NORMALITY DOES NOT EQUAL MENTAL HEALTH

The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Mental Health

Steven James Bartlett

Praeger, 2011

available in clothbound and in eBook editions

ISBN 978-0-313-39931-2

EISBN 978-0-313-39932-9

Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Mental Health is the first book to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. It is also the first book to take contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology to task for deeply flawed thinking when they accept the diagnostic system propounded by the DSM, which reifies syndromes into alleged “mental disorders.” Where Thomas Szasz argued that “mental disorders” are myths, Bartlett makes the much more damaging charge that reifying mental disorders involves a provable form of fallacious thinking, producing a variety of epistemological nonsense.

The author weighs the evidence, and with strict logic, compelling evidence, and careful analysis, challenges the current paradigm of mental health theorists and practitioners. Never has the case against the standard of psychological normality and against the non-scientific creation of “mental disorders” been made with such boldness, multidisciplinary knowledge, solid scholarship, and clarity of language.

Although the need to question psychological normality as a satisfactory standard of good mental health has been staring us in the face for a long time, no one, clinical professional or scholar, has had the courage or the intellectual willingness to face with unflinching honesty the shortcomings and disappointments of psychological normality and to propose that we should look elsewhere for standards of good psychological health.

Contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology, on the contrary, base their conception of mental health on the standard of psychological normality. This supposition has come to be accepted uncritically and without question, and yet it has become fundamental to current clinical theory and practice, and forms the core of the psychiatric classification system of the DSM, which has become today’s diagnostic authority.

While touting today’s scientific gold standard of “evidence-based” research, DSM’s authoritative classification of “mental disorders” is itself hardly “evidence-based,” for it is recognized, but seldom emphasized, that the majority of DSM’s “mental disorders” have no known empirical, organic basis.

Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health takes DSM to task not only for its failure to adhere to today’s evidence-based standard, but for its failure to rein in its highly speculative diagnostic labeling, in accordance with the modern paradigm of rigorous science, which repudiates metaphorical reifications whose alleged validity rests only on the voting preferences of a professional membership.

The book is a carefully argued critique of the dominant assumption in current psychiatry and clinical psychology that psychological normality is fundamental to mental health and therefore good. In place of this unsatisfactory presumption, Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health proposes a positive and constructive revision in our understanding of mental health and of our conception of mental disorders.

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Psychiatrist Sandra L. Bloom, M.D. presents key ideas of the book in the following delightful, creative, and artistic 16-minute audio commentary and slide show.

Dr. Bloom is Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy in the Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. She has used the video in her mental health policy course, “Public Health and the Complexity of Mental Health Policy: Exploring Past, Present, and Future,” as well as in other classes that focus on trauma. She has kindly given her permission for this video to be included on this website. Dr. Bloom may be contacted at Slb79@drexel.edu.