Abnormal Person Quotes

When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.

My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.

Sometimes you're going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there's nothing pathetic or abnormal about that. You are human.

I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.

A ‘normal person’ is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being.

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.

If what you create seems to turn out much stranger than who you are as a person, it's probably because your heart is talking.

Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift.

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do... I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. ...Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now. [Columbian Magazine interview]

I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

We live in a world that has so many people striving to look normal to a bunch of people that are abnormal, in order to be accepted. What is normal is realizing that being accepted comes at a price that robs the world of the uniqueness that God has created you to be every time you minimize your personality to make someone like you.

A person who loves and kisses a tree is a normal person; a person who hates and cuts a tree is an abnormal person.

Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind.

That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.

In my deepest contacts with individuals in therapy, even those whose troubles are most disturbing, whose behavior has been most anti-social, whose feelings seem most abnormal, I find this to be true. When I can sensitively understand the feelings which they are expressing, when I am able to accept them as separate persons in their own right, then I find that they tend to move in certain directions. And what are these directions in which they tend to move? The words which I believe are most truly descriptive are words such as positive, constructive, moving toward self-actualization, growing toward maturity, growing toward socialization.

Whether we are speaking of a flower or an oak tree, of an earthworm or a beautiful bird, of an ape or a person, we will do well, I believe, to recognize that life is an active process, not a passive one. Whether the stimulus arises from within or without, whether the environment is favorable or unfavorable, the behaviors of an organism can be counted on to be in the direction of maintaining, enhancing, and reproducing itself. This is the very nature of the process we call life. This tendency is operative at all times. Indeed, only the presence or absence of this total directional process enables us to tell whether a given organism is alive or dead. The actualizing tendency can, of course, be thwarted or warped, but it cannot be destroyed without destroying the organism. I remember that in my boyhood, the bin in which we stored our winter's supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout—pale white sprouts, so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow 2 or 3 feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. The sprouts were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing. They would never become plants, never mature, never fulfill their real potential. But under the most adverse circumstances, they were striving to become. Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish. In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet, the directional tendency in them can be trusted. The clue to understanding their behavior is that they are striving, in the only ways that they perceive as available to them, to move toward growth, toward becoming. To healthy persons, the results may seem bizarre and futile, but they are life's desperate attempt to become itself. This potent constructive tendency is an underlying basis of the person-centered approach.

I wasn’t raised in a household where it was considered abnormal to be gay. So for me to meet people who use the word 'faggot' as an insult, with a derogatory meaning, I can’t take it. I don’t understand it. It’s so foreign to me. I was raised in a household where being gay was like, the most normal thing. You know, my brother is gay, all of my best friends are gay. When my brother came out of the closet, it wasn’t a big deal for my family. Even my grandpa, who is like, super old-school, was like, Good for you! It’s outrageous to me when I see people hate on someone because of their sexuality. I hate the intolerance. I hate the judgment. I hate it so much. Most of my favorite people in my life are gay. It’s something I’m super passionate about, because whenever I would see my friends get bullied, or my brother get hurt for his sexuality, I would become a raging lunatic. I would literally become a raging lunatic because I just can’t take it. When you see someone you love hurting, for such a superficial, bullshit reason, it’s like, how small and spiritually unenlightened and dumb as fuck can a person be? How much further can your head get up your ass that you’re actually judging someone as a person based on their sexuality before you even have a conversation with them?

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person.

And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance". However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

We aren't really having this conversation," Neil said. Nicky clapped his hands to either side of Neil's head as if trying to shield Neil from their argument. It didn't really work, as he missed Neil's ears completely. "You worry about Neil's career. I'll worry about his personal happiness. Come on, Kevin. Even you have to admit this is really weird." Andrew threw his hands up. "Newsflash, Nicky: Neil isn't normal!" "This is beyond abnormal." "I am standing right here," Neil said, "and I can hear you.

In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon - for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Dore. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.

Evil does not only happen when a person is abnormally bad. Evil happens when good people do not see the good in other people. Evil happens when we judge each other. Evil happens when we put ourselves higher than others. Evil happens when we stand by someone else’s evil and do not speak up. I

In a climate changed world, it is a smart person who thins their trees so that the abnormally high winds can pass through them without damage.

I admire a contented mind. I revere enjoyment of the simple things. I can imagine that contentment has a high degree of truth. But the human tendency is to take good as normal, and one's natural right, and so no cause for satisfaction and pleasure. This is accompanied by the habit of regarding bad as abnormal and a personal outrage.

