Reviewing Paul Bloom on Psychopathology

In some ways, the distinction between normalcy and pathology is arbitrarily defined—as well as hard to measure.

Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, told me, “Once you abandon the idea of the personal baseline, it becomes possible to think of emotional suffering as relapse—instead of something to be expected from an individual’s way of being in the world.”

This is the real tragedy of our cultural psychologization of diseases we don’t understand: the ways such dismissals leave patients to suffer alone, their condition turned into a character flaw.