Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

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.

Nobody's Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity.

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, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity.

Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody's Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.

Author: Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 01/26/2021
Pages: 448
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.30w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780393531640

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/12/2020
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2020
Library Journal 01/01/2021 pg. 83
Booklist 02/15/2021 pg. 20