Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

by Roy Richard Grinker

Overview

A Guardian Best Book of 2021

A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma.

For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.

Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity.

Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity.

Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393531640
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/26/2021
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	1,115,879
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Roy Richard Grinker is professor of anthropology and international affairs at the George Washington University. He is the author of several books, including Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. He lives in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Introduction The Road Out of Bedlam xiii

Part 1 Capitalism

Chapter 1 Every Man for Himself 3

Chapter 2 The Invention of Mental Illness 24

Chapter 3 The Divided Body 38

Chapter 4 The Divided Mind 55

Chapter 9 From the Forgotten War to Vietnam 141

Chapter 10 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 155

Chapter 11 Expectations of Sickness 171

Part 3 Body and Mind

Chapter 12 Telling Secrets 189

Chapter 13 An Illness Like Any Other? 213

Chapter 14 "Like a Magic Wand" 236

Chapter 15 When the Body Speaks 260

Chapter 16 Bridging Body and Mind in Nepal 275

Chapter 17 The Dignity of Risk 292

Conclusion On the Spectrum 319

Acknowledgments 331

Notes 335

Index 383

Editorial Reviews

"Nobody’s Normal is for everyone. Patients and their families will read the book as if it were written for them because it is so personal and empathic. Mental health professionals will read it as if it were written for them because it is so extensively researched and erudite…Beautifully written, a remarkable history."

Alix Spiegel

"In Nobody's Normal, Roy Richard Grinker explores the way stigma has coalesced around mental illness and assesses the cumulative harm done by depressed or psychotic patients’ sense of humiliation…This engaging book is an able guide to how the problem might begin to be addressed, so that those who are ill bear only the burden of their illness itself."

Andrew Solomon

"A rich history woven with insights from four generations of the Grinker family’s research, Nobody's Normal shows how a society’s needs and prejudices shape how it deals with mental illness... This book sings with [Grinker's] empathetic and authoritative voice."

Virginia Hughes

"An unusually engaging history of mental illness and the stigma attached to it. Roy Richard Grinker threads together the attitudes of society toward psychiatric illness with the lives and work of his ancestors and his daughter’s experience of autism. The result is an informative and thoughtful book about mental illness: common, painful, usually treatable, and profoundly tied to the human condition."

Kay Redfield Jamison

01/01/2021

With the eye of an anthropologist and a family legacy of psychiatry, Grinker explores how the contemporary United States came to its current understanding of mental illness and what is considered "normal." The words we use and the structures we impose have changed throughout time and place, and stigma surrounding mental illness varies widely and evolves as doctors change the terms they use. While stigma around mental illness has decreased in some ways over the past decades, Grinker makes a provocative case that we still suffer from a mid-century invention of "normal," and that we assume pathologies as a way of explaining physical manifestation of symptoms rather than accepting that mental health and our lived experience affect our overall health. While the content and arguments are illuminating, Grinker's framing device adds useful drama and context. As he describes the experiences of his great-grandfather and grandfather in early psychoanalysis and psychology of soldiers, he highlights the history of psychology in the 20th century, as well as explicating a complicated family relationship (down to his daughter who has autism) that mirrors overall social trends. VERDICT An excellent overview for those interested in medical history or psychology, and also of interest to memoir and family history readers.—Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.

Library Journal

2020-11-11
A broad-ranging history of psychiatry, examining trends in how mental diseases are increasingly less stigmatized as we acknowledge that so often “the sufferer is innocent.”

Even today, English offers a rich lexicon of stigmatizing terms in the semantic domain of mental illness—one bit of evidence, writes cultural anthropologist Grinker, that “stigma isn’t in our biology; it’s in our culture.” Given its cultural locus, we can alter our behavior to use less alienating language, and, as the author illustrates, in some instances we have, especially regarding other illnesses. As we learned about HIV/AIDS, for example, “the fear and secretiveness…began to decrease,” even as obituaries now acknowledge the once-whispered term cancer and even suicide. Grinker, a professor of anthropology and international affairs, comes from a long line of psychiatrists and was brought up to believe that everyone suffers from some sort of mental illness at some point in life. Given its universality, the “discredited identity” that often accompanies mental illness is misplaced. The author offers an agile history of mental health and efforts to control it. For example, the Puritans of New England “believed that anyone without reason” needed to be controlled as if an animal, a category that included not just the mentally ill, but also babies. It was not until the 19th century that the realization became widespread that the mentally ill could be treated rather than merely punished. Interestingly, Grinker observes in his anecdotally rich narrative, many advances in psychiatric treatment came by way of military medicine, with so many soldiers shattered by the horrors of conflict. Indeed, it was the U.S. Army’s medical manual for mental disorders that formed the basis of the first DSM in 1952, a volume that represented “a marriage of military experience and psychoanalytical theory.”

A highly readable, thoughtful study of how we perceive and talk about mental illness—with luck, ever more respectfully.

Kirkus Reviews

"The most important work on stigma in more than half a century. It tells two intertwined stories—a meticulous, comparative history of mental illness from the Enlightenment to the present, highlighting the centrality of military medicine in times of war; and the story of [the author’s] own family…Roy Richard Grinker brilliantly unravels the tension between deviance and vulnerability by shaping the relationship between multiple generations."

Sander L. Gilman

"This landmark book could not be more timely, coming at the pivotal moment when our society is reevaluating its most basic assumptions about mental illness and health…[A] must-read for anyone interested in psychology, anthropology, the social model of disability, or the complex nature of being human. Nobody’s Normal is a masterpiece."

Steve Silberman