Everyone Has a Story

The guy to my left was overseas killing people for the military. He was concerned that he wasn't particularly broken up about it. The guy to my right was a big-city cop until he was severely injured on duty and took early retirement. The prof readily admitted to suffering from PTSD.

If everyone else in my Abnormal Psych class is that interesting, it's going to be one heckuva ride.

After the syllabus/policy housekeeping song and dance that I have given any number of times, we talked about abnormality and how problematic it is to define. The DSM-IV-TR has this incredibly long, totally useless definition that reads like the guy at the end of the car commercials murmuring a mile a minute about lease terms and payments.

There are four major components that can render a behavior abnormal. Unfortunately, for each criterion, it's pretty easy to come up with examples of things that meet that particular criterion, but are not pathological. Likewise, there are plenty of abnormalities that do not meet at least some of the criteria.

First, there's deviance: behavior, emotion, or thought that deviates from established behavior and norms. This one's super-easy: go to India and loudly proclaim the miracle of the Immaculate Conception. They will think you are deviant, all right. Or talk to the Ice Breakers, those people that go swimming in icy waters every winter. Deviant? Yes. Abnormal in the abnormal psych sense? No. Also, deviance is always relative to a particular culture and time--it would have been quite odd for me to be taking college classes a century ago as a woman.

Next, bring on distress: the behavior, emotion, or thought is unpleasant or upsetting to the sufferer. Seems clear enough. However, people who suffer from mania are clearly experiencing abnormal behavior despite the complete absence of distress involved. And the guy who's convinced he's Jesus Christ is probably happy as a clam.

Third, we have dysfunction: the ailment makes it difficult for people to care for themselves, maintain social contacts, and hold down a job. Again, a counterexample: people going on hunger strikes to achieve better conditions are dysfunctional in the sense that they are not meeting their basic needs, but this is not abnormal behavior in the clinical sense of the word.
So feel free to get your Gandhi on.

Finally, there is danger: the ultimate in psychological dysfunctioning is behavior that is dangerous to oneself or others. Clearly, the alcoholic who drives around drunk all the time fits the bill, but most people with mental health problems are not dangerous at all.

So, in conclusion, people continue to argue about what "abnormality" actually is. There's more gray here than in the skies over Cleveland in February.