What are the criteria of the norm in psychiatry, how to understand if you are "normal"?

By Category :

3 Answers

  1. According to article 10 of the Law of the Russian Federation “On Psychiatric Care…”, the diagnosis of a mental disorder is made in accordance with generally recognized international standards and cannot be based solely on a citizen's disagreement with the moral, cultural, political or religious values accepted in society, or on other reasons that are not directly related to the state of his mental health.

    By “generally recognized international standards” we mean section V of the 10th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases, which contains all the mental and behavioral disorders known to modern science. Conventionally, most of them can be divided into psychotic (arising for no apparent reason, accompanied by delusions and hallucinations) and neurotic (appearing as a reaction to certain external events).

    Some psychiatrists are convinced that there are no mentally healthy people, there are only underexamined ones. In part, this is true: we are not biorobots, we live and feel, and this cannot not affect our psyche. The question is that the psyche of each person copes with this in different ways: someone has almost no stress, and someone literally goes crazy.

    If a person is really seriously ill (schizophrenia, mental retardation, etc.), then he is unlikely to remain without the attention of psychiatrists and eventually get to a place from which he may not get out for the rest of his life. However, in the so-called “small psychiatry”, everything is much more complicated: due to the stressful living conditions, many of us need various forms of treatment and correction (usually psychologists and psychotherapists do this), but due to a number of prejudices, few people seek help, preferring to “treat” alcohol, tobacco, drugs, etc.

    In general, psychiatry is the most imprecise area of medicine, and the concept of normality in it remains as mysterious as the nature of schizophrenia. The task of each person is to ensure competent help in the event of the appearance of certain symptoms of banal stress, neurosis and depression and not to bring the situation to such a state when the discrepancy with the norm becomes obvious.

  2. You know, I don't want to overload you with unnecessary facts, laws, regulations, etc.
    as long as you deal with your own problems(worries or just fears that everyone has) no heartbreak, no infusion of horse-sized doses of alcohol or pills, no tam… I don't know about knifemaking and other creepy things..

    Then everything is ok with you. Even if you speak out loud ,you like to fight on the Internet or watch hardcore porn.
    After all, everyone's response to stress is different.
    You should worry about yourself when you realize that you don't have enough strength and don't know what to do to help yourself.

  3. In the most general sense, a mental norm is the absence of a mental pathology. That is, if a person has symptoms of any mental disorder, this indicates a discrepancy between the mental norm. You can view the International Classification of Diseases ICD-11 (http://icd11.ru/psihicheskie-rasstroistva-mkb11/) or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), which lists mental disorders and their symptoms in accordance with the concepts of modern psychiatry.�

    However, in itself, the discrepancy between certain types of behavior and other indicators of mental normality is not a sign of” abnormality ” of the person himself. For example, you can determine whether your blood sugar level is normal, but we can hardly call a person with high glucose levels “abnormal”. Similarly, psychiatry can diagnose a particular disorder, but not answer the question about the “normality” of the person himself.�

    At the same time, when we talk about the mental norm, we also need to take into account the problem of cultural relativity. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders explicitly states that “the boundaries between normal and abnormal behavior may differ across cultures” (DSM-V, p. 21).

    Anthropological studies show that some types of behavior that do not correspond to the ideas about the behavior of a mentally healthy person can be perceived completely differently in another culture. The first and perhaps most famous of these studies is Ruth Benedict's 1934 paper ” Anthropology and the Abnormal.” Benedict studied North American tribes in which behavior that we might describe as paranoid or megalomaniacal was not just normal, but socially acceptable. Later, there were numerous studies (just look at articles in the journals Transcultural Psychiatry, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, etc.) showing that the mental norm differs in different cultures, in different communities, and even under different circumstances.�

    In addition, ideas about the mental norm change over time. New disorders are beginning to be diagnosed, and some disorders, on the contrary, disappear from medical classifications (for example, until the 1970s, homosexuality was a psychiatric diagnosis).

    All this does not mean that “there is really no norm”, but the concept of a mental norm is not universal and changes.

Leave a Reply

Categories