There are prostitutes, drug gangs and skinhead men roaming the streets in the early hours looking to prove themselves with their fists.
Why are none of these given psychiatric diagnoses?
It seems odd that it's always the people like Autistic people who are seen as odd. What is normal about the way a lot of people behave?
i can recommend Adam Curtis "bitter lake" and "hypernormalisation" the latter will explain why all the psycopaths are running the show,
both films available on iplayer/youtube.
very interesting to see how we as a people ended up thinking this IS normal.
just my 2cents.
the fact is normal ?? society is not functional is it really normal ?.just look what its done to the planet .people regardless of how you were brought up should be accountable for what they do or say , as someone said if we gave money to everyone who was dysfunctional to get help the world would-be even more in debt that it allready is and knowing that type it will be nothing more than a rip off .yes theirs always going to be the odd ball
my neighbors totally inhumane and yet shes seen as being not just ok but good even though shes evil because she knows how to spin the lies .so called typical people are the insane ones most of the time you cannot trust them they lie like no tomorrow so you dont know were you really are with them or who to trust yes i do get on ok with some at times but ts hard going and i can only keep it up for a short time there are some typical people that do try but there very few and difficult to find
But those parents are the offspring of failed parents too - that's the problem - no community so there's no pressure for any of them to straighten up and fly right - they are allowed to become as dysfunctional as they like.
I dont agree it's the parents working long hours. Based on the area I live in and my sons constant bullying through school the parents in the majority didnt work at all, majority took drugs or alcohol or known to the police for various reasons. Based on my area
I believe all of society’s problems come from a lack of community – if you look at ancient communities, young people belong to the community – they are known to everyone and they interact with everyone. Eventually, the boys learn the skills of being a functional man and eventually undertake a rite of passage into adulthood where they fit in with the expectations of the community. The girls learn all about their role in life from their mothers and grandparents.
Today’s youths interact with no-one and have no rite of passage so their only way of making their mark in life is by vandalism or negative actions that gain them attention. There are no positive role models for them to understand how to be a good adult so they make it all up themselves.
Unfortunately, over the last 60 years or more, the government has worked against the people by fragmenting society and creating an environment where parents have to work long hours to pay the bills so children are left to their own devices. Their social education is mostly taught by violent tv programmes teaching them how to steal, murder, bully and abuse. 10 minutes of EastEnders would be X-rated for sex & violence in the old days – now the behaviour is seen as normal.
Just thinking of the question: why do we pretend that 'normal' society is functional?
The word 'pretend' is interesting.
If we try to catalogue dysfunctional things we come across daily in our lives, the list might be depressingly long and infinitely varied. Those errors, malfunctions of various sorts, mistakes, Kafkaesque dysfunctional policies and practices... We hear in the media but also I am sure at some stage of our life in one way or another we experience unexpected perverse consequences, misguided decisions, unkind and uncaring acts. We all hear about narcissistic self interest, psychopathic abuse, criminal acts, economic crime, negligence.
Is human society 'functional', can it be? Often, sometimes, rarely ? ... lol.
Many people do bad things in the absence of psychiatric or neurological disorder.
Autistic people shouldn’t be treated as odd because of their diagnosis. I’ve just been ‘heavy masking’ at a children’s birthday party for 2 hours (parent related hazard!) and was chatting with the mum of one of my daughter’s friends. I happened to mention that litlun has had her first two autism assessments this week. She went “what, so she might be AUTISTIC!!!” I said “Yeah, they put her through for assessment early partly due to her high needs but also because I’m autistic”. She didn’t know, she does now, it shut her up!
To be honest when you look at the percentages of people that suffer from mental illness in the UK
1 in 4 in any given year. I would imagine that would be more for lifetime prevalence. Then add all the people with developmental disorders; organic neurological disease; acquired neurological symptoms; plus many others. Then add all the people who are affected negatively in some way by things that happened in their childhood.
Who is normal?
Does normal even really exist except as a concept developed by scientists to try to standardise the measurement of specific behaviours across a population?
What is more important than if someone is or isn’t ‘normal’ according to some obscure graph, is how people behave towards others. I think it more important to be kind; understanding; compassionate; caring than to be normal!
Unfortunately if you wanted everyone to have personal help, diagnosis and assistance who need it, including people who just have a skewed view on life or have got into a culture of violence, etc, then you would probably need some sort of health / social expert for every one in ten people in the country. So if we needed to recruit 6 million people to look after the 60 million people we have, who knew what they were doing, we would also have to train them. So lets say we pay them £20,000 per year and to train them it costs us another £5000 over the first couple of years. That's going to cost us around £150 billion plus management, plus work spaces, pensions, taxes, etc, etc. Then there is a problem with actually finding those people. Nobody would elect a government that said we would spend that, which means we are always stuck in a world where the minimum to please the people is delivered. Its a harsh world...
I do think much can be done to change the perception of society towards an understanding that we are all different and regardless of the issue, most of us have some sort of issue, and once society normalises that, we will all be in a better place.
