Everybody’s Crazy
“The numbers related to the above-mentioned diseases, syndromes and disorders apply mainly to adults. So if you believe the statistics, 77% of America’s adult population is a mess. And we haven’t even thrown in alien adbuctees, road ragers or Internet addicts.
But give the experts a little time. With another new quantifiable disorder or two, everybody in the country will be officially nuts.”
“In fact, if we were to follow logically, the medical approach, almost everybody would be mentally ‘ill.’ The present official classification of psychiatric ‘diseases’ is already so broad that there is a real question whether anybody can claim to not fit into the category. To do so, one would have to be free of everything from anxiety…to acute alcohol intoxication. In short, all you have to do to qualify as ‘normal’…is to be a bowl of jello.”
But give the experts a little time. With another new quantifiable disorder or two, everybody in the country will be officially nuts.”
—Jim Windolf, Exec. Ed. of the New York Observer, “A Nation of Nuts” (reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22, 1997)
“In fact, if we were to follow logically, the medical approach, almost everybody would be mentally ‘ill.’ The present official classification of psychiatric ‘diseases’ is already so broad that there is a real question whether anybody can claim to not fit into the category. To do so, one would have to be free of everything from anxiety…to acute alcohol intoxication. In short, all you have to do to qualify as ‘normal’…is to be a bowl of jello.”
—Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, The Death of Psychiatry (1974, Chilton Book Company) p. 54
posted by Naomi Fox at 9:14 AM
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