“Modernity blames the victim,” Roy Richard Grinker writes in Nobody’s Normal. As an anthropologist, he looks at how mental illness was conceived in other societies and finds that much of our understanding isn’t constructed medically but socially. We “give an aura to truth to the explanation that make sense to us, even though no mental illness can be validated by a lab test.” He adds that the categories psychiatry gives to those illnesses “are just temporary names or frameworks that help us understand patterns of behavior that cause suffering.”
Grinker comes from a family of psychiatrists going back generations. In keeping with the science of his era, his great grandfather described the mentally ill as biologically inferior. His grandfather was treated by Sigmund Freud and recalled Freud’s maxims: everyone is neurotic and “ordinary unhappiness,” not a perfect life, is the most for which we can hope. Likewise, Grinker’s father believed that “everyone had a little mental illness” and emotional pain “was a part of normal life.”
Nobody’s Normal begins with Grinker’s assessment of the stigma surrounding mental health. As recently as the 1970s most symptoms were whispered about and many afflicted people lacked the language, much less the courage, to address their concerns. Since then, stigmatization of mental illness has declined dramatically; our society has accepted that it’s more widespread than once imagined. Cultural markers have been moved by athletes, rappers and combat veterans who speak openly of their challenges. Even Pope Francis once saw a psychoanalyst. Autism has become accepted and is seen to exemplify “neurodiversity.” The old definition of normal was socially constructed and is being dismantling.
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Stigmatization is one issue. The other comes down to who defines mental illness and why? “We cannot and possibly never will see mental illnesses in a microscope or test for them in a laboratory,” he writes. Even the much-vaunted breakthroughs in genetics have cast little light on the subject. Few causes are offered in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official and perennially revised bible for psychiatry. DSMD’s entries are “almost by definition, illnesses without a known cause” and are often no more than patterns of behavior associated with distress or disability.
Building from the theories of French philosopher Michel Foucault, Grinker assigns the rise of industry-driven market-based capitalism as the turning point from traditional societies to modernity. No longer were holy fools or demoniacs allowed to roam the peripheries or left to their families. The inherently unconventional or abnormal, “those who do not conform to the ideal modern worker,” began to be institutionalized and stigmatized as mentally sick. In recent years, “economic shifts have led to new accommodations and greater accessibility or people who were previously marginalized.” An Autistic person might make a good graphic designer or a great code writer.
Nobody’s Normal argues against one of the tenets of Western philosophy, the mind-body split that compartmentalizes healthcare and our understanding of ourselves. Physical symptoms are often the result of psychological trauma—and vice versa. But Grinker’s main thrust is against the social and individual harm promoted by stigmatizing mental illness. The changing attitude toward Autism is Exhibit A for his case.
