Title: Mental Health and Social Norms | The One Best Way
Headings: Mental Health and Social Norms
Mental Health and Social Norms
[This was from 2005.]

Content: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” This problem within psychiatry doesn’t lead me to the extreme position advanced by Thomas Szasz or Michel Foucault that “mental illness” doesn’t exist. Psychiatric disorders do exist, some of them rather minor (a moderate anxiety disorder), some of them deadly serious (severe depression, which often results in suicide). But we should realize that underlying mental disorders have (or ought to have) nothing, absolutely nothing to do with social norms. They are “health” problems, not “moral” problems and as such are socially neutral and more analogous to concepts like “race” and “gender.” Indeed, mental disorders are protected civil rights categories under the ADA and other related disabilities legislation. To say that someone has a “psychiatric disorder” is to say that their health is impaired in the same way that someone with high cholesterol or hypertension has their health impaired. [One thinks of the recent hubub on Lincoln and homosexuality. Though historians strive mightily in their battles over whether Lincoln suffered from the “mental disorder” of homosexuality, no one seriously disputes that Lincoln suffered from the true mental disorder of bipolar. Likewise Thomas Jefferson most likely suffered from a physiatric disorder — depression, as did Madison, who, given that he was convinced he would die an early death (he actually lived into his 80s), most likely had an anxiety neurosis.