^Great post.
By that logic, people over 6'4" and those with an IQ>132 (2 standard deviations from the mean) have a "disorder." And redheads (<2% ) too!
The author argues that the "irrationality" of excessive happiness can have a negative impact on the individual.
"Happy people have also been shown to exhibit various biases of judgement that prevent them from acquiring a realistic understanding of their physical and social environment. Thus, there is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves, and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others."
But then he goes on to argue that value judgments have no place in the classification of psychiatric disorders. It's an interesting argument, but I think fails in the same way that the categorical classification most psychiatric diagnoses fails: it lack validity as discrete entity...I'll explain below. Also, I'd say that value judgments are critical in establishing who we treat. To clarify, I am not at all anti-psychiatry. In fact, I'll be entering the field in the near future.
I agree. The word has clear negative connotations. There's no reason to go applying it haphazardly to as many people as possible. Some other thoughts on definitions...
The problem with the term "disorder" is that, like "disease," it has no commonly accepted, unambiguous definition.
The “disease realism” model has predominated in psychiatry, which states that a disease is “an objectively demonstrable departure from adaptive biological functioning.” Therefore, clinical signs and symptoms do not constitute disease. It is not until the causal mechanisms are clearly identified that we are unequivocally speaking of a disease. Much to the chagrin of psychiatrists, no consistent underlying pathology has been identified for the majority of psychiatric disorders, and that leaves big questions regarding how we define mental illness. To clarify, I'm not implying that mental illness does not exist. I'm simply saying that the definition is not as clear as many believe it to be. Delineating borders between pathology and normality are ultimately somewhat arbitrary.
It’s likely that many psychiatric disorders merge into others with no natural boundary in between...the proposed category of pathological happiness being one example. If we are giving an accurate description of nature, there should be "zones of rarity.” Attempts to demonstrate natural boundaries between major depressive disorder and normality have consistently failed. Instead, studies have found that these zones of rarity may not exist where we expected them. For example, it was demonstrated that the genetic basis of anxiety and depression are very similar, if not indistinguishable. What exists is a spectrum. The same goes for schizophrenia, psychotic affective illness, and a spectrum of other disorders, including szhizotypal/paranoid personality disorder. Again, I should clarify that this muddiness does not mean that the profession should withhold effective treatments from patients with significantly impaired functioning..."effective" being the key word there, since psychiatry has a track record of premature and overenthusiastic endorsements of new treatments, accompanied by a minimization of potential harms. If we don’t acknowledge the lack of real boundaries, we could end up pathologizing nearly all of human behavior.
good luck dude
