I feel like people confuse the term spectrum with the term continuum. Fading from black to white through gray is a continuum. Rainbow colours are a spectrum. In mental health, most conditions have no aetiology - or it is not considered, and the condition is described or defined by signs and symptoms, and not something like a bloodtest. The weight of each of these signs and symptoms is what makes up the spectrum. When someone is on the spectrum of whatever condition, it means the sum of those weights exceed a value that causes some detriment to the individuals quality of life. Maybe I'm spliting hairs but I thought to share my understanding.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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so what is an example of a mental health continuum?
"If the human brain (mind) was simple enough for us to understand it, we would be too dumb to understand it". I don't know who said it but my point is that I cannot imagine any health care pathology to be so simply one dimensional that it'll fit on a continuum.
Emotions are each examples of a continuum. You can be any level of sad or happy or angry, etc.
I'm not sure the distinction of spectrum from continuum is useful for understanding the world though. It's just conversationally helpful.
Perhaps everything is a continuum but we just manufacture a spectrum so we can classify people for our own ease of conversation.
Perhaps it helps to understand that a spectrum can be comprised of a cluster of continua: a possibility space of which any subset can be observed. Like each colour in the light spectrum. The continuum notion in that case can refer to its brightness. Same in the case of emotions. We don't just experience one emotion at any given time although there's a prominent one and others might be subdued. How we cluster certain aspects, such as traits in mental health as well as the threshold to diagnose anyone is of course arbitrary. Severities in presentations are perhaps seen as a continuum, but the underlying structure that aids in defining it, is a spectrum.
The way a condition is described or detected and where we choose to draw and name the arbitrary color boundaries is a spectrum. The way we actually are in reality is a continuum (along many dimensions). Some Homo Sapiens are so morally unmotivated and self-obsessed, we say they have ASPD. Yet many people you know are morally unmotivated! Their insufficiencies fall somewhere on that continuum.
Guten Tag. Ich bin der freundliche Korinthenkacker von nebenan. Es heißt "belief" nicht "believe". Außerdem wäre hier der Plural angebrachter, also "beliefs". Diese Nachricht wurde maschinell erstellt und ist ohne Unterschrift gültig.
Toll jetzt muss ich mein Schlaufon laminieren
Fick, da bin ich tatsächlich auf einen Standart-Rechtschreibfehler von Angelsachsen reingefallen, obwohl ich den Unterschied eigentlich kenne.
Wait... Black and white don't exist? Everything grey and contextual?
Shits gay 🤷
Always has been 🤷🔫
I love how light is last on the list
Got you, that's my icing on the cake
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We are all trapped on this large dirt ball floating in space. No one is unique even my post. We all have this idea of being an individual with unique traits. That is just a lie we tell ourselves to cope. That tattoo isn’t unique, that piercing doesn’t make you unique. Your gender preference is not unique, the food you eat is not unique, the art you make isn’t unique.
We all are just recycling ideas over and over again until we are gone. Then next cycle of not unique people will show up to recycle everything.
Only true unique thing is scientific discoveries and medicine discovery. Everything else is just recycled over and over again.