Does It Make Sense to Call Anyone ‘Normal’?

After treating several thousand troubled American pilots during World War II, the psychiatrist Roy Richard Grinker made a profound observation: that under such horrific stress, “a hair divides the normal from the neurotic.”

he doctor had witnessed how war could turn a man into a quivering child, unable to put words to his experiences. And he had seen how treatment — a combination of talk therapy and sodium pentothal, or “truth serum” — could spur recovery. His reports from the front lines, according to a 1944 article in this newspaper, “finally exploded as a myth” the notion of mental illness as a scourge of the weak.

But that myth never went away, as powerfully chronicled in a new book by the psychiatrist’s grandson, an anthropologist also named Roy Richard Grinker. A rich history woven with insights from four generations of the Grinker family’s research, “Nobody’s Normal” shows how a society’s needs and prejudices shape how it deals with mental illness, from the regrettable asylums and lobotomies of past centuries to the recent corporate trend of recruiting employees with autism. Grinker makes an edgier point, too: that cultural circumstances — whether in combat or on a college campus — can influence how someone expresses psychological pain.

Read more at The New York Times, January 2021.