Deciding what is normal
It is comforting to be reassured that one is, in every respect, normal. But what is normal, exactly? Who decides? The everyday kind of normal is about fitting in and fulfilling roles; a normal person internalises and submits to society's core set of rules of conduct. These embody the defining features of a culture and act as social glue: people feel close to and identify with others who have the same idea of what is normal. The whole thing is borne along by a lava stream of validations and peer pressures.
The opposite of this sort of seat-of-the-pants normal is weird, not abnormal, which is a technical description that I will get to later. Children instinctively want to be accepted. And being normal is especially important for teenagers and young adults, who are society's most impassioned conformists. Yes, those whacky fashions and habits are actually signs of the most devoted tribal adherence. As a parent, you just hope that your offspring's particular tribe is a well-established subset within a culture's range of normality.
A culture's sense of normality is a surprisingly robust block of ideas, fairly resistant to change and virtually impossible for any single individual to tamper with. This is particularly evident in children exposed to two cultures. They rarely assemble a pick-and-mix sense of normality. Rather, they internalise two complete and separate notions of normality and, depending on the setting, a dominant culture will be triggered - say, the higher-status one among peers at school or the maternal one at home.
In psychology, the word normality is loaded with meaning. One of the most frequent questions I am asked is what precisely constitutes normal (with reference to depression, alcoholism, gambling addiction, and the like). The easy answer is to paraphrase the criteria laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - the clinical psychologist's bible. To be classified as abnormally depressed, as opposed to experiencing 'normal misery', as Freud put it, one must suffer from, say, five of seven symptoms, including prolonged apathy and sleeplessness. Who decides exactly what clusters of symptoms require help and which fall within the scope of normality?
Historical precedent plays a part, the views of the professionals charged with updating the manual every year and, of course, society as a whole. Society stigmatises certain patterns of behaviour and, by extension, the thinking and feelings that accompany them. Stigmatisation has a powerful effect on an individual's mental health. Additionally, one important diagnostic indicator is the extent to which a person's psychological problem affects their day-to-day life. Other people's reactions are a big part of that experience.
In mild or borderline cases, therapy is really more about introducing a process of normalisation that has failed to occur in society at large. A client will usually seek help because of how they feel. That sounds obvious. But considered from a psychological point of view, what a client feels is just one of many factors to be considered. One man's symptom is another man's character trait. For example, if a society stigmatises shyness, a shy person will come to believe that there is something wrong with him or her.
Another culture may see the same behaviour as inner resourcefulness. An individual has only so much control over his or her thoughts: if the surrounding world thinks extreme shyness is a problem, it almost certainly will be.
Broadly speaking, that is how the manual of mental disorders sees things. If a problem affects a client's day-to-day functioning, including how people react to that person's behaviour, then there is a clinical problem. This is how society plays its part in deciding what is normal and what is not.
Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation
