Psychiatrist have expanded the percentage of mental illness to fit more people in order to expand their business
If the two standard deviation for determining high or low IQ is arbitrary and dependent on context, what would happen if we applied the two standard deviation cutoff (2.5 percent) to psychiatry and suddenly required that people be that far removed from the golden mean of mental health before they could merit a diagnosis of mental disorder. Psychiatrists and other mental health workers would mostly be put out of business and have to collect unemployment insurance.
One hundred years ago, psychiatry was limited to the very severely ill housed in hospitals, and very few people were employed caring for them. We have since worked our way up the bell curve much closer to the mean—so that 20 to 25 percent are currently considered mentally disordered, and we have more than half a million people caring for them. This is not the first time this has been done. To site a rather dark example: Dr. Aaron Rosanoff had adjusted the definition of mental illness to make his inheritance calculations more accurate in order to justify the sterilization of the mentally ill. Using the psychological test paradigm, we can compare people very precisely to one another but have no way to decide whether to draw the line between normal and abnormal at 2.5 percent or 25 percent of the population.
References
- Frances, Allen. (2013). Saving Normal CHAPTER 1. What’s Normal and What’s Not? (p. 31). New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry Status:☀️