Nobody's Normal

January 2021: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

A compassionate and eye-opening examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma.

For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma―from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.

Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. The preeminent historian of medicine, Sander Gilman, calls Nobody’s Normal “the most important work on stigma in more than half a century.

Also available at these fine retailers:

Books-A-Million Bookshop Google Play Indiebound

Read what critics are saying about Nobody’s Normal.

Read Reviews

– INTRODUCTION –

The Road Out of Bedlam

The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the concept of the good.
It is that which society has approved.

– Ruth Benedict (1934)

When I was six years old, my grandfather gave me a copy of his newest publication, a book about how to diagnose borderline personality disorder. He signed it: “To my grandson, who will carry on.” I didn’t know how to read full sentences, so he told me what it meant: I would be a psychiatrist, just like him—the fourth generation of psychiatrists named Grinker.

I am not a psychiatrist.

My family was deeply disappointed, of course, but I eventually earned some redemption by marrying a psychiatrist and by becoming an anthropologist who studies mental health. And inasmuch as this book is about both psychiatry and my family, I do “carry on” their legacy. The lives and work of those generations infuse the pages below—from my great-grandfather, Julius, a late-nineteenth-century neurologist and psychoanalyst who believed people with mental illnesses were biologically inferior, to my own cross-cultural research on autism in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia that rejects such antiquated views.

Read More...

This book chronicles the many cultural and historical threads that have brought us to the present, a time when societies throughout the world are challenging the stigma that has, for centuries, shadowed mental illnesses. We haven’t put it into words, but most of the people I encounter, even in low-income countries with inadequate health care, sense that something positive is happening. Although 60 percent of people with a mental illness in the United States still receive no mental health treatment, mental illness is fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of the human condition. We are acknowledging that mental illnesses are more common than we used to think, and that they affect us all—either individually or because of our relationships to others. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine that there is anyone unconnected to mental illness. In the twenty-first century, many of the people we most admire—celebrities like Lady Gaga and swimmer Michael Phelps, for example—speak publicly about their own emotional struggles. Also, in comparison to their parents, millennials are more willing to disclose a diagnosis and seek treatment. Many people, like my daughter Isabel, who is autistic, even celebrate forms of differences that just a few decades ago were a mark of shame.

These developments show us that we need not surrender to stigma, as if it were natural to marginalize otherness and difference. Stigma isn’t in our biology; it’s in our culture. It is a process we learn from within our communities, and we can change what we teach. But only if we know the history of stigma can we target the social forces that created it in the first place, strengthen those that reduce stigma, and say “enough” to the many barriers that keep so many people from getting care.

My grandfather, also named Roy Grinker, did not share his father’s objectionable views, and he spent much of his career trying to eradicate stigma. I was fortunate to grow up across the street from him. Occasionally, he would reminisce about the time he spent in Vienna as one of Freud’s patients, and I remember how often he talked about Freud’s wishes. One was that doctors could help lead people out of misery, not into a perfect life but into ordinary unhappiness. Another was to prove that emotional distress was universal. Perhaps, Freud told him, if people understood that we are all neurotic, they might eventually feel no shame seeking psychological care for their problems. Perhaps some psychiatric conditions could even become like the common cold, something everyone gets from time to time. And maybe students would be more eager to choose a career in psychiatry.

I was raised in a family that believed everyone had a little mental illness, that emotional pain was a normal part of life, and that mental illnesses existed within a hierarchy of all diseases. Anxiety, for example, was more serious than the common cold and less serious than cancers, but still in the range of what typical human beings confronted throughout their lives. I wasn’t ignorant of the stigma of mental illnesses since, outside my home, most people talked about them in a whisper. But people also whispered about cancer, dementia, and sexually transmitted diseases. It just took me a while to figure out the difference between the stigma of mental versus physical illness.

That realization came after I finished the tenth grade, when my grandfather helped arrange a summer job for me in a psychiatric hospital, cleaning and filing. One day I bumped into an emaciated girl who was my classmate. She was a patient, and simply seeing her caused an uproar. I was so harshly admonished by so many people—our school principal, her parents, my parents, my grandfather, her doctors, my supervisor at work—to keep her hospitalization confidential that I felt as if I had committed a crime. I can only imagine how uncomfortable she felt as she struggled with both her illness and the commotion around her.

I recognized then the extent to which our society had made psychiatric conditions frightening and shameful, a double illness: first, the ailment itself, and second, society’s negative judgment.

From time immemorial, we have averted our eyes rather face the cold hard facts of the impact of war on the human psyche. With the wide-ranging eye and objectivity of a brilliant anthropologist, Grinker has written a “must read” book for those seeking to understand, prevent and treat the wounds of war to the heart, mind and soul.

Pete Geren, Former United States Secretary of the Army and U.S. Congressman

Nobody’s Normal is an unusually engaging history of mental illness and the stigma attached to it. Dr. Grinker threads together the attitudes of society toward psychiatric illness with the lives and work of his ancestors, and his daughter’s experience of autism. The result is an informative and thoughtful book about mental illness: common, painful, usually treatable, and profoundly tied to the human condition.

Kay Redfield Jamison, Author of An Unquiet Mind, and Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)

Nobody’s Normal is a breath-taking tour de force. With lively illustrations across the centuries and spanning United States, England, Namibia, South Korea, and Nepal, Grinker shows how our shifting models of mental illness can only be fully appreciated by using different frames of reference. This fascinating book weaves together stories of mental illness during war, his grandfather’s psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, and a focus on post-traumatic stress disorder and autism. The net result is a compelling global panorama. An invaluable book.

Sir Graham Thornicroft, Professor of Community Psychiatry, King’s College, London

Roy Richard Grinker’s Nobody’s Normal is the most important work on stigma in more than half a century. It tells two intertwined stories – a meticulous, comparative history of mental illness from the Enlightenment to the present, highlighting the centrality of military medicine in times of war, and the story of his own family. As a distinguished anthropologist, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of noteworthy psychiatrists, and the father of a daughter with autism, Grinker brilliantly unravels the tension between deviance and vulnerability by shaping the relationship between multiple generations.

Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences; Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University, Author of Seeing the Insane