Mental Disorder

One of the interesting problems with the medical model that emerged during our regular contact with it when our first kid was born is that medicine is intensely normative - that is, it assumes a median condition and looks for outliers that require correction. From a statistical and biological perspective this does not make sense. There is no underlying biological norm - variation is real (as in, our fundamental biology differs), and any normal behavior is merely the result of the central limit theorem, etc. Defining this real variation as disordered seems a fundamental problem. This becomes particularly problematic when those norms are measured using a non-representative sample (e.g. white Americans) and applied to everyone else.

I have lot of questions on the whole psychology seriousness, but I will skip on them and just ask a simple one:<p>In the case of, let&#x27;s say, 60% of the population suffering of depression, is that a mental disorder or something that have to be ascribed to external conditions (maybe political, related to environment etc)?

&quot;Works of ancient philosophy are focused more on the psyche’s health (or eudaimonia) than its illness. Nonetheless, there are hints that just as a unified soul is one that is healthy (as well as rational and virtuous), a soul lacking unity will be disturbed, or mad. Offering an account of the harmonious soul, whose rational and non-rational elements achieve a unified whole, Aristotle leaves us a picture of the warring and fractured state of an unhealthy soul, for example.&quot;

This looks interesting. Going to need to set time aside for something this extensive though.