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Originally Posted by CityLightsLikeRain
I've been diagnosed as manic depressive with high anxiety. Of course this was four years ago, and I've done a lot of growing and turned my isolation into extroversion, thus raising my own self-concept. I just think it helps give insight into a certain situations. How can a psychologist help anyone without really knowing what it feels like?
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By reading the textbooks.
That's a fair enough reason for taking a strong interest in psychology, but in terms of insight it only really gives you one into manic depression and anxiety (and maybe mania and depression one their own). Plus, even if you have experience of manic-depression, your experience of the illness will be different in some ways to the experience of anybody else with the same illness. Proper treatment of mental illnesses is based more around using accumulated knowledge, theories and techniques from the backlog of psycholocial research, rather than trying to extrapolate things from your own personal experience.
I don't believe that you need to have suffered from a mental illness to be able to treat people with mental illnesses. Last time I checked, brain surgeons didn't need to have had brain surgery themselves, policemen don't need to have been arrested and forensics experts don't need to have murdered anybody to do their job properly.
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Originally Posted by The Dave
I took a psych. class in highschool and everyone (In my class of 24) had signs of at least one mental disorder. If I recall correctly I suffer from paranoia.
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That's because you were looking for it. It can be easy to find things like that if you're looking for them, even if they're not actually there. If you're not paranoid enough to actually require treatment for your paranoia, then it's stretching it a bit to actually label yourself as such.