When Freud was asked what the conditions are for someone to be considered normal, he answered briefly: “To be able to love and work.”
Do we know what is psychologically normal and what is not?
How do we determine the boundaries between mental health and mental illness?
Do we know how to love and work?
Banja Luka psychiatrist Aleksandar Pejić deals with the answers to these questions, in the author’s text for our portal.
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In somatic medicine, the clinical picture and pathophysiological mechanisms enable the diagnosis of the disease. In psychiatry, establishing a diagnosis is much more difficult.
In psychiatry, one must know what is healthy in order to know what is sick. In addition to the sick, there is also abnormal, which is not the same, because the term sick is narrower than the term abnormal. Modern psychiatry requires that a distinction be made between the terms: healthy (normal) and diseased (abnormal).
The questions of when a person is considered mentally ill and where mental illness begins are very complex and there is no single answer. That’s why the question is “How do we determine the boundaries between mental health and mental illness?” very important question. What modern psychiatry agrees on is that there is no ideal normal man.
The definition of normality ranges from utopian to sarcastic
The term “normal man” can be considered a certain idealization, somewhat fiction. That’s why terms like “so-called normality”, “unhappy normality” and “zero normality” are sometimes used.
It is important to emphasize that the World Health Organization defines health as follows:
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not just the absence of disease or decrepitude”. But one should certainly add one’s own sense of happiness and the ability to adapt to the demands of the environment.
Mental health and normality represent the average. Mentally abnormal behavior is behavior that deviates from normal. Abnormal behavior occurs less often in the population. But here too we have to take into account exceptions.
For example, today we have a frequent occurrence of anxiety and depression in the population, but the frequent occurrence of anxiety-depressive disorder does not mean that it is psychologically normal. Some mental illnesses appear suddenly and change behavior (eg post-traumatic stress disorder due to the horrors of war, traffic accidents, earthquakes, etc.).
And let it be as slow as schizophrenia. It is important to emphasize that people who do not comply with legal and social norms exhibit abnormal behavior.
But this does not mean that if someone “smuggles” in public transport or is late for work, he is mentally disturbed. Modern psychiatry evaluates mental health using the following five criteria:
• absence of mental illness,
• normality of behavior,
• adaptability to the environment,
• internal unity of personality,
• correct perception of reality
When Freud was asked what the conditions are for someone to be considered normal, he answered briefly: “To be able to love and work”.
Aleksandar Pejić, MD, PhD, specialist in psychiatry/
(WORLD)