me had a few discussions with His Wife The Doctor and colleagues of hers because according to her “cancer is not a genetic illness” (why not, it’s an illness of the genes!); she insists in reserving that term for what we would have called genetic defects, but which again she would refuse to call defects, they are “illnesses” (cf. hemophilia). We ended up deciding that the logic behind what doctors consider an illness is different from the logic a layman would use. How it works, we still haven’t found out.
Because it is an irreversible disability, not a treatable disease.
Fair enough, but I was trying to make the distinction above.
Thanks, Nava and anson2995. That seems to presuppose that all mental illnesses are treatable, or that they aren’t disabilities. Still, that helps a lot in understanding how the distinctions are drawn.