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What is normal?

Riverwolf

Amateur Rambler / Proud Ergi
Premium Member
I've long accepted that the notion of "normal" doesn't exist in the first place. What's always thought of as "normal" is simply what's familiar.
 

Wu Wei

ursus senum severiorum and ex-Bisy Backson
Normal is generally decided by the society in which you live
 

Paranoid Android

Active Member
Psychiatrists and big pharma seemed to want half the U.S. population doped up on meds. So to them what is a normal human?


I use a functional definition. In other words, are you eating ? Are you sleeping ? Do you take care of your hygene ? Using my functional definition, we would say that a person that does those things is normal.
In fact, the term "normal" has a different meaning depending on the person. Do you hear voices ? No ? Then, for you that would be abnormal behavior. For schizophrenics, that IS normal behavior.
The second question we have to ask is "Does the behavior cause significant harm to the person ? Can he or she handle or cope with that particular behavior" ? In the case of the schizophrenic, more often then not, the voices are disturbing and can drive the person literally insane. Again, to the question " Can he or she handle or cope with that particular behavior ", the answer is "No'.
So we can note some facts: 1) It is normal for that person 2) but they do not want to hear the voices. Seeing it is normal, but they don't want to hear the voices, we cn look fr some measure to cut the voices out or curtail them. As far as I currently know, there is no method to do that, but one: medication.
In my case, I was suffering from thoughts that encouraged me to kill my family. The thoughts to bash there heads in. cut there throats and other methods of killing were persistent like a broken record. I would tie myself into bed so I wouldn't kill my family in ,my sleep. I seemed to myself as if a demon straight from the pit of Hell had invaded me and was trying to possess me and cause me to kill. Of course, I sought help and I'm one of those people "doped up on meds".
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Psychiatrists and big pharma seemed to want half the U.S. population doped up on meds.
That's mostly due to professional, economic, and competitive move by psychiatry. After all, most clinical psychologists are better trained and disagree with the fundamental tenets of psychiatrists, these fundamentals have not only failed decades of tests, but these experiments have indicated the opposite of the original assumptions underlying modern psychiatry (defined when psychiatry used the creation of the DSM-III to create the biomedical model of mental health). However, clinical psychology is a fundamental component of the mental health field (so are MSWs and other clinical professionals).

So to them what is a normal human?
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
 

Laika

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
Normal. adjective.

1. moralistic and pseudo-scientific jargon which means anything you expect a person to do without them liking it. use of the term in this context means a person establishes their authority on the basis of peer pressure whilst desperately trying to conceal their extreme prejudice and complete ignorance of the subject based on the expectation that, inspite of such ignorance, these should be used as moral standards by which everyone else should be judged and expect compliance. The attribution of "normal" ussually has no proven relation to actual human behaviour and often therefore determintal to the interests of the person concerned.

Context: "This is perfectly normal. I don't know what you are talking about."


2. a derogatory insult or term of abuse, often employed by teenagers or infantilsed adults, as a measure of inner impoverishment by social standards of "goodness" and "nicencess". Often carries an inverse moral evaluation that wreckless, dangerous and illegal behaviour is desirable or "cool". use of this insult is common in societies based on consumerism in which instant gratification and sensationalism lead to potentially excessive expectations of fulfillment and in which a person who martyrs themselves in the pursuit of such fulfillment establishes high social esteem.

Context: "You're just so normal! I want to be like that guy!"

3. A state of relative tranquility and anonymity after a crisis that is often not as bad a people think based on the assumption that such a crisis was exceptional.

Context: "Its good things have gone back to normal"
 

psychoslice

Veteran Member
There is no such thing as being normal, normal is just what a society wants you to be, as long as you follow what society wants, then you are labelled as normal.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
The 68% that hover around the top of the bell curve.
.
I'd put "normal" in the middle....with a bigger middle than this...
th
 

beenherebeforeagain

Rogue Animist
Premium Member
It would be easy to say that an insane society creates insane members, but I don't believe there is any group on earth where at least some of the people don't "have issues." Or, insane members create and insane society.:D

A more reasonable thought that accounts for the broad distribution of mental problems across cultures is that living, even under the best of conditions, can be difficult for individuals due to a variety of innate and experienced causes. Some fraction of the population is going to have "issues" of the psychological sort...:eek:

if that normal distribution of a Bell Curve is accurate, then depending on where we draw the lines between "normal" and "abnormal" (that is, is abnormal more than one, two, or three standard deviations from the mean, which is how that "standard" distribution is typically described statistically), we could be talking about roughly 68 percent of the population as normal (within one standard deviation), with another 28 percent between one and two standard deviations (about 14 percent on each side of the curve), and about 4 percent more than two standard deviations from the mean. If "abnormal" is only outside one standard deviation, then about 32 percent of the population is abnormal; if two standard deviations, then only those 4 percent out on the tails, and if it's more than 3 SDs, then abnormal would only be a fraction of 1 percent.

There is of course no guarantee that the population is really distributed "normally" like a Bell Curve--that's just the basic assumption of statistics...:rolleyes:
 

1137

Here until I storm off again
Premium Member
Psychiatrists and big pharma seemed to want half the U.S. population doped up on meds. So to them what is a normal human?