I'll never be a normal person ever again. You took that away from me. You made me ABNORMAL and it's lonely being abnormal.

Be abnormal; being normal is too predictable for your brand.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person," (P. 1)

Even the most normal person, if placed in a highly abnormal situation, can be mistakenly perceived as the source of abnormality of the person/circumstance aggregate

Contrary to popular belief,” he began, “every normal person is both male and female in some degree.” What he called “erotic emotions” are felt by all people, toward virtually all other people. The problem is that “people not trained to an analytical point of view fail to consider these more complex expressions of erotic feeling,” and tend to regard them as abnormal.

One day I'm a normal person with a normal life,” he said. “The next I'm standing on a street corner in Madrid with a secret phone and a hole in my arm and I'm bleeding all over, hoping I don't get arrested. It was completely crazy. But it seemed like the only way at the time.

BERENGER: And you consider all this natural? 

DUDARD: What could be more natural than a rhinoceros? 

 BERENGER: Yes, but for a man to turn into a rhinoceros is abnormal beyond question. 

DUDARD: Well, of course, that's a matter of opinion ... 

 BERENGER: It is beyond question, absolutely beyond question! 
DUDARD: You seem very sure of yourself. Who can say where the normal stops and the abnormal begins? Can you personally define these conceptions of normality and abnormality? Nobody has solved this problem yet, either medically or philosophically. You ought to know that. 

 BERENGER: The problem may not be resolved philosophically -- but in practice it's simple. They may prove there's no such thing as movement ... and then you start walking ... [he starts walking up and down the room] ... and you go on walking, and you say to yourself, like Galileo, 'E pur si muove' ... 

 DUDARD: You're getting things all mixed up! Don't confuse the issue. In Galileo's case it was the opposite: theoretic and scientific thought proving itself superior to mass opinion and dogmatism. 

 BERENGER: [quite lost] What does all that mean? Mass opinion, dogmatism -- they're just words! I may be mixing everything up in my head but you're losing yours. You don't know what's normal and what isn't any more. I couldn't care less about Galileo ... I don't give a damn about Galileo. 

 DUDARD: You brought him up in the first place and raised the whole question, saying that practice always had the last word. Maybe it does, but only when it proceeds from theory! The history of thought and science proves that. BERENGER: [more and more furious] It doesn't prove anything of the sort! It's all gibberish, utter lunacy! 

DUDARD: There again we need to define exactly what we mean by lunacy ... 

 BERENGER: Lunacy is lunacy and that's all there is to it! Everybody knows what lunacy is. And what about the rhinoceroses -- are they practice or are they theory?

If I’m right,’ she said, ‘and you have all sorts of juicy information in that dossier of yours, you’ll know that I am an abnormally forgiving person, even of those who have used me and hurt me more than one person deserves to be hurt. But right this second, I am looking forward to the day you rot in hell.

Nobody lets go in an instant. You let go once. And then you let go again. And then again and again and again. You let someone go at the grocery store when their favorite type of soup is on sale and you don’t buy it. You let them go again when you’re cleaning your bathroom and have to throw out the bottle of the body wash that smells like them. You let them go that night at the bar when you go home with somebody else or you let them go every year on the anniversary of the day you lost them. Sometimes you’re going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there’s nothing pathetic or abnormal about that.

There was a muchacha who lived near my house. La gente del pueblo talked about her being una de las otras, “of the Others.” They said that for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up. they called her half and half, mita’ y mita‘, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to posess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift. There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the heiros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.

The fact that a patient is classified as mentally or emotionally sick prevents the psychotherapist from enquiring into the possibility of whether, or to what extent, his patient may be cognitively right. It is perfectly possible that a person with 'existential frustration', 'ontological despair', or simply 'sub-clinical depression' may, because of his abnormal condition, be in a better position to look through the camouflage of life that still is deceiving the 'healthy' psychotherapists.

Even though he was hounded by misfortune, never once did Scholar He think of killing himself.” “Think about it. He had abnormally strong determination,” Xie Lian continued somberly. “He was ground down by so much unfairness, so much injustice. A typical person would've given up or ended everything. Yet he always fought back; he never yielded. Perhaps, once the Reverend of Empty Words clung to him, it didn't bite down on sweet fruit but rather an iron plate. In the end, it broke its teeth and lost thoroughly.” Shi Qingxuan shook his head as he listened. He sighed in earnest. “...I really am nothing compared to that man.

From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body. She tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.

Vanderbilt University scientists had discovered chemically testable differences between psychopaths and others. One was the variance in levels of dopamine, a naturally produced chemical that contributed to a person’s motivation and pleasure. Those scientists concluded that the elevated level of dopamine was not an additional symptom to the personality abnormalities already known, but rather responsible for the personality changes.

