@@CHAP@@ Introduction
@@CHAP@@ Why Normal Is a Myth (And Why That Matters)
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
—Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
In the most health-obsessed society ever, all is not well.
Health and wellness have become a modern fixation. Multibillion-dollar industries bank on people’s ongoing investment—mental and emotional, not to mention financial—in endless quests to eat better, look younger, live longer, or feel livelier, or simply to suffer fewer symptoms. We encounter would-be bombshells of “breaking health news” on magazine covers, in TV news stories, omnipresent advertising, and the daily deluge of viral online content, all pushing this or that mode of self-betterment. We do our best to keep up: we take supplements, join yoga studios, serially switch diets, shell out for genetic testing, strategize to prevent cancer or dementia, and seek medical advice or alternative therapies for maladies of the body, psyche, and soul.
And yet our collective health is deteriorating.
What is happening? How are we to understand that in our modern world, at the pinnacle of medical ingenuity and sophistication, we are seeing more and more chronic physical disease as well as afflictions such as mental illness and addiction? Moreover, how is it that we’re not more alarmed, if we notice at all? And how are we to find our way to preventing and healing the many ailments that assail us, even putting aside acute catastrophes such as the COVID-19 pandemic?
As a physician for over three decades, in work ranging from delivering infants to running a palliative care ward, I was always struck by the links between the individual and the social and emotional contexts in which our lives unfold and health or illness ensue. This curiosity, or should I say fascination, led me in time to look deeply into the cutting-edge science that has elegantly delineated such links. My previous books have explored some of these connections as they manifest in particular ailments such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), cancer and autoimmune disease of all types, and addiction. I have also written about child development, the most decisively formative period of our lives.
This book, The Myth of Normal, sets its sights on something far more encompassing. I have come to believe that behind the entire epidemic of chronic afflictions, mental and physical, that beset our current moment, something is amiss in our culture itself, generating both the rash of ailments we are suffering and, crucially, the ideological blind spots that keep us from seeing our predicament clearly, the better to do something about it. These blind spots—prevalent throughout the culture but endemic to a tragic extent in my own profession—keep us ignorant of the connections that bind our health to our social-emotional lives.
Another way of saying it: chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.
The phrase “a toxic culture” in this book’s subtitle may suggest things like environmental pollutants, so prevalent since the dawn of the industrial age and so antagonistic to human health. From asbestos particles to carbon dioxide run amok, there is indeed no shortage of real, physical toxins in our midst. We could also understand “toxic” in its more contemporary, pop-psychological sense, as in the spread of negativity, distrust, hostility, and polarization that, no question, typify the present sociopolitical moment.
We can certainly fold these two meanings into our discussion, but I am using “toxic culture” to characterize something even broader and more deeply rooted: the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.