Normal is essentially a statistical average. The closer to the mean you are the more "normal". It's actually not even an operational definition really, not some subjective philosophical concept like people think. At the mean you can function in life and go about things with relative ease. The farther from normal in an context the more likely to have positive/negative effects. Once those effects get in the way and cause dysfunction, we have a psychological disorder. So someone with severe depression is going to be far from the mean in most variables and have trouble functioning in the world, and so medication and therapy are recommended. Without statistical means we couldn't help, well, anyone. To get rid of the concept of "normal" would leave dysfunctional people helpless.

Edit: the posts in this thread are... soul crushing. Stop commenting when you have no idea people.
 

Thief

Rogue Theologian
Normal is essentially a statistical average. The closer to the mean you are the more "normal". It's actually not even an operational definition really, not some subjective philosophical concept like people think. At the mean you can function in life and go about things with relative ease. The farther from normal in an context the more likely to have positive/negative effects. Once those effects get in the way and cause dysfunction, we have a psychological disorder. So someone with severe depression is going to be far from the mean in most variables and have trouble functioning in the world, and so medication and therapy are recommended. Without statistical means we couldn't help, well, anyone. To get rid of the concept of "normal" would leave dysfunctional people helpless.

Edit: the posts in this thread are... soul crushing. Stop commenting when you have no idea people.

soul crushing?
and your avatar is .....what?

(just poking fun....no malintent)
 

1137

Here until I storm off again
Premium Member
soul crushing?
and your avatar is .....what?

(just poking fun....no malintent)

Yeah. I'm so horribly sick of people talking out their *** what they studied on Wikipedia. Some of us work our butts off to study things like psychology and it's awful to just see others jump in spouting nonsense.
 

1137

Here until I storm off again
Premium Member
I've long accepted that the notion of "normal" doesn't exist in the first place. What's always thought of as "normal" is simply what's familiar.

More like what's most common, since that's exactly what normal means.

Normal is generally decided by the society in which you live

Normality is a descriptive of statistics, specifically those around the average. Imagine of we left mentally handicapped individuals fend for themselves since "there's no normal" (and therefore no abnormal).

Normal. adjective.

1. moralistic and pseudo-scientific jargon which means anything you expect a person to do without them liking it. use of the term in this context means a person establishes their authority on the basis of peer pressure whilst desperately trying to conceal their extreme prejudice and complete ignorance of the subject based on the expectation that, inspite of such ignorance, these should be used as moral standards by which everyone else should be judged and expect compliance. The attribution of "normal" ussually has no proven relation to actual human behaviour and often therefore determintal to the interests of the person concerned.

Context: "This is perfectly normal. I don't know what you are talking about."


2. a derogatory insult or term of abuse, often employed by teenagers or infantilsed adults, as a measure of inner impoverishment by social standards of "goodness" and "nicencess". Often carries an inverse moral evaluation that wreckless, dangerous and illegal behaviour is desirable or "cool". use of this insult is common in societies based on consumerism in which instant gratification and sensationalism lead to potentially excessive expectations of fulfillment and in which a person who martyrs themselves in the pursuit of such fulfillment establishes high social esteem.

Context: "You're just so normal! I want to be like that guy!"

3. A state of relative tranquility and anonymity after a crisis that is often not as bad a people think based on the assumption that such a crisis was exceptional.

Context: "Its good things have gone back to normal"

I feel a lot of anger in this post. Care to share what happened?

There is no such thing as being normal, normal is just what a society wants you to be, as long as you follow what society wants, then you are labelled as normal.

So then there's no such thing as abnormal. Everyone is just fine and needs equal treatment. Cancer shouldn't be treated, mental disorder shouldn't be treated, physical pain shouldn't be treated... Of course it would be great if everyone was normal, or at least there was so negative abnormality. But it's certainly not a socially created concept. Maybe to the average Joe but not in actual usage.
 

Wu Wei

ursus senum severiorum and ex-Bisy Backson
Normality is a descriptive of statistics, specifically those around the average. Imagine of we left mentally handicapped individuals fend for themselves since "there's no normal" (and therefore no abnormal). .

That is true...statistically, but normal is defined as conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected..... what is typical, or expected in one society or culture is not necessarily typical, or expected in another therefore what is considered normal in one society of culture can be considered abnormal in another.
 

1137

Here until I storm off again
Premium Member
That is true...statistically, but normal is defined as conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected..... what is typical, or expected in one society or culture is not necessarily typical, or expected in another therefore what is considered normal in one society of culture can be considered abnormal in another.

What's usual, typical, or expected is decided upon by statistics. How else would you know what's usual and what's not?
 

Wu Wei

ursus senum severiorum and ex-Bisy Backson
What's usual, typical, or expected is decided upon by statistics. How else would you know what's usual and what's not?

Observation and study... that is where statistics comes from.... but if a large group is doing a thing in a society it may be considered normal where in another it is not normal at all. Does not make it right or wrong. And a statistical study of said group will give you things that are within the normal range where the same study of another will show you it is abnormal
 

Politesse

Amor Vincit Omnia
Hate to set myself against the inertia of a communal rant, but I don't think the goal of psychiatrists is to make people normal. It's well understood that most people can find themselves in the DSM-5 somewhere. The idea of psychiatry is to help people be well, not "normal". If a problem isn't bothering the bearer or severely impairing their social relationships, it's not a problem. Believe it or not, psychiatrists tend to be your helper sorts, not evil people bent on mind control. Their primary weapon is conversation, not medication.

Pharmaceutical companies have their own, transparent motives.
 
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