Word: normalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...obvious reason is that so many people have a stake in what the world defines as crazy and what it calls normal. Famously, homosexuality was listed as a DSM condition until a 1974 vote among APA members removed it. Other groups of mental-health professionals and patients want certain disorders to be added (and covered by insurance): sexual compulsivity, for instance, is not in the DSM, even though "sexual aversion disorder" (302.79) - the persistent and distressing avoidance of genital contact not explained by another disorder like depression - is included. (Read an interview with an author who has bipolar disorder...
...reason for your funk is that you just lost your job. Such physiological responses as insomnia are evolutionarily natural (and sometimes helpful, in a jump-starting sort of way) when you suffer a trauma like losing your job. But according to the DSM, only perfect is considered normal. Another basic problem with the DSM: it tries to reduce the vastly complex experiences of your mind to a single number...
Rather, Hyman argued that many mental illnesses are problems that lie along a continuum from normal and functioning to disordered and tragic. To the annoyance of some old-fashioned DSM defenders, he made the case that the DSM should regard mental illness as "continuous with normal": less like leukemia and more like hypertension. You don't get diagnosed with hypertension until you meet a cutoff point for high blood pressure that takes into account other extenuating factors: your age, for instance, or the conditions under which the blood-pressure reading is taken. Depression should be the same...
...continuum model like the one Hyman proposes could help solve this problem by recognizing that people aren't always one thing or another. They're sometimes just a little depressed or a little anxious. To avoid medicalizing normal stress, the DSM-V would set a cutoff point within the spectrum. Of course, determining the right cutoff point for the DSM's 350 illnesses would take an enormous research effort, one that has begun for some disorders like depression but probably hasn't even been thought about for rare problems like sexual sadism...
...Alcohol traditionally has featured prominently in these moments of repose from the cares and concerns of life. It drives conversation, accentuates wit, entreats laughter, makes melodious the otherwise shrill and tone-deaf, assuages old grudges, and initiates strangers into easy friendship. It makes possible what, under normal conditions of reality, would be improbable. For that very reason, as well, it poses such a danger if used irresponsibly and excessively. But, when enjoyed properly, drink has served to unite—not to divide—society...