The DSM Tells Me So

What's with this tendency nowadays to pathologize everything?  I understand that the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual, or, the Psychiatrist's Bible) this year is now bigger than ever with a whole plethora of new and invented mental health diagnoses.  What is going on here?  Yesterday and Sunday I had to do battle with a potential episode of depression while pondering how easily as a child I could have been falsely diagnosed with any number of mental health maladies, especially Asperger's Syndrome.
     It is actually a counsellor I am currently seeing who suggested that as a child I might have had borderline Asperger's and I think she may have a point.  I was exceptionally bright, talked like an encyclopedia, sucked at sports and was too awkward and uncoordinated to learn to ride a bike. On the other hand, I had very good social and communication skills, had tremendous empathy and was very sensitive and aware of other people and what was happening to them.  Probably the jury is still out but I think I might have been vulnerable to that diagnosis.
     Does this means that I have or once had Asperger's.  Does this suggest that I may be, if not mentally ill, then maybe..."abnormal?"  Or is it more that there may be something terribly wrong with this vogue of using clinical terminology that we toss around in order to define and codify any kind of behaviour that could be just even a little bit unusual?  I am not going quite so far (but maybe almost) as suggest there is no such thing as mental illness.  And as a mental health worker myself I am very cognizant of the need for psychotropic medications, at least under certain circumstances.  Often diagnosis can be necessary, if a necessary evil, to help us make sense of and contextualize certain behaviours, patterns of behaviour and the corresponding brain chemistry that can be clearly understood as paranoid schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder.  But when even mildly unusual or eccentric behaviour gets targeted as something negative and is named any number of pathologies from the psychobabble grab bag then it is time to sit up and take notice.

     I find it interesting that in this age of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism that more than ever a certain social conformity seems to have become de rigueur.  We live now, here in Canada, anyway, or should I say in Vancouver, in well-integrated societies where people of all nationalities, races, and sexual orientations can feel comfortable and at home.  I wonder if, as a way of digesting and counter-balancing this wonderful and sometimes crazy diversity we have come to insist, albeit passively and unconsciously that everyone has to be otherwise more or less the same in our values and in the way we talk, dress, live, consume and work and play.  If we do not fit within these narrow unspoken grids then we are unusual, but not just unusual but strange, and not simply strange but perhaps just a little bit ill.
     People have to earn a certain minimum income while working within a narrow range of occupations thanks to a certain level of schooling (usually but not always university), patronize reasonably fashionable restaurants, drink in a certain range of bars (or anywhere else, but they're all expected to not be non-imbibers), have no interest in religion (but spirituality, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, is okay), visit the gym or at least participate in yoga, tai-chi, or run every day, which is to say make a god out of physical fitness and physical beauty and youth...In other words, if you are not the same flavour of bland as everyone else then you are at the very least suspect, if not considered worthy of a mental health diagnosis.
     This isn't to say that within this tepid so-called "Creative Class" (which is neither) that there isn't going to be your fair share of seething eccentricity and individuals who are simply jonesing to be, well, individuals.  We are everywhere.  But anyone who has the cojones or at least the lack of self-restraint to actually be and openly express who we are?  Oh no, off to the Mental Health Team, get a diagnosis and don't forget your prescription dear.
     We are all casualties of capitalism: not small business entrepreneurship and mom and pop shop type capitalism but that big nasty fiscal cancer that is metastasizing everywhere.  To do global capitalism well we have to make ourselves competitive and bland conformity is safer than eccentric individualism which simply does not sell because it is not market friendly.  Those who do not adapt and conform are inherently weak, or ill or both and for this reason we have such a growing rate of mental health diagnoses that the medical health system is unable to cope or keep up.  All the giftedness, creativity, real authentic spirituality, intelligence and integrity that makes us truly human and that can really redeem us out of this bland useless porridge of conformism and mediocrity has to be battened down, repressed, imprisoned and medicated out of existence because it makes us uncompetitive.  If it isn't all based on greed, self-interest and being competitive it is thrown to the side of the road like road kill and by giving our consent to this we are rapidly undermining our humanity and gradually destroying any chance we have for developing authentic community in a tragically inauthentic world.
     Fight this.  Reclaim yourselves.  Resist this madness by going beautifully and authentically crazy.  As long as you develop sufficient social skills and emotional intelligence to get along well with others you will otherwise do fine.