Nobody's Normal
How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness
-
-
4.5 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma.
For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.
Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity.
Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity.
Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grinker (Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism), an anthropology professor at George Mason University, examines modern ideas around mental illness in this impactful book. He proposes that "mental illness and stigma were born together" of capitalism, under which the mentally ill were understood in opposition to the "ideal modern worker." As a result, up until WWI, the insane were considered unfit for society; the war, however, exposed the general population to the idea that even brave men could be diagnosed with problems such as shell shock or neurasthenia. Grinker then looks at the development of medical means for treating mental illness over the 20th century, resulting in both effective and ineffective measures, such as, respectively, electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomies. He also includes some family history his grandfather was psychoanalyzed by Freud and later became a famous psychoanalyst himself. Readers sympathetic to Grinker's concern for the mentally ill will find an enlightening brief for the positions that "both normality and abnormality are fictional lands" and that the idea of a mental health spectrum leads to more humane care than strictly drawn divisions between the mentally healthy and unhealthy. This book will fascinate anyone drawn to the subjects of mental illness, psychology, and psychiatry.
