Poll of the Day > Do you think sometimes people need to stop looking for...

(+) Yeah! (+)

...a psychological explanation for their bad behavior and just accept that they need to be responsible for themselves and fix themselves?

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Yez

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Unfortunately, some people do suffer from some sort of mental malaise, and America today in 2021 has the most people with mental illnesses than any other industrialized country in the world. Ditto for drug addiction as well.

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To be fair, there's always a psychological explanation for behavior (bad or otherwise). That's pretty much literally what psychology is.

But if what you're saying is that people need to stop using their past and their issues as an excuse that somehow completely absolves them of their own shitty behavior now and forever, then I'd agree.

It actually reminds me of a quote from a story that I thought was really appropriate long ago:

"I wish... I wish that some time, long ago, something had not been said that was said, or something done that was not done. Something, had we known, which might have let him grow differently, something which would have seen him become another man than the bitter, bent thing I saw up there. It is a waste of something that might have been."

I did not answer him. What he had said might or might not be right. It did not matter. Brand might have been borderline psychotic, whatever that means, and then again maybe not. There is always a reason. Whenever anything has been mucked up, whenever anything outrageous happens, there is a reason for it. You still have an outrageous mucked-up situation on your hands, however, and explaining it does not alleviate it one bit. If someone does something really rotten, there is a reason for it. Learn it, if you care, and you learn why he is a son of a bitch. The fact is the thing that remains, though.
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Very often, finding an explanation for the behaviour is an essential first step to correcting it. There are still definitely people who treat an explanation as enough of an excuse to stop trying to do anything about it, but it's nonetheless wrong to characterize the search for an explanation as an effort to avoiding solving the problem.

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