JQXVN on Substack: "Critiques like Hari’s make more sense in light of the pervasive idea that psychopathology reflects a kind of moral or other deeply personal stain. The sense of “normal” that’s meant isn’t “typical” or “understandable” but something more like “unblemished”. If you suffer from gri…"

Notes

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Critiques like Hari’s make more sense in light of the pervasive idea that psychopathology reflects a kind of moral or other deeply personal stain. The sense of “normal” that’s meant isn’t “typical” or “understandable” but something more like “unblemished”. If you suffer from grief, or another environmental insult, there’s nothing “wrong with you” insofar as you aren’t the source of the problem. And many consider, subconsciously or otherwise, that psychiatry treats people who have “something wrong with them,” people who are the problem as opposed to people who are having problems. If being given a diagnosis is tantamount to receiving a scarlet letter or getting tossed in the rotten fruit bin, people (individuals, society) will be much more guarded and frankly weird about what kinds of things can be considered psychopathologies. This intuition is foundational to a lot of misplaced ideas about psychiatry.

“Other critics focus on things like understandability to challenge psychopathology. Bloom discusses Johann Hari’s objections, for example: depression is a reasonable response to life circumstances. If you have full-blown depression but you are grieving, or homeless, or unemployed, or going through a divorce, you are not ill, you are having a normal response to a terrible event. ‘Normal,’ of course, is a fuzzy, ambiguous concept. If someone who lost their job is so depressed that they cannot get out of bed for weeks, it may be ‘normal’ or ‘understandable’ in some sense of the word, but it will be abnormal in many others. Since the concept is ambiguous, consequently, notions of ‘normality’ (or ‘understandability’) and ‘psychopathology’ are not mutually exclusive. It may be ‘understandable’ for someone to have a nervous breakdown in the middle of a high-stress divorce or for someone to experience paralyzing fear and traumatic flashbacks months after a sexual assault, but these still represent states of disabilit…”

Awais Aftab

Reviewing Paul Bloom on Psychopathology

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