Why do we pretend normal society is functional?

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

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/statistics-and-facts-about-mental-health/how-common-are-mental-health-problems/#.XTMz-SXTWEc

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!

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

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/statistics-and-facts-about-mental-health/how-common-are-mental-health-problems/#.XTMz-SXTWEc

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!

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.

I agree there's no such thing as normal really. It's great when you can make someone realise how ignorant they are on the spot like that!