Nobody's Normal Quotes

“Dividing human differences into distinct illnesses is like dividing up the color spectrum into distinct colors. While most of us can easily tell the difference between yellow and orange, we probably can't agree on exactly where yellow ends and orange begins because there is no single point at which one becomes the other. Similarly, the border between health and sickness is the judgment call we make about whether a person's symptoms are impairing their lives and warrant treatment.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“. . . PTSD, and other illness terms as well, have become a way of claiming a right to legitimate pain and misfortune. It is as if, without the illness label, their anguish wouldn't be valid, and they wouldn't be granted a passport to what Susan Sontag once called citizenship in 'the kingdom of the sick.' [However, it is] only some realms in that kingdom [that] offer a refuge from the stigma of mental illnesses: the diseases that come to us from the outside, apparently through no fault of our own, like PTSD and the enigmatic Gulf War syndrome (GWS).”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“. . . symptoms of mental illnesses are inevitably local.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“In capitalism, the inability to work became the quintessential disease of modernity, and the source of the stigma of mental illness.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Stigma isn’t in our biology; it’s in our culture. It is a process we learn from within our communities, and we can change what we teach. But only if we know the history of stigma can we target the social forces that created it in the first place, strengthen those that reduce stigma, and say “enough” to the many barriers that keep so many people from getting care.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Medicalization is itself a product of culture, an ideological position grounded first in the belief that we can separate the body and the mind, and second in the belief that we can separate the mind from the environments in which we live, as if culture is just a bothersome factor that obscures biological realities.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Stigma does not derive from ignorance or lack of knowledge, but rather from the conception of mental illness as the sign of the idle, a personality incapable of achieving the ideal: producing for oneself and the economy.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Systems of healing that do not hew to the orthodoxy of Western individualism have found ways to protect the sufferer. They deflect responsibility away from the individual and the individual’s brain, and in the best of circumstances they harness the social supports that, even the most Eurocentric doctors will confess, lessen the pain of mental illness. As we now turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, we’ll see that European and North American psychiatry continued to shame and discredit the individual sufferer, but that stigma decreases when a society accepts some of the blame.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“What colonial psychiatrists did not understand was that the symptoms of mental illnesses are inevitably local. Most societies view emotional and physical sicknesses as a problem of the community that therefore demands a social rather than an individual therapeutic response.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“In fact, homosexuality was one of the key psychological conditions that helped psychiatry remain a method to regulate behavior. By turning homosexuality into a mental illness in the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists and psychiatrists would highlight the dangers of sex and sexuality, as a watch tower in the center of a prison yard illuminates everything around it. Psychopathology was the alibi for surveillance and discipline.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“This rather abrupt change from one sex to two sexes was not the result of any new knowledge of the female or male body. Scientists knew little more about human anatomy in 1800 than they did in 1700. What changed was the demand for a division of human beings into stable categories, a demand that was essential for social order in an increasingly industrialized Europe. Science, in other words, didn’t change anything on its own but rather did the work of culture by defining a new reality. And in this world, there was little room for any idea that sex was a spectrum or continuum along which humans could move. A clear-cut distinction between male and female roles, and between the home and work, the private and public spheres, was essential, even if in most industrial English working-class families both men and women worked. An ideology of manliness, male privilege, and superiority also fit well with the new image of the strong, independent male worker who was at no risk of becoming as soft and vulnerable as men believed women to be. In the one-sex world,”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“By the early 1800s, the reverse was true in European thought. Society had previously defined sex; now sex would define society. In the precapitalist one-sex world, one could move, like Marie Garnier, along the continuum of maleness. In the two-sex world, populated by both males and females, sex was fixed and inscribed in medical texts with new words to describe the female anatomy. Today we tend to think about sexual fluidity as something modern, but the reality is that sex has been fixed for only two centuries of the long history of Western civilization, and a number of non-Western societies have, for generations, recognized three, four, or five sexes, and with little or no stigma.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“In this one-sex world, Queen Elizabeth I could refer to herself as both a feeble virgin and the nation’s husband, and artists could represent Eve’s partner, Adam, as pregnant.3 Before the Enlightenment, there were even paintings of Christ with breasts.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Until the late 1700s, there wasn’t even a separate anatomical lexicon for the female genitalia. The clitoris was called a penis, the uterus an internal scrotum. The ovaries were testicles, the vulva and labia were foreskin, the vagina was an inverted penis, and the fallopian tubes were the epididymis. In fact, as any twenty-first-century biologist will tell you, these are indeed homologous pairs of organs, and the male and female genitalia look virtually identical in the first trimester of a fetus. There were, of course, two genders—man and woman—but those identities came from society not nature. When Marie Garnier became a man, her gender changed but not her sex.