Reviewing Paul Bloom on Psychopathology

Operating under an illness model of care doesn’t just carry powerful implications for the way we conceptualize perfectionism, it impacts the way we conceptualize every aspect of mental health. The slightest pang of sadness, a drizzle of frustration—we register any decline in positive emotion with an assumption of pathology. It’s a cultural tic. The

In some ways, the distinction between normalcy and pathology is arbitrarily defined—as well as hard to measure.

1. Some therapists have an overly reductive understanding of psychiatric diagnosis. They seem to think a diagnosis of mental disorder necessarily implies there is some intrinsic brain abnormality. They think if someone’s symptoms can be explained with reference to a history of abuse or trauma, then a diagnosis doesn’t apply to them. The logic is so in

Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, told me, “Once you abandon the idea of the personal baseline, it becomes possible to think of emotional suffering as relapse—instead of something to be expected from an individual’s way of being in the world.”