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Challenges in Identifying Mental Disorders Submitted by Name of Student Name of Establishment Class XXXX, Section XXXX, Fall 2012

2 Challenges in Identifying Mental Disorders The question of norm has always been quite arbitrary. History makes it evident beyond doubt that cultural context of a certain epoch may shift the borders between acceptable and abnormal immensely. For example, in Ancient Greece, over two thousand years ago, the citizens of Athens condemned Socrates to death because he allegedly was causing the moral corruption of youth, whereas now we consider him a prominent ethical philosopher. Another bright example is our attitude to homosexuality: the ancients deemed it absolutely normal and even preferable to heterosexual relations, in the Middle Ages it was considered an unforgiveable sin and nowadays we are taught to tolerate people of non-traditional orientation and provide them special privileges. However psychopathology has gone a long way in diagnosing and treating mental disorders, there are countless disputable questions left. And while the clinicians break their lances in discussions and create new classifications, many of their patients are doomed to suffer from stigmatization by society. In modern psychopathology and psychiatry, a pragmatic approach to mental illnesses is accepted: actually, there is no such name as illness; instead, psychiatric classifications describe symptoms, clustered in syndromes, which comprise a certain disorder. This situation is due to the lack of biological evidence, which makes our understanding of the causes of disorders extremely poor. However within the frames of neuropsychology some advances are made, in medical practice, doctors consider it safe to cure the symptom and not to go to the core. Ideally, definitions and taxonomies of disorders should be invariable over time, but in fact they differ in distinct classificatory systems and within revisions of the same classification. It is a notorious fact, that DSM-IV was acknowledged by the medical community as totally inadequate, and, once again, the new version is being devised (Kelland, 2012). Although, this edition has already instilled to many parents the belief that their children suffer from attention deficit disorder and

3 made them buy expensive stimulating medication, which is probably needless for a child who is just growing up and needs to move a lot. Cooperation of doctors with pharmaceutical companies may probably be one of the reasons new disorders are being devised, so that nowadays people can even get prescriptions for shopoholism and shyness. Apart from the financial aspect, such arbitrariness in diagnostics is extremely dangerous in terms of manipulation of diagnosis and stigmatization: it is well-known, how the in totalitarian USSR the diagnosis schizophrenia was widely used to repress all the dissenting people and constrain them to mental asylums. Finally, a person who is diagnosed with a mental disorder, suffers from a great deal of discrimination in social institutions: in present, many children are diagnosed with autism and Asperger syndrome and consequently debased at schools as abnormal, however, their behaviour may be just different from the usual one due to their peculiar frame of mind. They are often very talented but fail to develop their abilities because of pernicious effects of this harsh stigmatization. Hopefully, for many opposing researchers it is nowadays beyond doubt that the social and developmental context in which behaviour takes place is what distinguishes normal from disordered behaviour (Canino & Alegria, 2008). But if the limits between normality and abnormality inevitably involve social judgement, is there a safe way to draw the line? Butcher et al. (2010) set forth a reasonable set of criteria, the presence of all of which determines a mental disorder: suffering, maladaptiveness, deviancy, violations of the standards of society, social discomfort, irrationality and unpredictability. One or several of these elements are not sufficient to diagnose a disorder. Concepts of normality and abnormality are influenced immensely by social stereotypes and change over time. That is why psychopathologists should work thoroughly on devising clear definitions and bear in mind that because of their mistakes people may suffer from cruel discrimination while we should try to be tolerant to those disordered.

4 References Butcher, J. et al. (2010). Abnormal psychology: core concepts (14th edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Canino, G., & Alegria, M. (2008). Psychiatric diagnosis is it universal or relative to culture? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 49:3 (2008), pp 237250. Kelland, K. (2012). Millions mistakenly classed mentally illincluding shy or defiant children, grieving relatives. The Sun: February 15. Available at: <http://www.cchrint.org/2012/02/16/millions-mistakenly-classed-mentally-ill-includingshy-or-defiant-children-grieving-relatives/>