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“And, over time, urban-industrialized society would become increasingly responsible for controlling people whose differences might have been tolerated at home.21”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“she had to wait until she went to college to act on her own. “Getting diagnosed with ADHD,” she told our class, “was one of the best days of my freshman year because someone actually saw that I wasn’t stupid or lazy,”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“No president has yet admitted to receiving specialized mental health care. When a reporter asked Nancy Reagan about psychiatry, she said 'getting psychiatric treatment means that you are not really trying to get hold of yourself. It's sloughing off your own responsibilities.' And when Bill Clinton and other American political leaders have reached out for emotional support, they turned only to Christian ministers.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“. . . illnesses that derive from the stresses of war come in many different forms. Every war has its own syndromes.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“. . . military psychologists tell me that the best practitioners in their field are those trained in child psychiatry; eighteen- and nineteen-year-old men are, in the clinician's view, still children.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“The value of any diagnosis is what it has to offer the sufferer.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“. . .the reality is that sex has been fixed for only two centuries of the long history of Western civilization, and a number of non-Western societies have, for generations, recognized three, four, or five sexes, and with little or no stigma.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“. . . mental illness categories are just temporary names or frameworks to help us understand patterns of behavior that cause suffering.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Culture itself constructed the illusion of innate differences on which so much discrimination is based. If there is anything that truly counts as human nature, it is our unique ability to transcend nature through culture”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Stigma isn’t in our biology; it’s in our culture. It is a process we learn from within our communities, and we can change what we teach.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“She would never have qualified for a diagnosis of Asperger’s, the term that was associated with verbal skill and “high functioning” autism. But many people whom doctors characterize as “high functioning” have just as many, if not more severe, social impairments as people we might think of as “low functioning.” In addition, bright and verbal people with Asperger’s, who perhaps have undergraduate or graduate degrees, might expect—or their parents might expect—that they will find employment that demands far more social ability than they possess. In those cases, it’s difficult to set one’s sights lower. The same is true for the parents of so-called low functioning adults who set their sights higher.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“some point in their lives receive a medical treatment that can be traced directly to the advances in medicine made during wartime. The whole field of psychological testing arguably derives from the screening of recruits in the world wars.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“And whereas in WWI and WWII the symptoms of stress were apparent during or just after combat, and were treated using frontline clinical care (sometimes called “forward psychiatry”), combat stress during the brutal Vietnam War was rare.62 The spike in the prevalence of combat-related trauma among veterans of the Vietnam War only occurred well after the United States left Vietnam—hence the postwar development of the apt term “post-traumatic stress disorder.”63”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Once the category of shell shock was invalidated, and the symptoms stigmatized, shell-shock symptoms nearly disappeared. There was no benefit to expressing one’s emotional pain through the now-shameful disorder. Over time, new symptoms of war trauma replaced those of shell shock. The loss of speech, inability to walk, and contorted body postures, so frequent during WWI, would be relatively rare in WWII among combatants of every nation, and would mostly disappear by the mid-1950s.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“So even though the term “shell shock” was new, the war did not create many new symptoms. It did create a new framework in which to understand them as a pattern. Shell shock was caused not by the passions, as in women, but by physical experience. The diagnosis, historian Peter Lerner writes, “once a taboo, was not only acceptable by the middle of the war but was turned into a rallying cry, a patriotic crusade inflected with nationalistic and military language.”43 The diminishing concern about the feminine connotations of hysterical symptoms was especially pronounced in Germany, where Hermann Oppenheim said that with the term “shell shock” he could now talk about a soldier’s “nervous disturbances” without making him sound mentally diseased.44 In the United States, Thomas Salmon remarked on the tenacity with which war veterans “clung to a diagnosis of ‘shell shock.’ ”45 And with this common diagnosis came a message for the public at large: anyone, soldier or civilian, could get a neurosis, and to have one should in no way be dishonorable.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Women serving as nurses and ambulance drivers in WWI also experienced shell shock, but they were typically not diagnosed or treated for their symptoms. If they were diagnosed, the diagnosis was hysteria, and they were immediately discharged from the war. Officials in France, Belgium, England, and the United States considered women of less value than combat soldiers and so made less effort to treat or retain them. In addition, when doctors thought about war trauma, they didn’t include interpersonal trauma that occurred outside of combat, such as sexual violence and the trauma of witnessing the effects of warfare. Yet women were exposed to just as much violence, if not more, than many men. Nurses had to care for horrific injuries and participate in surgeries, including amputations for men with gangrene. A Canadian military nurse, M. Lucas Rutherford, wrote that among all the conditions, shell shock was the most distressing and difficult to treat because the afflicted soldiers were often unreachable, unable to communicate.28”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness