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.    

Find Out If Someone Is Normal

Step 1: Ask anyone if they are normal and they would agree before you can even drop that dot on the question mark that they are
Step 2: Change conversation and talk something irrelevant for a while
Step 3: After a while, ask if they have ever screamed, whistled, howled and growled when the lights go off in movie halls, scribbled the names of their friends or someone intimate along with theirs behind seats in public places for the world to see 
Step 4: Wait for them to become sheepishly nostalgic and say with pride that they too have done all these in their lifetime 
Step 5: Ask if they would still consider themselves normal now...


Point: Normality is so dissuasive. Some agree that majority behaviour is normal behaviour. "If you can't beat them, join them" goes the proverb. Yet, everyone has been a crackpot sometime or the other,  thus proving that "everybody is somebody's fool" and that no one is wise enough to judge another. "Let s/he who has not sinned be the first to cast the stone" goes the Biblical line and if we think about it, there will be lesser bruises around.