The social construction of abnormality

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The Social Construction of Abnormality
The fields of psychology and psychiatry similarly postulate that there are proper inherent functioning attributes and characteristics, which can be identified in human nature as normal, and this provides the means to characterize ‘abnormal functioning’. Within the diagnostic process of mental disorders there is a classificatory system, which the field of psychiatry developed through means of social construction, and it defines if someone does or does not have a mental illness. Hence, the purpose of this paper arises from this realization, and it is to elucidate the means by which psychiatry has missed the mark in attempting to declare mental illness as natural kinds by using the standard model of science in the development of psychiatric theories.
In this paper, I will begin by describing aspects of abnormal psychology and how “abnormal behavior” is evaluated. This will include the diagnostic criteria of Social Anxiety Disorder, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatry Association, to provide an example of diagnostic symptomatology to compare in relation to theories in social constructionism and the standard model of science as they pertain to defining mental disease or illness. The following questions will be analyzed to extract the socially constructed elements of mental illness in relation to the standard model of science: what is the line that distinguishes between people who meet or do not meet diagnostic criteria, and who created this? If abnormal behaviors are able to be deciphered, then, is the paradigm for normal versus abnormal behaviors or functioning innate in the human condition or did we create it? Should abno...

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...ific law is considered to be unconditionally true, yet all “truths” in mental illness are conditionally true dependent upon a person’s society, culture, and ethnicity. The focus must be on the fact that, that which comes to be a theory through the standard model is a set of laws that are supported through evidence that discovers and explains some physical phenomena; furthermore, in psychiatry, the standard model is utilized in such a way that it is not discovering something that is universally true, it is creating the theory said to be proven true by experimentation. Nevertheless, if what has been said is accepted as true, then one can easily see that mental health diagnoses should not be married with the standard model that is used to define a theory or law that is innate to existence. Rather, we must understand this form of scientific inquiry through another lens.

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