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

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Richard a drinker, thanks for coming on the show. Your new book is nobody's normal how culture created the stigma of mental illness. In your opening epigram from ruth benedict, the concept of the normal is properly a variant of the concept of the good. It is that which society has approved. So let's start there. A fuco picks up first sentences of his book, we have yet to write the history of that other form of madness. Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness. We must try to return in history to that zero point in the course of madness.

For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In episode 161 of The Michael Shermer Show, Dr. Shermer speaks with anthropologist Dr. Roy Richard Grinker about his book Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness which chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma — from the 18th century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. 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. Shermer and Grinker discuss: the DSM, ADHD, PTSD, the autism spectrum, schizophrenia, labels and stigma, neuroses vs. psychoses, mental vs. medical models, brain/mind dualism, blacks and drapetomania, homelessness and mental illness, and the future of madness and normalcy.