If the history of the last century taught us the dangers of empowering governments to determine genetic “fitness” (i.e., which person fits within the triangle, and who lives outside it), then the question that confronts our current era is what happens when this power devolves to the individual. It is a question that requires us to balance the desires of the individual— to carve out a life of happiness and achievement, without undue suffering— with the desires of a society that, in the short term, may be interested only in driving down the burden of disease and the expense of disability. And operating silently in the background is a third set of actors: our genes themselves, which reproduce and create new variants oblivious of our desires and compulsions— but, either directly or indirectly, acutely or obliquely, influence our desires and compulsions. Speaking at the Sorbonne in 1975, the cultural historian Michel Foucault once proposed that “a technology of abnormal individuals appears precisely when a regular network of knowledge and power has been established.” Foucault was thinking about a “regular network” of humans. But it could just as easily be a network of genes.

When someone expresses some feeling, attitude or belief, our tendency is almost immediately to feel “that’s right,” or “that’s stupid,” “that’s abnormal,” “that’s unreasonable,” “that’s incorrect,” “that’s not nice.” Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to the other person.

Reserving judgement is a matter of infinite hope. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality[reserving judgement] when it appears in a normal person.

It felt like the start of a whirlwind five-person romance, like we were running into something deep and exciting, something magnetic and abnormally comfortable.

In many ways, commonplace ratings such as “normal/abnormal” and “acceptable/unacceptable” hamper the gifted person who requires not either/or dichotomies but an accepting,

To be queer antiracist is to see homophobia, racism, and queer racism—not the queer person, not the queer space—as the problem, as abnormal, as unnatural.

Whether government or person, if you aren't tranquil and honest, the normal flips to the abnormal, the auspicious reverts to the bizarre, and your bewilderment lasts for a long time.

Just last year, I had to read the old Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Inspired by it, I wished I had been named Draupadi. After all, she, too, had been born differently, even abnormally. She had stepped out of fire, a gift from the old gods to her father the king. There had been no Hindu gods involved in my birth, but the loose parallels gave me a delightful sense of grandeur.

Gus thought maybe this is what normal people did, but he couldn’t quite figure out how normal could be so goddamn terrifying. When he had been abnormal, weird, and strange, he had never had to worry about anything like this.

judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person,

Psychopathic individuals have a neurobiologic impairment in the ability to recognize and process fear and sadness in the facial expressions or voices of other people. It's as though they're blind and deaf to the pain of those around them.

My Standard of Performance—the values and beliefs within it—guided everything I did in my work at San Francisco and are defined as follows: Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement; demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does; be deeply committed to learning and teaching, which means increasing my own expertise; be fair; demonstrate character; honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter; show self-control, especially where it counts most—under pressure; demonstrate and prize loyalty; use positive language and have a positive attitude; take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort; be willing to go the extra distance for the organization; deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation (don’t get crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss); promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress); seek poise in myself and those I lead; put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own; maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high; and make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

Dr. Rose has an accurate but tragic assessment of the plight of SeaWorld’s orcas. “I personally think,” she says, “all captive orcas, whether caught in the wild or born in captivity, are behaviorally abnormal. They are like the children in Lord of the Flies—unnaturally violent because they do not have any of the normal societal brakes on their immature tendency toward violence. Children can be very violent, but under normal circumstances, they are socialized to suppress that violence and channel it productively as they mature.

Rikki looked over at me. “Why now?" she asked, looking back at Arly. “Why is this happening now?" "Hard to say." Arly [therapist] replied. "DID usually gets diagnosed in adulthood. Something happens that triggers the alters to come out. When Cam's father died and he came in to help his brother run the family business he was in close contact with his mother again. Maybe it was seeing Kyle around the same age when some of the abuse happened. Cam was sick for a long time and finally got better. Maybe he wasn't strong enough until now to handle this. It's probably a combination of things. But it sure looks like some of the abuse Cam experienced involved his mother. And sexual abuse by the mother is considered to he one of the most traumatic forms of abuse. In some ways it's the ultimate betrayal.

After this Daisy was never at home, and Winterbourne ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintances, because, as he perceived, these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too far. They ceased to invite her, and they intimated that they desired to express observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative - was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal. Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned towards her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness of innocence or from her being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class. It must be admitted that holding oneself to a belief in Daisy's "innocence" came to see Winterbourne more and more a matter of fine-spun gallantry. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was angry at finding himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady; he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal. From either view of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late.

