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How do you define good mental health? This controversial, counterintuitive, and altogether fascinating book argues that "psychological normality" is neither a desirable nor an acceptable standard.
Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health is a groundbreaking work, the first book-length study to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. Its author, Dr. Steven James Bartlett, musters compelling evidence and careful analysis to challenge the paradigm accepted by mental health theorists and practitioners, a paradigm that is not only wrong, but can be damaging to those to whom it is applied—and to society as a whole.
In this bold, multidisciplinary work, Bartlett critiques the presumed standard of normality that permeates contemporary consciousness. Showing that the current concept of mental illness is fundamentally unacceptable because it is scientifically unfounded and the result of flawed thinking, he argues that adherence to the gold standard of psychological normality leads to nothing less than cultural impoverishment.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on Conventions
Introduction
Part I. Normality and Mental Health
Chapter 1. Questioning the Standard of Normality: Steps to a More Effective Understanding of Mental Health
From the "Banality of Evil" to the "Evil of Banality"
The Dispositional Pathology of Psychological Normality
Psychological Normality Is Not Mental Health
Positive Illusion and Resistance to the Pathology of Normality
Where We Might Go from Here
Toward a More Effective Understanding of Mental Health
Mental Health as Exception to the Rule
A Preliminary Conclusion
Chapter 2. The Psychology of Definition in Psychiatric Nosology
The Need for a Psychology of Definition
The Purposes of Definition in Psychiatric Nosologies
Stipulative Definitions as Sources of Authority
Real Definition and Reification
Defining Mental Disorders into Existence
The Dysfunctional Nature of the Psychology of Definition
Choices in the Interpretation and Recognition of Disease: Physical Pathology and Mental Disorder
The Psychology of Symptom Clustering
Psychiatry's Inflationary Ontology
The Concept of Mental Illness Is No Myth but the Result of Dysfunctional Thought
The Psychology of Resistance to Idiopathic Disease
Do Internal Malfunctions or Dysfunctions Underlie Psychiatric Syndromes?
The Psychology of Definition and Claims to Truth
The Next Step in Reification
Intelligent Science and Stopgap Definitions
To Summarize
Is Nosology Essential to Effective Clinical Practice?
Chapter 3. The Abnormal Psychology of Creativity and the Pathology of Normality
The Abnormal Psychology of Creativity
The Inner Turmoil Thesis
Who Is Harmed? The Ascription of Pathology
The Situational Thesis
The Psychopathology of Normality
The Psychiatric Plight of the Artist
Afterword
Part II. Psychology During a Collapse of Culture
Chapter 4. Acedia: When Work and Money Are the Exclusive Values
Work and Cultural Bankruptcy
The Symptoms of Acedia
Acedia: Moral Failure or Psychiatric Disorder?
Treatment of Work-Engendered Depression
Chapter 5. Barbarians at the Door: A Psychological and Historical Profile of Today's College Students
What Higher Education Meant
The Degradation of the Ideal of Higher Education as a Result of Democratic Values
The Self-undermining History of Higher Education in America
The Pathology of Narcissism
Barbarity as a State of Mind
The Mediocre Population, the New Barbarians
The New Dark Age, Already in Progress, and the Disappearance of Higher Education
Sobering Reflections
Chapter 6. Psychology, Culture, and the Demoralization of University Faculty
The Nature of Career Burnout
The Concept of Situational Depression
The Situation in the Liberal Arts
Situational Depression of Faculty in the Liberal Arts
Adjustment Disorders and the Liberal Arts
Treatment for Liberal Arts Demoralization
Part III. Beyond Long-standing Facts
Chapter 7. The Psychology of Abuse in Publishing: Peer Review and Editorial Bias
Gag Orders through Time: Socrates, Savonarola, Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo
Religious Belief, Imprimatur, the Inquisition, and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum
Sedition, Treason, Censors, and Censorship
Academic Freedom versus Peer Review and Editorial Tampering
Running Afoul of the Belief Systems of Peer Reviewers and Editors: Varieties of Abuse in Peer Review and Editorial Tampering
The Psychopathology of Peer Review and Editorial Bias: Blocks to Creative Research
Obligations to Which Peer Review and Editing Must Answer
A Code of Conduct for Peer Reviewers and Editors
Removing the Psychological Obstacles Erected by Peer Review
Conclusion
Chapter 8. The Psychology of Mediocrity: Internal Limitations That Block Human Development
A Brief History of a Mundane Trinity: Mediocrity, Mediocre, Mediocracy
Past Attempts to Understand the Psychology of Mediocrity
Mediocrity as a Set of Traits
The Major Defining Traits of Mediocrity
"People Who Aren't Real"
Resistance to Acknowledging Individual Differences in Abilities
The Epidemic of Mediocrity
Mediocrity: Arrhostia or Spandrel?
Traits of Excellence and Superiority
Rejecting Normality as a Standard of Mental Health
The Transmission of Mediocrity
"A Room of One's Own": The View from the Third Floor
Chapter 9. Normality, Pathology, and Mental Health
The Romanes Principle
Two Promising Directions and Two Kinds of Pathology
Creating Mental Disorders by Ballot
Psychological Resistance to the Abandonment of Psychological Normality as Mental Health
Psychological Primitiveness
Iatrogenic Effects of Psychiatric Labeling
Afterword
Part IV. In Retrospect
Chapter 10. The Reflexive Turn in Psychology
The Economics of Human Emotion
The Psychological Dynamic of a Dark Age
Subordinating Mundane Reality
Practical Implications
Idealism That Is Not Hopeful
Appendix I. An Apology to Lovers of Humanity?
Appendix II. Practical Speculations, or Speculative Practices
Appendix III. The Distribution of Mental Health
References
Index
