Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health

How do you define good mental health? This controversial, counterintuitive, and altogether fascinating book argues that "psychological normality" is neither a desirable nor an acceptable standard. Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health is a groundbreaking work, the first book-length study to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. Its author, Dr. Steven James Bartlett, musters compelling evidence and careful analysis to challenge the paradigm accepted by mental health theorists and practitioners, a paradigm that is not only wrong, but can be damaging to those to whom it is applied—and to society as a whole. In this bold, multidisciplinary work, Bartlett critiques the presumed standard of normality that permeates contemporary consciousness. Showing that the current concept of mental illness is fundamentally unacceptable because it is scientifically unfounded and the result of flawed thinking, he argues that adherence to the gold standard of psychological normality leads to nothing less than cultural impoverishment.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgments A Note on Conventions Introduction Part I. Normality and Mental Health Chapter 1. Questioning the Standard of Normality: Steps to a More Effective Understanding of Mental Health From the "Banality of Evil" to the "Evil of Banality" The Dispositional Pathology of Psychological Normality Psychological Normality Is Not Mental Health Positive Illusion and Resistance to the Pathology of Normality Where We Might Go from Here Toward a More Effective Understanding of Mental Health Mental Health as Exception to the Rule A Preliminary Conclusion Chapter 2. The Psychology of Definition in Psychiatric Nosology The Need for a Psychology of Definition The Purposes of Definition in Psychiatric Nosologies Stipulative Definitions as Sources of Authority Real Definition and Reification Defining Mental Disorders into Existence The Dysfunctional Nature of the Psychology of Definition Choices in the Interpretation and Recognition of Disease: Physical Pathology and Mental Disorder The Psychology of Symptom Clustering Psychiatry's Inflationary Ontology The Concept of Mental Illness Is No Myth but the Result of Dysfunctional Thought The Psychology of Resistance to Idiopathic Disease Do Internal Malfunctions or Dysfunctions Underlie Psychiatric Syndromes? The Psychology of Definition and Claims to Truth The Next Step in Reification Intelligent Science and Stopgap Definitions To Summarize Is Nosology Essential to Effective Clinical Practice? Chapter 3. The Abnormal Psychology of Creativity and the Pathology of Normality The Abnormal Psychology of Creativity The Inner Turmoil Thesis Who Is Harmed? The Ascription of Pathology The Situational Thesis The Psychopathology of Normality The Psychiatric Plight of the Artist Afterword Part II. Psychology During a Collapse of Culture Chapter 4. Acedia: When Work and Money Are the Exclusive Values Work and Cultural Bankruptcy The Symptoms of Acedia Acedia: Moral Failure or Psychiatric Disorder? Treatment of Work-Engendered Depression Chapter 5. Barbarians at the Door: A Psychological and Historical Profile of Today's College Students What Higher Education Meant The Degradation of the Ideal of Higher Education as a Result of Democratic Values The Self-undermining History of Higher Education in America The Pathology of Narcissism Barbarity as a State of Mind The Mediocre Population, the New Barbarians The New Dark Age, Already in Progress, and the Disappearance of Higher Education Sobering Reflections Chapter 6. Psychology, Culture, and the Demoralization of University Faculty The Nature of Career Burnout The Concept of Situational Depression The Situation in the Liberal Arts Situational Depression of Faculty in the Liberal Arts Adjustment Disorders and the Liberal Arts Treatment for Liberal Arts Demoralization Part III. Beyond Long-standing Facts Chapter 7. The Psychology of Abuse in Publishing: Peer Review and Editorial Bias Gag Orders through Time: Socrates, Savonarola, Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo Religious Belief, Imprimatur, the Inquisition, and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum Sedition, Treason, Censors, and Censorship Academic Freedom versus Peer Review and Editorial Tampering Running Afoul of the Belief Systems of Peer Reviewers and Editors: Varieties of Abuse in Peer Review and Editorial Tampering The Psychopathology of Peer Review and Editorial Bias: Blocks to Creative Research Obligations to Which Peer Review and Editing Must Answer A Code of Conduct for Peer Reviewers and Editors Removing the Psychological Obstacles Erected by Peer Review Conclusion Chapter 8. The Psychology of Mediocrity: Internal Limitations That Block Human Development A Brief History of a Mundane Trinity: Mediocrity, Mediocre, Mediocracy Past Attempts to Understand the Psychology of Mediocrity Mediocrity as a Set of Traits The Major Defining Traits of Mediocrity "People Who Aren't Real" Resistance to Acknowledging Individual Differences in Abilities The Epidemic of Mediocrity Mediocrity: Arrhostia or Spandrel? Traits of Excellence and Superiority Rejecting Normality as a Standard of Mental Health The Transmission of Mediocrity "A Room of One's Own": The View from the Third Floor Chapter 9. Normality, Pathology, and Mental Health The Romanes Principle Two Promising Directions and Two Kinds of Pathology Creating Mental Disorders by Ballot Psychological Resistance to the Abandonment of Psychological Normality as Mental Health Psychological Primitiveness Iatrogenic Effects of Psychiatric Labeling Afterword Part IV. In Retrospect Chapter 10. The Reflexive Turn in Psychology The Economics of Human Emotion The Psychological Dynamic of a Dark Age Subordinating Mundane Reality Practical Implications Idealism That Is Not Hopeful Appendix I. An Apology to Lovers of Humanity? Appendix II. Practical Speculations, or Speculative Practices Appendix III. The Distribution of Mental Health References Index

About the Author :
Steven James Bartlett, PhD, is visiting scholar in psychology at Willamette University, Salem, OR; is senior research professor at Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR; and has published 14 books and monographs and numerous papers in the fields of psychology and epistemology.

Review :
Well-written and clearly structured. . . . I wish everyone would read Bartlett's chapter in Normality on the abuses of peer review and editorial bias (Chapter 7) and adopt his proposed code of conduct for peer reviewers and editors (p. 172). And Bartlett's treatment of relativism, the relativity of frameworks, and human evil in Pathology is absolutely limpid (Chapter 20).