Being lonely does not mean that we are abnormal, love-starved, oversexed, or alienated. Perhaps all it means is that we are incurably human and sensitive to the fact that God made us for an ecstatic togetherness in a body with divine love and with all other persons of sincere will.

We need to do away with the idea of 'normal,' especially when it's used as a stand-in for 'mainstream' (whether that's white or anything else seen as such). Because at the heart of this difference between normal and abnormal is the belief that these so-called normal things are neutral.

Evil does not only happen when a person is abnormally bad. Evil happens when good people do not see the good in other people. Evil happens when we judge each other. Evil happens when we put ourselves higher than others. Evil happens when we stand by someone else’s evil and do not speak up.

When the brain is diseased, the functions that become pathological are the person’s emotional life, thought processes and behaviour. And this creates addiction’s central dilemma: if recovery is to occur, the brain, the impaired organ of decision making, needs to initiate its own healing process. An altered and dysfunctional brain must decide that it wants to overcome its own dysfunction: to revert to normal—or, perhaps, become normal for the very first time. The worse the addiction is, the greater the brain abnormality and the greater the biological obstacles to opting for health.

I wonder how much of a person is simply fabricated by others,” she said. “And think about this: None of us see the same person in the exact same way. We bring ourselves into the equation. So an individual is never really an individual.” “This might be a little too deep for a hangover. Are you saying we’re not only a product of our environment; we’re also informed by accurate and inaccurate observations by others? That makes my head hurt even more.” “One thing I know, before my capture I saw myself through everybody else’s eyes, if that makes any sense. Every single person I engaged with throughout the day. I read their reaction to me and saw what they saw, accurate or inaccurate. That hasn’t happened since my escape. I don’t know if this new me is normal or abnormal, but that skewed reflection no longer exists. It should feel good, but it’s like something is gone.” You become the person he sees.

communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile

And woe betide the person with the 'double abnormality' of a false self and 'a fine intellect' that they find they can use to escape their pain. 'The world may observe academic success of a high degree, and may find it hard to believe in the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels 'phoney' the more he or she is successful. [as quoted by Winnicott]

There is something ill about a person who makes a surrender of the great human good of married love and then fixes his heart on mere things. Or to put the same idea a bit differently, it is abnormal to give up a dearly loved human person and then attach one’s heart to subpersons. A healthy man or woman gives up married love only because he has found another and greater love.

Psychopaths are generally viewed as aggressive, insensitive, charismatic, irresponsible, intelligent, dangerous, hedonistic, narcissistic and antisocial. These are persons who can masterfully explain another person's problems and what must be done to overcome them, but who appear to have little or no insight into their own lives or how to correct their own problems. Those psychopaths who can articulate solutions for their own personal problems usually fail to follow them through. Psychopaths are perceived as exceptional manipulators capable of feigning emotions in order to carry out their personal agendas. Without remorse for the plight of their victims, they are adept at rationalization, projection, and other psychological defense mechanisms. The veneer of stability, friendliness, and normality belies a deeply disturbed personality. Outwardly there appears to be nothing abnormal about their personalities, even their behavior. They are careful to maintain social distance and share intimacy only with those whom they can psychologically control. They are noted for their inability to maintain long-term commitments to people or programs.

inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,

name Sheila Tubman Sheila Tubman Sheila Tubman hair parted crooked should grow longer much too long face ugly but lovable weird eyebrows gruesome! body skin & bones ugly feet abnormal!!! brain thinks it knows it all a mental OVERUSED!!!!!!!! best thing picks neat friends gives parties ???????????????? worst thing CHICKEN bossy acts real tuff! in general an interesting person not that bad there’s hope

Maimed, mad and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift. There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like pother queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the comig together of opposit qualities within.

In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments, that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could not doubt, nor even admit the possibility of doubt. He felt that they were not analogous to the fantastic and unreal dreams due to intoxication by hashish, opium or wine. Of that he could judge, when the attack was over. These instants were characterized--to define it in a word--by an intense quickening of the sense of personality. Since, in the last conscious moment preceding the attack, he could say to himself, with full understanding of his words: "I would give my whole life for this one instant," then doubtless to him it really was worth a lifetime. For the rest, he thought the dialectical part of his argument of little worth; he saw only too clearly that the result of these ecstatic moments was stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy. No argument was possible on that point. His conclusion, his estimate of the "moment," doubtless contained some error, yet the reality of the sensation troubled him. What's more unanswerable than a fact? And this fact had occurred. The prince had confessed unreservedly to himself that the feeling of intense beatitude in that crowded moment made the moment worth a lifetime.

