Abnormal And Abnormal Behavior

Abnormal/Normal Behavior When I think of abnormal behavior, the first thing that comes to mind is one of my aunt’s. She committed suicide when I very young, so early 1970’s. As I got older, inevitably stories of her would arise during holiday get togethers. She was married with three children and in her early thirties, residing in Florida, when she walked out and away from her husband and small children. For over a year, no one knew what happened to her, she made no effort to contact anyone. Eventually, the Salvation Army somewhere in Michigan called my grandmother and they sent her home on a bus. She never returned to her husband or children. The doctors diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic. My mother told me that when she was on her medication she was fine, but once she felt “fine”, she would stop her medication. When the medication left her system, she became anxious and afraid. She once chased my grandmother, who was in her late sixties down the driveway with an ax, because she thought her mother was trying to kill her. After several inpatient stays in mental hospitals, she came back home again and she was doing good. She left my grandmother’s one night while everyone was sleeping, made it approximately fifteen miles away to a lake.

Although, serial killers such as Ted Bundy looked and acted “normal” on the inside he was not. I find it very difficult to define normal behavior, because of the large variations of what is “normal”. Our society accepts many forms of normal behavior, whether it is a gender identity issue, or being LBGT are both of which would have never occurred or be accepted in 1970. Thankfully, we live in a country and have information that tests our toddlers and children to make sure they are hitting the “normal” developmental milestones. An absence of speech by a certain age is a milestone used to test a child for autism (Hooley, Butcher, & Mineka,