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The New Sanity |
Statistics Canada recently issued a report that for the first time in history, married people are in the minority in Canada. This despite the presumed bump in the stats provided by all those newly legal gay marriages.
Fully a quarter of all families are now headed by a single parent. There was a time when that was referred to as a broken home, but these days fathers are increasingly seen as superfluous. Even though today's fathers are more involved in their children's lives than ever. But that's a rant for another enspiel.
There have been other studies, too numerous to count, which show that the diagnosis of mental illness is at an all-time high and still climbing. I'm not trying to draw a link between the two. At least not yet.
The thing about mental illness is that the definition of normal and abnormal are constantly changing, and were never clear to begin with. And it doesn't help that most of the people studying psychology are really just trying to figure out what's wrong with themselves.
It doesn't take a degree in crazy to know that if more and more people are being diagnosed as abnormal, something is up. People might be getting a little crazier, just as part of the general devolution of the species. But more likely we're just applying new labels to things that have always been around.
These days when a kid doesn't want to sit still in a classroom for six straight hours they're diagnosed with ADHD and given drugs. There was a time when the diagnosis would've been that they are boys. Of course, the prescription for that diagnosis would be a whack with a ruler.
Or maybe the correlation should just be made between the increase in "hyperactive disorders" and the elimination of recess, otherwise known as exercise. Exercise, you may have heard, is good for a lot of problems. Problems that are increasingly becoming prevalent among kids, like depression and being fat.
But it's not just kids that are getting the crazy label. Anxiety disorder is up, bipolar is up, OCD is up. Some crazyologists think geekiness may actually be a mild form of autism. And absolutely everyone suffers from depression at some point.
The line I want to draw is not a causal link between the increase in mental disorders and the decline of the nuclear family, even though that would be fun. No, what I want to point out is that "normal" is--by definition--whatever happens to describe the majority of people. These days literacy is normal , but a few generations back illiteracy was the norm (and if MySpace is any gauge, it will be again).
Right now we are at the inflection point of two changes in the definition of normal. First, being married is now abnormal. Deviant, even. And second, it's not normal to be sane.
Obviously in the case of marriage there is no implied value judgment. Married people being abnormal doesn't mean they're not still richer, happier and longer lived. In the case of mental illness, however, the definition of sane is the definition of normal. If the majority of people panic while drowning, it's not a phobia. If only a few do, it is.
We only call people who hear voices in their head insane because the majority of people (ie the sane ones) don't. Everybody hears one voice in their head, and anyone who doesn't is crazy.
But because of the increase of categorizing things as abnormal, the majority of people (the measure of what we call sane) are now actually insane. Having any individual mental illness is not normal (by definition), but having no mental illness at all is also abnormal. And therefore is itself a mental illness. It's now possible to be too sane. Having nothing wrong with you is what's wrong with you.
This line of thinking triggers my paradoxophobia. But that's good, because it means I'm not suffering from excess sanity. If you get diagnosed with that they probably make you take PCP.
