Lack of insight

Psychology is a fascinating yet confusing field. Sometimes it feels like everyone can be labelled as one thing or another when looking through lens of psychology.

I’m not talking about the serious psychological diseases like Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the likes. These are serious disorders that needs medical attention.

There are list of psychology terms to describe various characteristics of human behavioral pattern, I’m not sure if they can be called diseases. For instance, I read somewhere about hording disorder. There are different types of personality disorder out there as well.

The fact that most of these disorders, unlike other medical conditions, cannot be objectively tested by other means, makes it confusing for a lay person like me.

If someone has tumor, there are means to test if that tumor is cancerous or not. We don’t have to rely just on the opinion of a doctor. A conclusion can be made objectively. As far as I know, most psychological conditions cannot be confirmed like that.

One of my close relative, I notice, has a poor judgement. The person is perfectly normal managing family and a career but over the time I could see the pattern. He makes decisions confidently in situations where normally people would hesitate. At first I thought the confident comes from the knowledge and experience but it didn’t take me long to realize that the confident is the result of lack of insight.

It is like a small child who doesn’t know about the fire tries to play with it. An adult would be careful when dealing with a fire because of our knowledge about the fire.

After that realization, it makes a lots of sense about his comments about things and his actions. There is a serious lack of insight about common things.

I wonder if there is a psychological disorder named after this phenomena.

 

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