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Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness
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About This Book
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."
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Reviews
"Grinker makes an edgier point, too: that cultural circumstances — whether in combat or on a college campus — can influence how someone expresses psychological pain ..."
"A brilliant insight that emerges again and again from the book, though never articulated as such, is that it is hard to imagine stigma without a constellation of beliefs that are distinctly Western and Judeo-Christian ..."
"His compassion shines through in this meticulously researched and carefully written book, a passionate call for humans to think about how we view those with mental illness."
"This book will fascinate anyone drawn to the subjects of mental illness, psychology, and psychiatry."
"A highly readable, thoughtful study of how we perceive and talk about mental illness—with luck, ever more respectfully."
"both personal and highly professional."
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