STIGMA OF MENTAL ILLNESS: ARE ANY OF US NORMAL?

Our mental health has taken a beating during this past year, as we have been forced to try to adjust to things - from the pandemic to politics - that seemed as if they were taken from episodes of The Twilight Zone. So, as more of us are suffering from anxiety to agoraphobia, paranoia to PTSD, and germaphobia to grief and depression, this would be a good time to question what's 'normal' before we go into what is being called the 'new normal'. Today's guest, Dr. Roy Richard Grinker, a renowned anthropology professor and award-winning author, can answer this question with his latest book, Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness. He has been moved to study society and the psyche because approximately twenty percent of all American adults—around 60 million people—live with a mental illness. But due to the lingering legacy of shame and secrecy around mental health, sixty percent of them receive no treatment. Dr. Grinker looks at these issues, not only as a professor, but also from his personal history, since his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry include his great grandfather, a scientist who believed mental illness was a sign of biological inferiority; his grandfather, a patient of Freud; and his daughter’s experience with autism, about which he wrote UNSTRANGE MINDS: Remapping the World of Autism.