This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.

I have come to believe with fervent passion that the focus on multiple personalities is missing the point. dissociative identity disorder is not rare; it is not unique; it is not special. It is just a logical set of symptoms to some terrible trauma. It is a normal way to react to very abnormal childhood treatment. In fact, I only have it because I am normal. If I had not reacted normally to chronic trauma and disrupted attachment, I would not have developed it.

Some parents resist the idea of ADD for fear of seeing their children labeled and categorized. They do not like the idea of pinning a medical diagnosis on a child who, except in certain areas of functioning, seems quite well. Such fears are not baseless. Too often ADD seems no more than a judgment that characterizes a child as a problem student, incapable of normal activity. How people use language is quite revealing. People commonly say that this adult or that child “is ADD.” That, indeed, is labeling, identifying the whole person with an area of weakness or impairment. No one is ADD, and no one should be defined or categorized in terms of it or any other particular problem. Recognizing a child’s ADD should be simply a way of understanding that helping him calls for some knowledgeable and creative approaches, not a judgment that there is anything fundamentally or irretrievably wrong with him. This recognition should enable us to support the child in fullfilling his potential, not to further limit him. That even open-minded people may have difficulty coming to terms with this diagnosis is only to be expected. Our usual mode of thinking about illness (or anything else, for that matter) is not comfortable with ambiguity. A patient either has pneumonia or does not; she either has some illness affecting the mind or does not. There is a popular discomfort with any condition of the mind perceived as “abnormal.” But what if illness is not a separate category, if there is no line of distinction between the “healthy” and the “nonheaithy,” if the “abnormality” is just a greater concentration in an individual of disturbed brain processes found in everyone? Then perhaps there are no fixed, immutable brain disorders, and we could all be vulnerable to mental breakdowns or malfunctions under the pressure of stressful circumstances. We could all go crazy. Maybe we already have.

Getting drunk every Friday night and thinking that it's normal, only to get mad every Monday, looks normal only because most people are insane. It becomes abnormal when it affects your relationships and you push people you want away with a smile and cry when they're gone. That's when a person should question her own sanity. If that still doesn't make one question it, then that's a very deep stage of insanity. That's not life. That's the scenario for an apocalyptic movie.

Many public officials are using the power of their offices to defy the law of the land. Through their irresponsible actions, their inflammatory statements, and their dissemination of distortions and half-truths, they have succeeded in arousing abnormal fears and morbid antipathies within the minds of underprivileged and uneducated whites, leaving them in such a state of excitement and confusion that they are led to acts of meanness and violence that no normal person would commit.

The more conscious I was of all the good and of all this "beautiful and lofty," the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it. But the main feature was that this was all in me not as if by chance, but as if it had to be so. As if it were my most normal condition and in no way a sickness or a blight, so that finally I lost any wish to struggle against this blight. I ended up almost believing (and maybe indeed believing) that this perhaps was my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, how much torment I endured in this struggle! I did not believe that such things happened to others, and therefore kept it to myself all my life as a secret. I was ashamed (maybe I am ashamed even now); it reached the point with me where I would feel some secret, abnormal, mean little pleasure in returning to my corner on some nasty Petersburg night and being highly conscious of having once again done a nasty thing that day, and again that what had been done could in no way be undone, and I would gnaw, gnaw at myself with my teeth, inwardly, secretly, tear and suck at myself until the bitterness finally turned into some shameful, accursed sweetness, and finally-into a decided, serious pleasure! Yes, a pleasure, a pleasure! I stand upon it. The reason I've begun to speak is that I keep wanting to find out for certain: do other people have such pleasures? I'll explain it to you: the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one's own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and enough faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.

I can actually follow the plot of TV programs now, and I no longer use books as masks—I read them like a normal person, just like you have read this. Which assumes you are normal; maybe you’re not. Maybe none of us are. Maybe none of us would want to be anyway. But, for the sake of argument, let’s call me normal now. I am better. I don’t know whether it’s for good, or if one day something might make me abnormal again. But that’s the funny thing about living. If you do it properly, you don’t know how the next sentence will begin.

But a normal ego of this sort is, like normality in general, an ideal fiction. The abnormal ego, which is unserviceable for our purposes, is unfortunately no fiction. Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent; and the degree of its remoteness from one end of the series and of its proximity to the other will furnish us with a provisional measure of what we have so indefinitely termed an 'alteration of the ego'.

