faetal on 6/5/2014 at 12:09
Schizophrenia is a huge impairment of cognitive function. Paraphilia isn't. Not sure how they're comparable actually.
PigLick on 6/5/2014 at 12:47
faetal is spot on.
SubJeff on 6/5/2014 at 14:25
You don't think wanting to have sex with kids is a huge impairment of cognitive function? This is a condition that leads to people abducting and forcing themselves on children. Normal people find the opposite sex sexually attractive when they are at least sexually mature. That's pretty hard wired. For someone to only find people younger and less developed than that sexually appealing enough to sexually assault them, knowing how wrong it is and what harm they are doing? I'd say that's a serious deviance from normal cognitive function.
Schizophrenics suffer from a completely different type impairment, which is arguably just a failure to regulate the information input. One could say they are permanently tripping. But once you reduce the input (or interference) they don't then necessarily suffer from any specific logical, emotional or sexual oddity. I've met schizophrenics who are far more normal and logical than many "normal" people I've met.
Besides - my point was that if both groups arise because of phenotypical expression (rather than some nurture/life event issues) how are they different? So what if it's a phenotype? If being a total dick (or a crazed killer) was a phenotype would you just let it slide? I don't think it's an excuse of any type.
PigLick on 6/5/2014 at 14:48
Its a big stretch from "finding younger people sexually attractive" to "raping kids for reasons". Look I know this is a distasteful issue, but surely you can see how idiotic your argument is?
So people who have pedo urges are eventually bound to abuse/assault?
How about I abduct and force myself on an adult? Does that make it better in your eyes? Cos you know they are sexually mature so they are better able to handle it. But of course that never happens does it.
You are equating pedophilia with sexual abuse here, which is so neanderthal I am dumbfounded.
Its not about "making excuses" for peoples behaviour.
faetal on 6/5/2014 at 15:22
Schizophrenia is characterised by a disconnect with reality and severe symptoms involving conceptual, linguistic and sensory cognition. I know several people with schizophrenia and even went out with someone for a year and a half whose paranoid schizophrenia was controlled by medication. She told me how she spent a year of her life in full belief that her friends were trying to poison her food and regularly saw people in the street with rotting flesh dropping from their faces. She also thought that everyone around her was being controlled by some malign and ineffable agency.
It is categorically not the same thing as a person who through some glitch of sexual development, finds themselves attracted to pre- rather than post-pubescent humans. Your conflating of paedophiles with child molesters is a fallacy which you are wrongly using to reinforce a poor argument. Just as there are people who spend their life battling with psychotic urges who never kill, there are also going to be people who never act on their paraphilia. You're behaving as though anyone who is attracted to children also can't tell right from wrong and thus will definitely kidnap and molest the first opportunity they get. It's like claiming that all people with sexual urges are rapists. Which really wants evidencing in order to be taken seriously, as it's a very bold claim.
[EDIT] One very bad side-effect of the extreme stigmatisation of paraphilia is that without people coming forward and submitting themselves to some kind of support, it's very difficult to know what the prevalence of it is within populations. That in itself is very worrying.
SubJeff on 6/5/2014 at 15:57
I never said that all people who are attracted to children act on it. Please don't strawman me, both of you.
It does happen though, as you well know. There are people who commit no other crimes, who from the outside seem normal and nice, but who are sexually attracted to inappropriately young children. Some of them act on it, some of them don't. Either way, that attraction is abnormal and is a form of illness. The big difference between these people and others is that it is entirely possible to have consensual sex with adults, as an adult. It is possible to rape as an adult, but that isn't the way it always is when you act on your desires. For paedophiles acting on it is always abuse.
faetal on 6/5/2014 at 16:10
Yes, but that doesn't mean that paraphilia is a mental illness by default. It certainly isn't comparable to schizophrenia.
SubJeff on 6/5/2014 at 17:09
Well the ICD10 and DSM disagree with you.
faetal on 6/5/2014 at 17:11
They compare paraphilia with schizophrenia? Really?
SubJeff on 6/5/2014 at 18:02
No, they class paedophilia as a psychiatric illness. Don't be obtuse.
