Reviewing Paul Bloom on Psychopathology

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.

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.

1. Some therapists have an overly reductive understanding of psychiatric diagnosis. They seem to think a diagnosis of mental disorder necessarily implies there is some intrinsic brain abnormality. They think if someone’s symptoms can be explained with reference to a history of abuse or trauma, then a diagnosis doesn’t apply to them. The logic is so in

Mental ailments and the way we diagnose and treat them unveil something central about the pursuits of modernity itself.

Operating under an illness model of care doesn’t just carry powerful implications for the way we conceptualize perfectionism, it impacts the way we conceptualize every aspect of mental health. The slightest pang of sadness, a drizzle of frustration—we register any decline in positive emotion with an assumption of pathology. It’s a cultural tic. The

“diagnostic inflation”—the slapping-on of more (and more, and more) clinical labels to pathologize everyday sadness and stress.

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