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The_Inquisitor's avatar

How do people go crazy?

Asked by The_Inquisitor (3166points) July 22nd, 2008

Is it stress that makes people go crazy sometimes? Or what is it?

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17 Answers

nikipedia's avatar

Define “crazy”.

rockstar's avatar

Its the postal service

charliecompany34's avatar

being assigned as a winter season custodian for a large hotel resort in the colorado rockies. cabin fever baby.

charliecompany34's avatar

OR… living alone with pigs, little statues and having a strange penchant for good typing paper and novelists who drive really cool old cars. ah yes, a hermit’s life.

charliecompany34's avatar

guess the two above movies and watch for tell-tale signs of potential crazy people…

loser's avatar

commute traffic!!!

jcs007's avatar

Like this BLUESHAWASSABIDAMINLAIBAKIMAKIMAKIDAMSHABAMDO POO POO LAP.

loser's avatar

WTF?!!!

susanc's avatar

loser, that was cjs007 showing curiouscat “how people go crazy”. Good, huh?

flyawayxxballoon's avatar

That all depends on your defenition of crazy, though depression is the root cause of most instances.

Mental illnesses like phobias can happen because of an experience, sometimes traumatizing, [which, according to multiple therapists/psychologists, could have been in a past life] or even for no reason at all. Depression is another mental illness that can be caused just by being sad a lot, or also for no reason at all. Suicide thoughts are often called craziness, and those are usually caused by depression.

However, being crazy in a sense of murdering their family is a different story. I actaully know, or I guess knew, someone who was murdered by his dad. The father also murdered the rest of the family before commiting suicide. This was because he and the mother were getting a divorce. This was probably caused by depression.

The other different thing is like the murders at Columbine and Virginia Tech. Columbine was because the murderer had been teased nonstop by his classmates. This was either caused by depression, or something in him just snapped, which would point towards extreme anger management issues. Virginia Tech was also the same basic issue, although this murderer also killed the innocent.

nikipedia's avatar

@flyawayxxballoon: You made some pretty extreme factual inaccuracies in your answer.

Depression is a very specific mental illness (I would be happy to explain this in detail), and it is not the “root cause” of other mental illnesses. Sometimes it occurs alongside other mental illnesses—psychologists call this “comorbidity”—but it absolutely does not cause people to commit murder. Saying depression leads to murder is pretty offensive to people who have suffered from depression and similar mental illnesses.

No mental illness is especially strongly related to murder because murder is such an extreme action. Sometimes people who commit homicides have suffered from illnesses like schizophrenia or antisocial personality disorder, and they are often the victims of extreme abuse and trauma as well. But none of these things leads to homicide.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that there is one kind of depression called “psychotic depression” in which people sometimes experience hallucinations and delusions that might lead them to commit homicide. This is extremely, extremely rare.)

Depression is not “caused just by being sad a lot”. When people suffer from depression, one of the symptoms is often a feeling of profound sadness, but sometimes people feel anxious, angry, irritable, hopeless, or completely numb. Everyone who suffers from depression experiences it a little bit differently, and it is crucial to understand that depression is not the same thing as sadness, even though they very often overlap.

Further, psychologists and psychiatrists who endorse mental health effects stemming from experiences in a past life will have a very difficult time justifying that approach. If you have a reliable source for this claim I would be very interested to see it.

I am sorry to hear about your friend and his family, and I hope that you will be inspired by their tragedy to learn a bit more about mental health. In the meantime, please tread lightly on the topic, and try not to make statements that you don’t know to be true. I would be happy to talk to you more about mental health if it’s something you find interesting.

XCNuse's avatar

@rockstar hahah!

what makes people go crazy?

Well you have to see what crazy is on terms anyway.
Crazy is a term that we define someone who is… abnormal to what we are used to. And as history has proved to us… forever, humans aren’t really fans of things that are a little ‘different’.

So someone who isn’t really in tact with society, may lose what makes them socially in tact with others, and if they aren’t in tact, they learn new/different ways of doing things, different from the norms of someone who is attached to society. And when that person that has been away from all forms of society, and comes into one, they are, to say the least.. a little different.

In order to understand someone being ‘crazy,’ you have to understand social perspective, which is basically saying that people around the world have different social standards etc.
You see, when you take someone from one culture, and put them in another culture, they become socially traumatized due to the differences, also known as what sociologists call “culture shock.” You land up in another country, with people with different ways of doing things. This may lead to you referring to them as crazy.

mcbealer's avatar

unrequited love

tyrantxseries's avatar

depends on what “crazy” means, theirs alot of different crazy

xjustxxclaudiax's avatar

Too much of anything can make someone go crazy. I think in a way our brain shuts down when too much is going on…and we go to our…happy place.

sashii's avatar

maybe because of “love”.

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