rationalskepticism.org

zoon wrote:

ScholasticSpastic wrote:That thread title is so utterly click-bait-ish that I refuse to read your post, and I move that any thread with a title that's this click-bait-ish be moved to P&CA. Just put the fucking name of the fucking disease in the thread title.

igorfrankensteen wrote:Thread mislabeled indeed. Not a "disease." AIDS wasn't a disease either, by the way.

Whatever was affecting this woman physiologically, was NOT the cause of her thinking she was dead. Her particular collection of conceptualizations of the world, is what led to her conclusion. It's essentially the same thing as when someone suffers neurological damage that results in their losing all sense of empathy, and they therefore conclude that they are gods.

I'm failing to follow these objections to the OP. The thread title is catchy (from the Washington Post) but accurate enough. The word used was "illness" which is even vaguer than "disease" (going by Merriam-Webster, illness is ": a condition of being unhealthy in your body or mind: a specific condition that prevents your body or mind from working normally : a sickness or disease"), and as far as I can tell the Cotard delusion is a recognised syndrome which is recognised as a disease by the WHO if not by the DSM.

Why isn't AIDS a disease? Wikipedia refers to it as both a disease and an illness here ("HIV/AIDS has had a great impact on society, both as an illness and as a source of discrimination.[19] The disease also has large economic impacts"), though admittedly the article starts by calling it a spectrum of conditions.

HIV is the disease. AIDS was the SYNDROME (that's what the S stands for). SYNDROME in this case, means a collection of symptoms which the person giving it a label, believes has a single cause, but it is a cause which they have not yet identified.

Cotard Delusion is ALSO a SYNDROME. Again, that means that mr Cotard gathered together a list of symptoms, suspected that there was an underlying physical or psychological cause for it, but could not himself identify that cause.

The sloppy habit of referring to something as an illness, is the source of a lot of misunderstandings, including this whole thread, and the article it is based around. The term "illness" as used in most discussions is every bit as bad, if not worse, than the horrible mess that is intrinsic to the use of the term "theory" in common speech.

The problem with the click-bait headline, is that it's use of the word illness implies that the cause of the syndrome is known, and will be identified in the article. Then all the article proves to be about, is a reiteration of the now ancient Cotard observations.

Cotard syndrome does not, as the thread title says, "MAKE PEOPLE THINK THEY’RE DEAD," the Cotard Syndrome is the description of the fact that some people think they are dead.

They may as well have posted an article titled "War is Caused By this behavior," and then in the article itself, said "War is people fighting each other in an official or coordinated way."