

Mapping the Human Phenome - byrneseyeview
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/HumanSciences/phenome.html

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_delirium
This is a pretty good take on the subject. The basic problem is that the
_science_ of psychiatry, like most sciences, can give you facts, not make
normative judgments. If you want to know why one person is like one thing, and
another person is like something else, science might be able to find out. But
there is no scientific test to distinguish characteristics that are "normal"
from those that are "illness", as the shifting classification of homosexuality
makes painfully clear. It's a philosophical question, at root. The fact that
we don't actually do the philosophizing, and instead "resolve" it by holding
committee votes in the APA, is a bit of a problem, though.

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derefr
It's neither a philosophical nor a scientific problem, because both of those
professions deal in _universally applicable_ theory. "Normality" is a
_sociological_ categorization—different societies will ascribe it to different
people, for different reasons.

The DSM is in the strange position of being akin to a prescriptivist
dictionary—it tells society what words mean, and demands they use them that
way. The more obvious route would be to have a descriptivist text that just
finds, groups, and classifies sentiments that a given society _already has_
about what it considers normal.

~~~
_delirium
I can buy that, and the linguistic analogy is pretty interesting. I do think
it's at least a plausible question to ask philosophically: is there a coherent
concept of "mental illness" and came we come up with some criteria for it? But
certainly the concept people use is a descriptive one: people who are _really_
far outside the social conception of normality are almost universally
considered mentally ill (many types of psychosis, for example), others are on
the borderline, and others are universally considered normal.

