Mental Illness and Mental Health

Introduction

Psychology is portrayed as a noble field where clinicians seek who help clients through the human suffering that they experience from psychiatric issues. There is controversy as to what constitutes human suffering to the extent that therapeutic and pharmacological interventions need to occur. The line between normal functioning or coping with the realities of life and psychiatric illness appears to blur further with every new addition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) from the American Psychiatric Association (APA). An example of this blurring is the proposed addition of Complicated Grief Disorder which has the potential to medicalize and dehumanize an adaptive process that occurs when one is bereft of a relationship. What is deemed abnormal by one generation, in one edition of the DSM can be totally revised in another edition. But what is abnormal and normal in our society at any given period?

The use of the terms abnormal and normal seems archaic when dealing with symptoms of mental illness given the mathematical origin of the terms. More appropriately, the terms adaptive and nonadaptive speak to the transient nature of the relativity in our thoughts, behavior, physical symptoms, and psychosocial interactions. Several individuals I work with have been institutionalized their entire lives, thus living for decades with no privacy and little safety from other residents and unscrupulous care givers. They display behaviors today that are described as maladaptive because the situation that they live in has changed and the old behavior has not changed.

For instance, a client has been institutionalized since for 31 of his 35 years of life. He hordes items such as garbage,...

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