Similar to other people, I suffer from my own brand of neurosis – a functional mental and emotional disorder involving emotional distress, indecision, social awkwardness, and interpersonal maladjustment. Unlike other rational people, I also suffer from mental delusions. It is a risky gambit attempting to hold at bay a pressing pack of personal abnormalities and a hazardous stable of personal neuroses including obsessional conduct, and compulsive thoughts while simultaneously straddling the horizontal bars of rationality and irrationality.

In general, I know that when speaking of private and opposing worlds, one tends to refer to divided, sometimes even irreconcilable facets of personality or of the spirit, each with its corresponding secret value and its psychological, metaphysical, political, or simply practical- or even pathological- content. But in my case there was neither a moral nor existential disjunctive, what was more, I saw that my two worlds weren't separated in an equal or reciprocal way; neither did one world linger in the shadows or in private as the flip side of the other, the visible one, who knows which; nor would they seek to impose themselves over the other or to merge as one, but force or not, as tends to occur in these cases. Nothing of the sort; they seemed a nearly abnormal example of coexistence, of adaptive tendency and of absolute absence of contrasts. I took all this into consideration, and it seemed worrisome and insoluble. . . But an instant later I resigned myself, thinking that when all was said and done I ought to bow to these conditions, because just as we cannot choose our moment to be born, we also know nothing of the variable worlds we'll inhabit.

BPII is considered a biological illness because it is associated with structural and functional abnormalities in the brain. In recent years, psychologists have learned much about how the brain of someone with BPII differs from that of someone without the disorder; however, because the brain is very complex, there is still a lot that we do not understand. We know that BPII is caused, at least in part, by problems with the brain’s chemical messengers, or neurotransmitters. But it seems that each person with BPII may have slightly different problems with his or her neurotransmitters and we don’t yet understand exactly what these differences are.

PHYSIOLOGY 1. Sex 2. Age 3. Height and weight 4. Color of hair, eyes, skin 5. Posture 6. Appearance: good-looking, over- or underweight, clean, neat, pleasant, untidy. Shape of head, face, limbs. 7. Defects: deformities, abnormalities, birthmarks. Diseases. 8. Heredity SOCIOLOGY 1. Class: lower, middle, upper. 2. Occupation: type of work, hours of work, income, condition of work, union or nonunion, attitude toward organization, suitability for work. 3. Education: amount, kind of schools, marks, favorite subjects, poorest subjects, aptitudes. 4. Home life: parents living, earning power, orphan, parents separated or divorced, parents’ habits, parents’ mental development, parents’ vices, neglect. Character’s marital status. 5. Religion 6. Race, nationality 7. Place in community: leader among friends, clubs, sports. 8. Political affiliations 9. Amusements, hobbies: books, newspapers, magazines he reads. PSYCHOLOGY 1. Sex life, moral standards 2. Personal premise, ambition 3. Frustrations, chief disappointments 4. Temperament: choleric, easygoing, pessimistic, optimistic. 5. Attitude toward life: resigned, militant, defeatist. 6. Complexes: obsessions, inhibitions, superstitions, phobias. 7. Extrovert, introvert, ambivert 8. Abilities: languages, talents. 9. Qualities: imagination, judgment, taste, poise. 10. I.Q.

When someone expresses some feeling or attitude or belief, our tendency is, almost immediately, to feel “That’s right”; or “That’s stupid”; “That’s abnormal”; “That’s unreasonable”; “That’s incorrect”; “That’s not nice.” Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of his statement is to him. I believe this is because understanding is risky. If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into his frame of reference. It is also a rare thing.

I feel abnormally aware of the air in my lungs and of the blood in my body. Brian’s breath is loud and reminds me that he is a person and that he is alive and so am I. I put his hand on my throat to stop my breath and try to subdue this feeling of being a person who breathes and takes up space and fucks people, but he won’t keep his hand there. He moves it to my waist and kisses my forehead. I feel a cold rush down my body and suddenly I’m panicked. I wonder if Brian has ever been with a girl who loved him before. I wonder if there is a person out in the world who would feel sick at the thought of him being naked with me. I cannot shake this thought. I become sure of it. I suddenly feel a sickening, overwhelming guilt. I have to close my eyes to stop from crying at the thought of the girl I have imagined.

