Diagnoses' Crossing the Line Between Normal and Abnormal... Wait, What's Normal?

Reading through "Better than Well: American Medicine meets the American Dream", and "Brave New World" in the library at school today, intermittently oohhing and ahhing when I found a quote that I was interested in (to which the man sitting across from me occasionally gazed upwards from his studies and looked over my way as I sunk deep within my books, hardly aware at all that he may be thinking I am a disturbance to him), I got to thinking about psychotropic medications (good thing! it is what I'm studying...) but more so than just that it's an anti-depressant, but that perhaps psychiatrists are treating what may be "normal". I don't have my quotes in front of me right now, but I will add to this blog later what I discovered in "Better than Well". Fascinating.

The example they used was shyness. What crosses the line between someone who is normally shy and someone who suffers from social anxiety? I don't know, honestly, as I'm not a psychiatrist nor am I anywhere near the point in my psychology studies to diagnose someone, but it did get the wheels turning.

So, I sat down tonight with this thought, about shyness and how much we are treating for normal behavior, and thought about all the famous people (artists, musicians, leaders) that suffered from a mental illness. What would they be like today if they were treated for their disorder(s)? I don't think we can ever actually answer that, but nonetheless, it's an interesting topic.

It is one more thing to add to my study of popular culture and American psychiatry.