A Normality Check

Recently a young doctor couple dropped in and asked, 'Is something wrong with the both of us? Can you analyze us and tell us what is wrong?' In the field of psychiatry often we are called to lay our judgments and stick a label to people's suffering. All these get done based on some parameters and within the limitless permit of our limited perspective.

We teach in Social Work to be non-judgmental yet, we end judging people the most - based upon their clothes, their gait, their gesture and every little clue and cue we get while recording a patient's MSE. Can we really say what is wrong? What is abnormal? I doubt. 

When we say, someone is behaving abnormally, do we really consider the situation, the experience or even the remotest expectation of the person that makes him/her behave the way they do? Perhaps give their situation, they would be abnormal if they did not behave the way they do... isn't it? Should we not expect our experiences and expectations to have an impact on us at all?

During post-tsunami I remember watching a school teacher standing on dry ground trying to grapple something very invisible to me. It seemed like what learned psychiatrists would call, 'catatonia' or unnecessarily repeated motion. Later I was told that this poor soul witnessed his entire family - his wife and both his little children - being pulled by the merciless tidal wave right from his hold. Ever since, he has been grappling this image of his family washed away in an absolutely understandable attempt to deny the trauma. 

Is he abnormal? Despite what had happened to him, if he were untained, unaffected and be technically 'normal' to comfort my parameters, would he be really normal then? What is it being normal? To condone our own beliefs and to submit to satiate the beliefs and needs of others? To compartmentalize our perceptions and perspectives to the conditional boxes of the society and to confine ourselves to the mediocrity of the society? What is this problem with its measurement?

Today, as I teach students those parameters, clues and cues to look for to measure the concept of normality and those tools to measure the same, it makes me hate myself for teaching them something that I don't believe in these days. People cannot be analysed without making an effort to understand their invisible world. Once we understand that, our limited judgments welcome a cloud of acceptance to drain those perspectives, prejudice and bigotry that we carry. Then why am I not teaching the value of 'acceptance' more? Why is it so difficult to accept people as they are? Their situations, circumstances, experiences and expectations as it is? Why do I deliberate to change something and everyone to fit into my perspective and make sure that they are measurable within the limits of my tools?

At times, being abnormal is the perfectest way of being normal I suppose.