The Perpetrator’s Narrative: The story begins with the harmful act. At the time I had good reasons for doing it. Perhaps I was responding to an immediate provocation. Or I was just reacting to the situation in a way that any reasonable person would. I had a perfect right to do what I did, and it’s unfair to blame me for it. The harm was minor, and easily repaired, and I apologized. It’s time to get over it, put it behind us, let bygones be bygones. The Victim’s Narrative: The story begins long before the harmful act, which was just the latest incident in a long history of mistreatment. The perpetrator’s actions were incoherent, senseless, incomprehensible. Either that or he was an abnormal sadist, motivated only by a desire to see me suffer, though I was completely innocent. The harm he did is grievous and irreparable, with effects that will last forever. None of us should ever forget it. They

What on earth did we do wrong? What harm did we inflict? What did we do to you? Who are you to judge us? Who gave you the right? Are you the representatives of mankind, or what? Who appointed you? Was it God? Yourselves? You don't care if someone loves to go bowling or shooting! You don't care if someone wants to be a doctor or a flight attendant! So why can't we love someone of the same gender? What makes you say that the way we love is wrong? Because we're not "normal"? Because we don't abide by the provisions of God? The laws of nature? Well, fuck you. What a load of bullshit. You want to create a land for God? Good. Then let's bring back the regulations on sex positions first! Don't use condoms, and only fuck in the missionary position, damn it! Since sex should only be for childbirth, and any other pleasure is against the will of God, am I right? Come to think of it, you guys are fucking disgusting. I mean, I know you all fuck doggy-style and blow each other! So I guess you're all going to hell as well! The same goes for singles who don't copulate at all! If the union of man and woman is what is "normal", singles are the most abnormal of all! You're all going to hell, too! On, and let's just kill all the ugly people, fat people, and poor people while we're at it. Then it'll be heaven on earth, with no abnormal beings! Where the normal are free to kill the abnormal! If you ask me, you uneducated, narrow-minded scumbags are the ones that degrade human nobility! You're fucking revolting! Ignorant morons! Do you feel good? Or pissed off? Mad? Then come at me! Instead of being fucking cowards, bashing someone that's all tied up. Won't it be more fun to beat up a person of color? Kill me before I infect your brains and turn all of you into homosexuals! Kill me first! Stupid scumbags!

consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves. Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Either one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there can be no great art and no profound happiness--and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed.

Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement; demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does; be deeply committed to learning and teaching, which means increasing my own expertise; be fair; demonstrate character; honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter; show self-control, especially where it counts most—under pressure; demonstrate and prize loyalty; use positive language and have a positive attitude; take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort; be willing to go the extra distance for the organization; deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation (don’t get crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss); promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress); seek poise in myself and those I lead; put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own; maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high; and make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

if there is no proof that a depressed person has a chemical imbalance, and you choose nevertheless to put that person on a medication that will alter neurotransmitter levels in his or her brain, then in effect you are causing a chemical imbalance rather than curing one. According to Steven Hyman, a neuroscientist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, all psychotropic drugs cause “perturbations in neurotransmitter functions.” And this is Whitaker’s main point. We are subjecting millions of brains to drugs that change natural neurotransmission, sometimes radically, disturbing and upsetting the complex interplay inside our heads, clogging neural pathways with excess chemicals, and sometimes causing the entire brain, which is intricately interlinked, to malfunction in ways we do not yet understand. An unmedicated depressed patient does not have a known chemical imbalance in his brain, but once he ingests Prozac, he will. The drug crosses the blood-brain barrier and gets to work, jamming serotonin into the synaptic cleft. Whitaker explains the result this way: “Several weeks later the serotonergic pathway is operating in a decidedly abnormal manner.

What happened to factual, down-the-middle reporting? That’s hard to even define anymore, as the line between fact and fiction, between truth and lies, gets murkier every day. We can’t survive without a free press, dedicated to preserving that fine line and secure enough to follow the facts where they lead. But the current environment imposes serious pressures on our journalists, at least those who cover politics, to do just the reverse—to exercise their own power and to, in the words of one wise columnist, “abnormalize” all politicians, even honest, able ones, often because of relatively insignificant issues. Scholars call this false equivalency. It means that when you find a mountain to expose in one person or party, you have to pick a molehill on the other side and make it into a mountain to avoid being accused of bias. The built-up molehills also have large benefits: increased coverage on the evening news, millions of retweets, and more talk-show fodder. When the mountains and molehills all look the same, campaigns and governments devote too little time and energy debating the issues that matter most to our people. Even when we try to do that, we’re often drowned out by the passion of the day.

