

What Is Normal? - mcantor
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/what-is-normal

======
mcantor
_The question of normality creates strange paradoxes in the consulting room.
Often it is relatively healthy people who feel defective. In psychotherapy,
patients may perseverate over vague complaints, feeling off-balance and out of
sync. The worriers may believe that they have too much or, more often, too
little ambition, desire, confidence, spontaneity, or sociability. Their keen
social awareness (a strength), when tinctured with obsessionality, causes them
to fuss over glitches in the self. For them, a sense of abnormality precedes
any diagnosis and may persist even when none is proffered.

In contrast, seriously ill patients may have no such concern. Those who
manifest frank paranoia will insist on their normality; anyone would be
vigilant in the face of plots directed at them. Anorexics and alcoholics may
profess certainty that they're fine; the degree of "denial" is something of a
marker for severity of disorder._

I know how much Hacker News loves the Dunning-Kruger effect. I feel like it
definitely poked its head out there.

