Normal mental health – make the definition I know that the organization is a major contributor to Florida’s economy generating $ 7 billion in annual revenue. Surely it’s time for a correction back to a reasonable Goldilocks balance. We need a tighter diagnostic system and an end to pharma marketing, to get there. Opinions expressed by guest bloggers are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psychiatric Times or its parent company, UBM Medica. Basically, our blogs and columns are for commentary on problems in the field of psychiatry. For psychiatrists or psychologists interested in blogging, please email us at editor@psychiatrictimes.com. So if all the passionate, prejudiced, vicious, and vain people in this world are to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the keys to the asylum, In strictness, we are all mad as often as we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity.

Make it the entire human race are involved in the dragnet, Make the definition that may not be rn to shreds in five minutes by any ordinary logician. Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity.

Second equally telling quote is from the 1888 novella, Billy Budd by Herman Melville. Notice that with sanity and insanity. Let me ask you something. Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other, distinctly we see the difference of the colors.

In pronounced cases loads of us know that there is no question about them.

There’s nothing namable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.

In some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation few will undertake tho’ for a fee some professional experts will. Victorian writing has a subtlety and grace of expression rarely found in our more utilitarian modern modes of speech. Puzzle of defining the boundary between normal and illness is just as problematic day as it was after that,. We currently have an imbalance. Will have to do in the absence of a gold one, so it is a brass standard. Loose definitions, and even looser application of them under the pressure of pharma marketing, have expanded psychiatry beyond its competence and have made normal an endangered species.