How do you feel about chess?

I hate myself for sucking so bad. I should be able to beat all you losers.

The chess community needs more sadness. Please abandon chess.

Yeah I think that would be my prefered time control as well, but it's rarely convenient to play it on the Internet. As you say, blitz is thin on strategic and positional ideas, but on the other hand turn-based seems to be too positional. An  average player can make it through the opening using a database, and later handle a lot of the tactics (in a defensive way) using the analysis board and long thinking times. Most of my turn-based games seem to reach drawish positions.

go for a beer

 I just wish people had the common sense to realize no game has the power to cause madness. There's a genetic component to it. Good answers to most, by the way.

Woodshover, when your frog gets hit by a truck everytime he tries to cross the highway, you just keep believing madness is genetic!

But, seriously, madness can be cultural, it doesn't have to be genetic.

I am very enthusiastic about chess. To me chess is just not a game but it's a way of life. Foreseeing things, strategies,offence , defence, understanding threats, and tackling with them. It's political (knights) ,romantic (mating), religious (bishops),  psychologically exciting , enticing (Queen), combatant(Rooks) and warmongering(pawns). It's my army on the board!

I could be wrong, but I would be that you could get from total novice to expert with maybe half a dozen well-picked books. You just have to be willing to put the work in to wring every last drop of skill out of each book.

 Environment can affect it, and make it worse, but with schizophrenia, and other dorms of insanity there's a genetic component.

I hate chess.  It's a stupid addiction and I wish I could get kicked off chess.com for cheating or something so I don't have to delete my own account.

Prolongued solitary confinement, for example, can cause severe mental problems (madness if you will) in those with apparently no genetic disorders, such as schizophrenia

Wait, if I did get blocked, woundn't it be just as easy to create another one?  So that doesn't really deal with the issue of being tempted to come back.  Correct me if I'm wrong, anyone.

In some cases of "madness", or, "insanity", it is culturally determined, meaning in a given culture you may be deemed "mad", based on behaviour alone. Only recently, have there been talk of a gene which could allow for one, under certain environmental conditions (and even then the chances are not great), that one may become mad. Until then, we rely on cultural reasons for someone being deemed mad, or not. Also, disease, and brain damage have been the usual suspects.

Um, I couldn't sleep... what criteria more reliable than behaviour do we have to estimate someone's mental sanity, or lack of it ?

Woodshover is implying a genetic reason--a gene which  determines insanity. In the past, something like being bitten by a rabid dog, for instance, would be a reason to watch the person's behaviour afterwards. Or, contracting syphillis, would make doctors watch for "symptoms of madness". If none of these things occurred, then there could be anything from eccentric behaviour, to political agendas participating in the declaration of madness. Raving mad, in a genteel society, could just have meant the poor boy did not "fit in".

So yes, the behaviour of the subject plays a large role. But, a larger role is played by the spectator, and their prejudices concerning that particular individual they wish to declare "mad".

I'm nowhere near an expert on this or any field, but I think modern genetics says that something can be genetic *and* triggered by environment. We have many, many genes that await activation through environmental factors.

Well, but whether the causes are genetic or organic or environmental, the observable symptoms are behavioural. (Introspective insights of the patient might be of some interest also but they are hardly very reliable.) Knowing the causes of schizophrenia is not essential to diagnosing it.

You are right that there is no meta-cultural definition of mental disease but, there is some reason to think that a person who behaves in ways that strongly and visibly defy the expectations of the culture they are part of, is mentally ill. 

Yes, that is how I understand it as well.

It would be quite a nightmarish society if people start believing in, and espousing insanity to be a gene which alone determines that one will eventually become insane. Such notions gives over to authority, one's very own mind. While the rest of society would defer to such authority, leaving the unique individual helpless in the grasp of corruption.

I don't agree with you here, as I very strongly find the expectations of this society quite mad, and I hope I behave in a way that comports this feeling. I know, for instance, that this society wishes to supress ideas and behaviour which it finds uncomfortable, and therefore would call people mad for merely thinking for themselves, and doing what they wish. It is as much, if not more, the fault of the culture, and not the behaviour of the individual, which breeds claims of madness.

One of my co-workers used to work in the mental health field. She was telling me that any one of us could be certified insane depending upon the criteria used by the institution. The institution is, of course, controlled by the state. She used as an example a man who was at a speech that the president made in Chicago. I don't know which president,  but we've worked together more than ten years. The secret service heard him make this statement and determined he was a threat. He was "evaluated" and left in a mental institution for close to two years. If you're not armed, how much of a threat can you be?