Even the asexual has a deviation - his asexuality. It is far more abnormal to have a lack of desire (unless illness or oldage, or another valid reason has caused the wane) than it is to be sexually promiscuous. However, if a Satanist choose sexual sublimation above overt sexual expression, that is entirely his own affair. In many cases of sexual sublimation (or asexuality), any attempt to emancipate himself sexually would prove devastating to the asexual. Asexuals are invariably sexually sublimated by their jobs or hobbies. All the energy and driving interest which would normally be devoted to sexual activity, is channeled into other pastimes or into their chosen occupations. If a person favors other interests over sexual activity, it is his right, and no one is justified in condemning him for it. However, the person should at least recognize the fat this is a sexual sublimation. Because of lack of opportunity for expression, many secret sexual desires never progress beyond the fantasy stage. lack of release often leads to compulsion and, therefore, a great number of people devise undetectable methods of giving vent to their urges. Just because most fetishistic activity is not outwardly apparent, the sexually unsophisticated should not delude himself into think it does not exist.

   As these examples show, the physiology of the brain makes such reproductions possible. But, for them to take place, an abnormal mental state is always needed, which can justifiably be conjectured in Nietzsche’s case at the time when he wrote Zarathustra. One has only to think of the incredible speed with which this work was produced. There is an ecstasy so great that the tremendous strain of it is at times eased by a storm of tears, when your steps now involuntarily rush ahead, now lag behind; a feeling of being completely beside yourself, with the most distinct consciousness of innumerable delicate thrills tingling through you to your very toes; a depth of happiness, in which pain and gloom do not act as its antitheses, but as its condition, as a challenge, as necessary shades of colour in such an excess of light.9 So he himself describes his mood. These shattering extremes of feeling, far transcending his personal consciousness, were the forces that called up in him the remotest and most hidden associations. Here, as I said before, consciousness only plays the role of slave to the daemon of the unconscious, which tyrannizes over it and inundates it with alien ideas. No one has described the state of consciousness when under the influence of an automatic complex better than Nietzsche himself:

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

Just as I have named authenticity and attachment as two basic needs, so Bruce has identified people's "vital need for social belonging with their equally vital needs for individual autonomy and achievement" and calls the marriage of the two psychosocial integration. A sane culture, Bruce and I agree, would have psychosocial integration as both an aim and a norm. Authenticity and attachment would cease to be in conflict: there would be no fundamental tension between belonging and being oneself. Dislocation, in Bruce's formulation, describes a loss of connection to self, to others, and to a sense of meaning and purpose — all of which appear on the roster of essential needs. Lest the word "dislocation" conjure something hazy like "being lost," he is quick with a graphic metaphor. "Think of a dislocated shoulder," he said, "a shoulder disarticulated, out of joint. You didn't cut off the arm, but it's just hanging there and not working anymore. Useless. That's how dislocated people experience themselves. It's excruciatingly painful." More than an individual experience, the same intense pain often occurs at the social level when large groups of people find themselves cut off from autonomy, relatedness, trust, and meaning. This is social dislocation, which, along with personal trauma, is a potent source of mental dysfunction, despair, addictions, and physical illness. Abnormal from the perspective of human needs, such dislocation is now an entrenched fact of "normality" in our culture. Dislocation spares no class of people, even if it shows up differently in different strata of society. Societal privilege may insulate some of us from being outwardly wrecked by dislocation's gale-force winds , but it cannot exempt us from the inner impacts of having our needs for interconnection, purpose, and genuine self-esteem denied. Neither achievements nor attributes nor external evaluations of our worth can possibly compensate us for such a lack.

true—helping a hurting person is a bit scary. We want to do the right thing, not the wrong thing—say what will help, not what will hurt. To add to our confusion, our friend is “not quite herself.” She’s different. We want our friend fixed and back to normal. All you have to do is care. Harold Ivan Smith described the process so well: Grief sharers always look for an opportunity to actively care. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief, but you can wash the sink full of dishes, listen to him or her talk, take his or her kids to the park. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief but you can visit the cemetery with him or her. Grief sharing is not about fixing—it’s about showing up. Coming alongside. Being interruptible. “Hanging out” with the bereaving. In the words of World War II veterans, “present and reporting for duty.” The grief path is not a brief path. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.[1] What can you expect from a friend who is hurting? Actually, not very much. And the more her experience moves beyond a loss and closer to a crisis or trauma, the more this is true. Sometimes you’ll see a friend experiencing a case of the “crazies.” Her response seems irrational. She’s not herself. Her behavior is different from or even abnormal compared to the person not going through a major loss. Just remember, she’s reacting to an out-of-the-ordinary event. What she experienced is abnormal, so her response is actually quite normal. If what the person has experienced is traumatic she may even seem to exhibit some of the symptoms of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). And because your friend is this way, she is not to be avoided. