metonymy4u

Prevalence is a measure of the number of people meeting criteria for a given condition in a specific time period. Lifetime prevalence is the number of people in a given population that will have the condition at some point in their lives. For example, the lifetime prevalence for asthma in the US is about 13%, which means that 13% of the US population will have asthma at one point or another in their lifetime. Let’s compare that number to the figures for “mental illness.” At some point in their lives, 46% of adults will meet criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis, 30% of adults will meet criteria for alcoholism, and 40-50% of adults will get divorced. Now definitions of what constitutes an “illness” certainly do differ, and most of the definitions that I looked up in Webster’s relating to health, illness, sickness or disease emphasized a functional definition. That is, they defined health as practical, working capacity to do things and illness as loss of this capacity. However, when one looks up “disorder” one finds this: “an abnormal physical or mental condition.” The concept of normality, which is a statistical concept, is turn defined as “conforming to a type, standard or regular pattern.” Now I ask you, what sort of regular pattern are we seeing when 30-50% of the population doesn’t conform to it at some point in their lives? Of course, if you look around you right now you won’t see 50% of the population suffering from “mental illness,” and so it may indeed look like emotional suffering is not so statistically common. But if we take a larger, high altitude view, our species is suffering from a hell of a lot more emotional disorder than is commonly understood. This is the myth of isolation which I believe contributes to much of the emotional suffering that we call mental illness.