"I just wish I could be normal" is the lament of a lot of people who are dealing with mental illness. Well, there's a funny thing about normal, at least from a psychological point of view. The DSM V is 991 pages long. In it there are definitions of all kinds of mental illnesses and disorders from Acute Stress Disorder to Voyeurism (actually from the Index of Psychiatric Disorders for the DSM IV). But there is no definition of "normal."
Google defines "normal" as "conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected." Hunh. Conforming. That's an orange alert word for me. Does "normal" mean everybody should look the same, think the same thoughts, believe in the same things? Eric Maisel asks these questions in his Psychology Today blog post, "What do we mean by 'normal'?" and continues the discussion in other posts.
More relevant to the discussion of mental illness, should everyone feel the same things, react the same way to an event? The fact that many, but not all, veterans of war show symptoms of PTSD means that not all people experience events, even traumatic and violent events, in the same way.
And even normal events aren't experienced in the same way by everyone. I see a movie; I really like it; my sister hates it. Rotten Tomatoes gives it 23% on the Tomatometer. So a lot of people didn't like it, but I enjoyed it.
I think "normal" can be scary. I mentioned in a previous post watching "The Book Thief". It adeptly illustrated what "normal" was in German society at that time. "Normal" was conforming to Nazi beliefs. People who didn't were shunned, imprisoned, and much, much worse.
Today, there are many politicians who proclaim, "We live in a Christian nation." That comes as a shock to me, being Jewish, and having friends and acquaintances who are Muslim, atheist, Buddhist, and so forth.
For people diagnosed with a mental illness (and by the way, Eric Maisel, along with many others, argues mightily against these labels), it's easy to feel a long way from "normal." But maybe we need to rethink whether "normal" is a good standard to hold ourselves against.
I prefer two other standards: "stable" and "functional." "Stability" means for me no longer being on the wild roller coaster ride of overwhelming emotions. For a schizophrenic with auditory hallucinations, it may mean either no longer hearing those voices, or realizing that those voices aren't real. So definitions can vary.
"Functional" is what works for you. I have been chasing this sleep routine for a while now. I can give you many reasons why I want to have a sleep routine, including: I think it contributes to stability and physical health as well as mental health; it makes it easier to make and keep appointments; and it makes it easier to run errands.
George Dawes Green, on the other hand, a novelist and founder of The Moth, has learned to live with his body totally out of sync with a 24-hour schedule (USA Today article that I first found on the Non-24 blog). So that works for him.
Why worry about what is normal? What is your "functional"? How do you define "stability"?
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