Mental health problems >>>> Is slovenliness a sign of what?

Is slovenliness a sign of what?

Many people know what is behind the term "slovenliness". This is a disregard for order in the surrounding environment and / or a violation of the norms of body hygiene. The indifferent attitude of a person to his own appearance causes, at least, bewilderment, and sometimes just a feeling of disgust among others. The messy, cluttered environment surrounding a person can suggest a catastrophic lack of time, negligence in things, or a simple reluctance to spend time cleaning.

Typically, signs of slovenliness are attributed to cases of lack of upbringing in childhood, lack of training in order, laziness, or lack of aesthetic taste. But slovenliness can also act as a symptom of a mental disorder. And if in the case of slovenliness, which is fixed in the form of a character trait, a person can be influenced by persuasion, by his own examples, to impose an algorithm on him, subject to which he will be able to achieve certain success in changing his cluttered world and appearance, then in case of a mental disorder, cope with the phenomenon sloppiness is very hard. Mental disorder and self-esteem are often incompatible things, so it is not possible to convince a person to look at himself from the outside and evaluate his appearance or the condition of his home (workplace).

As a rule, such painful phenomena of slovenliness occur during puberty of adolescents, when some biochemical processes in the body change, which can affect the functioning of the brain. Most often, after leaving puberty, the phenomena of slovenliness gradually disappear. But this does not always happen, since a careless attitude to one's body and a sloppy attitude to things can be learned from childhood as a result of imitating one or both parents, regardless of the educational process they conduct with the child.

A person is somewhat different from an animal in relation to instincts, and if in animals the need for purity of their own body is associated with the instinct of self-preservation, then in a person the love for purity is fixed in the form of a habit (developed independently or copied in childhood from the behavior of people around him, in particular, with behavior of parents).

A negligent attitude towards oneself and the environment can be the result of depression, when a person, always neat and collected in everyday life, loving order, cleanliness and tidiness, gradually begins to slide into the abyss of indifference and chaos, ceases to notice the inconveniences and clutter surrounding him, begins to neglect partially or completely own hygiene. After getting out of depression, such a person will pull himself together and begin to observe, as before, his own rules of hygiene and order, but in the case of untreated depression and the impossibility of getting out of it on his own, slovenliness can take on catastrophic proportions.

Slothfulness can be a sign of personality degradation in certain diseases: alcoholism, drug addiction.

Frequent cases of slovenliness are observed in the elderly during the period of degradation of brain cells. Such people need the attentive attitude of their relatives and the help of a psychiatrist, who will select the optimal treatment for each specific case. It will not be possible to cope independently or with the help of relatives who have no experience in such a matter.

There is a kind of slovenliness associated with an irresistible desire to hoard things, as a result of which housing turns into a cluttered warehouse or trash heap. Foreign scientists have come up with a term for such a state of sloppiness: "Messi syndrome" (messy - translated from English, dirty, disorderly). This condition has other names in the medical literature: "Diogenes Syndrome", "Plyushkin Syndrome", "Syllogomania". As it turned out, this condition can be caused not only by diseases affecting brain cells, but also by deep psychological trauma (loss of a loved one, ruined personal life). In the case of "Messi Syndrome", the help of a doctor - psychiatrist is required.