“The camera has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as to make them look extremely disturbed,” writes Susan Sontag in an essay from 1973 called Freak Show. “The camera chooses oddity, chases it, names it, elects it, frames it, develops it, titles it.” Sontag was talking about photography, but this concept of naming-and-framing is a useful analogy for how we view one another in society at large.
We muscle through life constantly framing the “normality” of others against our own patchwork of knowledge, life experiences, values and opinions. We can’t help it. Yet normality is probably the most subjective concept human beings can ponder.
If I were to walk down the street and take photos of anyone that didn’t fit with my idea of normal, the pictures would reveal more about me than about my subjects because, as an individual, normal is a social construct based on my cultural values and relative norms: what I know from the life I have lived.
Like everyone else, over time I have attached my own meaning to the words normal and abnormal. This is the product of so many things: the society I was born into, childhood experiences, my parents’ values, my education, my relationships, what I read and watch, my chosen career path, etc. I can reject the notion of normal until I’m blue in the face and, like many, I largely try to, but I cannot reject the unconscious associations I make with the word. Of course, my concept of what’s normal doesn’t just affect how I view others; it affects how I view myself.
Am I a normal size? Am I normal if I’m not heterosexual? Am I normal in my sexual practices? Am I normal to get as lonely as I do? Am I normal to let my dog sleep in bed with me? Am I normal in the way I emotionally process things? Am I normal for worrying about everything? If yes is the desired response, where does that need for validation come from and what is contributing to the self-questioning in the first place?
I’d wager that a significant number of people asking Google whether they are normal are doing so in reaction to a mental or emotional state. If we broadly consider the meanings we attach to normality and abnormality in society, clinical pathology is a starting point. In medicine, normal is a term inextricably bound with the diagnostic process. The parameters are set by centuries of research and knowledge that tell us what levels, rates or positions of things are needed for the body to function well and what signals a body in distress. Tests and scans can tell doctors what’s wrong: a higher-than-normal heart rate, blood glucose level or an abnormal growth where there shouldn’t be one. In this context, normality can be empirically quantified. However, “pathology” is also a term associated with mental health, which can’t be empirically quantified. Therein lies all sorts of tension.
Wondering if you’re normal or why you can’t be normal often goes hand in hand with mental distress, particularly if it’s the first time you’ve felt a certain way. It’s an upsetting, frustrating thought tangle. But no test or scan can say to us, “You are definitely depressed”. Research tells us more about the genetic components to some types of mental distress, but diagnosis is based on discussion and observation.
There is much conflict in psychology over how helpful it is to adhere to the biomedical model of mental distress (for example viewing depression as a clinical pathology that should be treated with the appropriate medication), because it limits our potential to explore contributing sociocultural factors. Critical psychologists challenge mainstream psychology and see social change as means of preventing – rather than firefighting – mental health issues. Many question the value of diagnosis altogether because of the potential impact a “disordered” label could have on a person and how they perceive their place in the world.
If someone is highly anxious and seeks help, how does a clinical diagnosis of anxiety disorder fit into thoughts surrounding being abnormal, self-esteem and the prevailing stigma around mental distress? For many, a term that names and makes sense of frightening, abstract thoughts and feelings will be very helpful. You’re told that you’re not alone in despair, that you’re part of a cohort. It is unhelpful to argue with this. For others (I include myself here), the idea that a propensity for anxious thinking somehow knocks you off the axes of normal humanness doesn’t seem fair or valid.
Controversy continues to rumble around the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the standard classification of mental “disorders” used by mental health professionals in the US and beyond. It is the bible, of sorts, for who is or isn’t mentally normal. But in its last revision in 2013 the diagnostic criteria expanded to such whopping proportions, it began to read as a medicalisation of … life. By lowering so many diagnostic thresholds, pretty much anyone could be seen as having a mental illness at any point in time. When I was researching my book, I read the DSM in the British Library and diagnosed myself with about 50 disorders. Can something like grief really be pathologised as a mood disorder? Who can tell us that we’re doing bereavement abnormally? Do “conditions” such as “sluggish cognitive tempo disorder” actually just point to, you know, laziness?
When Jon Ronson was researching The Psychopath Test he met Robert Spitzer, the editor under whose charge the DSM’s waist expanded most dramatically, and asked if he might have created a world in which the line between normal human behaviour and clinical diagnoses has become dangerously blurred. Spitzer’s response? “I don’t know.” Books such as The Psychopath Test and James Davies’s Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good gently encourage us to be suspicious of what psychiatry considers normal and abnormal and to explore the idea of mental health as a movable concept.
Pretty much everything is a movable concept, though, right? Babies being born now will enter a world that’s beginning to have a more nuanced, compassionate understanding of the spectrums of gender, sexuality and identity than those of previous generations. Historical heteronormativity is challenged more with every passing day. It’s a similar picture with mental health – stigma still abounds, but the discourse is changing. We see experiencing mental distress less as marking someone as “other” than just a someone. It’s too easy to assume that everyone else is normal and we’re not, but as Eva Wiseman has asserted “every single other comfortable-looking fool is trying really hard, all the time”.
Human beings cannot be reduced to statistical jargon. People are not outliers on a bell curve when they don’t conform to a societal norm: they are living their own interpretation of it. Ideological power is a thick artery through so many social institutions but we must remember, as much as we can, that definitions of normal vary as much as our fingerprints. Unless we’re breaking the law or could be responsible for gratuitous human suffering, seeking clarity over whether what we’re thinking, feeling or doing is normal should also come with the inward question: “Who or what am I trying to get validation from?” The answer can tell us more about ourselves than we think.