Do people that are truly “losing their mind” realise it, and if not, when someone thinks they are losing their mind, is that an indicator that they are in fact not?
In: Biology
It depends entirely on the condition causing them to “lose their mind”. Some conditions would appear normal to the afflicted, some are clearly abnormal. Some conditions have moments of lucidity, some don’t.
There’s no cut-and-dry answer here.
How aware people are of when they are having mental health issues varies quite a bit.
People who are really out of it do not know that they are having issues. For a person who is delusional, their delusions are their reality. There are also plenty of people who have personality disorders that prevent them from realizing that they are not behaving in a typical manner. People with Narcissistic personality disorder aren’t able to grasp that they are narcissistic – they just think everyone else is an idiot.
Other disorders have less of an effect on reasoning. People who have anxiety disorders are usually quite able to tell that they are having a panic attack, people with OCD understand that their compulsions aren’t something other people have.
There’s really no clinical definition of “losing your mind”, so you’d have to be a bit more specific. For some mental illnesses, yes, people absolutely know that they’re suffering from a mental illness. For others, they don’t, and suffer from [anosognosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia).
Took an Abnormal Psych class in college. After the first week the prof said, “Raise your hand if you think you have one of the conditions in the text.” Everybody raised their hand. “You don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t know it. The mentally ill wouldn’t believe there’s anything wrong with them even if they read their own case file.” Big audible sigh of relief as everyone put their hand down.
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