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: Back in Socarides’s day, it was the 1950s style social conservative morality which was “medicalized.” Today it’s PC. Previously, homosexuality and other behaviors which violated “traditional morality” were “mental illnesses.” Today “racism” and “homophobia” are mental illnesses (or at least, some folks within the profession seriously advance this notion). As Pete Townsend put it: “ 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.”