What is "normal"?

I have one problem with my doctor. I didn't enjoy the experience in the hospital but he never gave me a label. He decided to go the general route and give the possibility of two. So I still can't help myself by researching my illness thoroughly.

Mindlessness.

Wake up. Go to work. Do what you're told. Be like everybody else. Keep yourself private. Amuse yourself in your "free time", and continue on mindlessly enough that you're not aware that you're just running in circles at the advantage of others whilst ultimately just waiting to die.

Speed when I replied to your earlier post I might have shot off my gun too soon and would like to correct it a bit.

The Eichmann example I didn't give very good treatment. There is something you say in the 'relative normalcy' of conditions like sociopathy or narcissism.

Some say that nowadays people are more 'narcissistic'. Back 20 years ago, we would have reserved that tag for 1% of the population. I bet now, with more people using the diagnosis, the numbers are more like 5 or 10%. Dunno if it's due to more narcissists or whether it's due to an overapplication of the term. But it's there.

In similar spirit, like Eichmann, we cut our leaders all kinds of slack when it comes to their behavior. We don't call Bush a murdering sociopath for Iraq. We don't call our soldiers in war murdering sociopaths either, but they clearly do kill, they learn to feel nothing, no remorse, no emotion, and they have that 1000 yard 'stare'. After a war, we say they are 'normal'. But we don't treat them as sociopaths at all.

Dunno if we 'should', but we clearly don't.

So yeah, normal isn't easy to apply consistently. Our culture is there to skew our ideas one way or another, whether it's Eichmann or anyone else.

Normal= Functional
Being able to preform necessary tasks and not exhibiting behavior outside or society's norms / standards

sonovlaurin wrote:Speed when I replied to your earlier post I might have shot off my gun too soon and would like to correct it a bit.

The Eichmann example I didn't give very good treatment. There is something you say in the 'relative normalcy' of conditions like sociopathy or narcissism.

Some say that nowadays people are more 'narcissistic'. Back 20 years ago, we would have reserved that tag for 1% of the population. I bet now, with more people using the diagnosis, the numbers are more like 5 or 10%. Dunno if it's due to more narcissists or whether it's due to an overapplication of the term. But it's there.

In similar spirit, like Eichmann, we cut our leaders all kinds of slack when it comes to their behavior. We don't call Bush a murdering sociopath for Iraq. We don't call our soldiers in war murdering sociopaths either, but they clearly do kill, they learn to feel nothing, no remorse, no emotion, and they have that 1000 yard 'stare'. After a war, we say they are 'normal'. But we don't treat them as sociopaths at all.

Dunno if we 'should', but we clearly don't.

So yeah, normal isn't easy to apply consistently. Our culture is there to skew our ideas one way or another, whether it's Eichmann or anyone else.

You're approaching mental illness as a science, and I'm a more philosophical/metaphysical person by nature. There are definite limits to applying scientific solutions to everything. (Can you put a man and a woman together in a laboratory and predict whether they will fall in love, or set up a repeatability experiment where people will always laugh at a particular joke?)

The DSM is fine for what it is, but like all attempts to apply language to human problems, it is always imprecise and limited. My basic point is that the human condition itself is essentially insane/absurd. All attempts to make "sense" out of it, or create "systems" that explain it, eventually collapse.

We live in a world where we are busy using up the last of our natural resources to keep a Perpetual Growth Machine going forever, even though it is destroying our environment and creating unhealthy societies where people have to pop pills to keep functioning as "consumers" and "workers." But this is the "normal" state we are supposed to adjust to.

There is no true definition for 'normal', or 'normality' other than what falls inside the bell curve of 'accepted' social behaviour or the majority's culture. It doesn't actually exist.

Just as there is no definition for what is 'sane', when we use the 'logic' of an assumption that "disconnection from reality" means we are 'insane' - when nobody can prove any given reality is real or 'true', not theirs nor anyone else's. If perception is our reality, we truly are lost, defineless, far from shore with no anchor. All of us.

Still, people think we must have a standard to measure against, so that human beings can live in proximity without destroying each other. That standard is laughable, and mental diagnosis and care not much more advanced than trepanning in my opinion, but there it is. People haven't learned enough yet.

Normal is a setting on a dryer.


Seriously, I am normal because after a year or so of very turbulent thoughs and felings, Ihave the life that I want and the state of mind that I want.
That is normal to me.

greenfig wrote:[

Yeah, think about the labels professionals used 50 years ago. Hysterical, divergent, neurasthaniac etc. These diagnostics have been changed greatly since then. For instance being a homosexual is no longer considered a mental illness. I think in 100 years we will look back on horror at current practices, as we look back at medival bloodletting as archaic, now.

I really don't understand the seclusion room scenario. How does putting someone into a room that is ill going to help the pascient?? Srsly people need to be treated with more respect. I was in Mexico and they would just tie you down to your bed and I saw them only do it twice while I was in the hospital. Much better practice.