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Comment by davidjohnstone | Hacker News Reader

One of the criticisms being leveled at the DSM-V here is that "normal" is being negatively defined as the absence of disorder:

> DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. The normal individual in this book is tranquilized and bovine-eyed, mutely accepting everything in a sometimes painful world without ever feeling much in the way of anything about it.

Positive psychology[1] is a branch of psychology that agrees with this critique, and rather than looking at what goes wrong with people, it looks at what is right about people. There is a book "Character Strengths and Virtues"[2] that is aimed at being the positive counterpart to the DSM, providing a taxonomy of character strengths that have been identified across different times and cultures.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_Strengths_and_Virtues

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What if that characterization is right? Sad but right?

Let's suppose that you feelings are summed up by a score, happiness is just score 0 and normality being between 0 and a very small negative interval; also suppose that you cannot go over zero and everything that can happen can either:

- decrease that score (you feel bad about something, and that feeling is related to a certain, possibly temporary, disorder);

- increase that score, but only up to them maximum value of zero (you feel bad, but that friend helped you and her jokes are actually funny).

It may be that positive traits and strengths do exists, but it is also possible that they are limited to being able to only putting you back on track once you have a problem, not making you more happy or "normal" that you can possibly be.

The fact that you have never experienced happiness doesn't mean everyone else's experiences of it are somehow illusory.

Please, I did not wrote that I never experienced happiness, neither that it is illusory. I am just playing devil's advocate here, the comment started with a "What if".

The reply from ordinary got my intent right: maybe it is right that happiness is limited but sadness is not.

I think we could strike a parallel with perfection. Let's think about bowling. From the DSM-5 point of view, happiness is scoring a "clean game" with all strikes, i.e. the lack of mistakes. Isn't this the same as "happiness is the absence of disorders"? You can win a bowling game even if you make few mistakes, just as you can live a successful life with some small minor disorders.

As you can see, perfection is very limited and corresponds to a single value: zero mistakes.

You may be interested in modern concepts of "recovery" - a patient may not be conventionally well, but may consider themselves to be 'recovered'.

The team should help that person achieve meaningful recovery, and not just reach some checklist target of wellness.

What makes you believe happiness (or any positive feeling) is limited, but sadness (or any negative feeling) is not? Because that's quite a radical hypothesis, and as the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Not only is normal defined as the absence of disorder, but disorders are viewed dimensionally rather than categorically, so to some extent they apply to everybody.

For many disorders, the extent to which they apply on an axis is also, when it comes down to it, defined relative to whether it causes trouble for one's job or not. This is written explicitly into many of the diagnostic criteria, so that the same objective behaviors would be a disorder for a person with one job, where they pose a serious problem to their ability to carry on that occupation, but not for another person with another job, where the behavior is no threat to their livelihood.

But this begs the question [1] of whether it's the person or the job that's "at fault" or "abnormal". That's where some of the criticism originates: one allegation is that perfectly normal people are being diagnosed as mentally ill and told they need treatment, when they are maladapted to a job that in fact most humans are maladapted to. In other words, they are within the normal range of human behavior, but treated as mentally ill because their job expects abnormal human behavior.

[1] In the precise meaning of the term.

> begs the question

Bad English translations of Latin translations of Greek translations give us hard to read phrases ;-) If we are going to use terms like ad hominem what is wrong with petitio principii? Sorry, that's a bit of a tangent....

> whether it's the person or the job that's "at fault" or "abnormal".

Yeah, see shift work sleep disorder.....

What's wrong with "appeal to principle"?

Heh, I clicked into the comments here specifically to link that book. With the current fad of criticism against psychology due to the DSM, it's really important to recognize and encourage the work that's being done explicitly to address that failing.

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