Not many people outside the world of psychiatry and psychology will have heard of DSMV. This is a massive American publication and is the psychiatric bible not only in America but many other countries too. DSMV stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 5 and at close to a thousand pages is a substantial work indeed. Here you will find listed every conceivable state of mental ill health. This whole area of study is officially known as ‘abnormal psychology’.
In DSMV there is a label for every state of mind you could imagine, and some you probably could not. Psychosis, schizophrenias, depressive states, anxiety states, phobias, obsessive compulsive disorders, paranoia, plus every kind of perversion. It is so comprehensive that as others have cryptically remarked, even if you regard yourself as mentally fit you won’t have to look far before you find a perfect description of yourself.
However, among all the thousands of labels for so-called ‘abnormal’ states of mind there is a glaring absence. There is no description of a ‘normal’ state of mind. This is because in the wonderful world of psychology no-one can agree on a definition. So there isn’t one.
This then begs the question, if we don’t know what normal is how can we possibly know what abnormal is? After all, something must be defined in terms of what it is not. It must be the opposite of something, but the opposite of what?
Of course, if normality doesn’t even exist it means abnormality can’t exist either, which then puts the whole term ‘abnormal psychology’ into question.
In fact, in my 34 years as a psychotherapist and counsellor I have found most mental distress is a result of unhappy or traumatic events or circumstances that we would logically expect to create a ‘mental injury’ of some kind. After all, if someone falls off a ladder and suffers a broken leg we might say the person was unlucky, or even careless, but we would be unlikely to say they were abnormal.
But there we have it. Mental illness and those who suffer from it have a long history of being thought of as abnormal, and the title in psychology persists. Things are changing but it’s a slow business. And it’s unlikely to stop the next edition of the DSM being even bigger than the present one.
You are more than a label. Check out ‘I Just Want To Be Happy’ on Amazon or the e-book version on this site.