872021, issue 2
Normality Proper to the Time is Sickness
Fabian Freyenhagen
Capitalist societies have the uncanny ability to constantly change, and yet remain the same.
An envisaged psychoanalysis of the prototypical culture of mid-twentieth-cen-
tury society – especially as it presented itself in California – was predicted to reveal
that sickness proper to this time is normality (§ 36). Being a regular guy or popular girl
then required blocking all signs of illness, displaying exuberant vitality and cheerfulness
as if one’s soul’s salvation depended on it. In fact, the mechanical nature of the bodily
comportment and the suppression of even as much as a furrowed brow inadvertently
suggested that the hearts had stopped beating long ago; and that what was presented
to us were corpses, skilfully prepared so as to not scare o anyone at the open-casket
funerals that were hidden in plain sight. It was a time when being homosexual was
considered a mental illness, which tells us not only about the sexual mores then, but
also about the stigma – even taboo – that was attached to those not considered normal
in their mental or emotional make-up.
As times have changed, so have mores. Being diagnosed as presenting with
mental illness has become much less stigmatised, especially if the suerers are privileged
and do not have socially unacceptable delusions. Certain conditions are now often
understood as examples of neurodiversity, rather than abnormality. Being neurologically
dierent is sometimes even celebrated, as in the trope of the troubled geniuses of the
world of art, mathematics, or nance that populate the silver screen and on-demand
streaming devices. It has become statistically likely and accepted – even fashionable,
judging by how many princes and other celebrities go public with it – to receive at
least one diagnosis in one’s lifetime, be it anxiety, depression, attention decit hyper-
activity, or autistic spectrum. It is seen as a mark of individuality to be an instance
of a general category, although this absurdity is partly masked by the exceptions and
reasonable adjustments an acknowledged diagnosis might make available to whoever is
prepared to accept it (this quid pro quo can be witnessed in university contexts, where
the rise in mental health problems has been particularly striking). Still, perhaps, so far
so good. Things become more troubling when we consider the open secret that an
ever-increasing number of us are prescribed and take medication meant to address
low mood or anxiety, conceptualised as chemical imbalances in the brain; and the less
open secret that the side-eects might be worse than the (purported) disease. The shift
from the “age of anxiety” to the “age of depression” has been accompanied by a shift of
response, from one of telling people to man up or be locked up to one of popping pills
and exemption badges. What it means to be mentally distressed has changed in a way
that can almost be dated to a specic year: in 1980 a watershed occurred in psychiatry
– inevitably rst in the USA – whereby mental distress became understood as a bundle
of symptoms, for which the aetiology need not be known. The individualisation of
mental distress – something that already worried Adorno about mid-twentieth-century
psychoanalysis’s becoming part of social hygiene – thereby reached a completely new
level. The change in ontology within psychiatry made this distress into an illness of the
brain of yet-unknown origin. The causal nexus of these developments is like a vortex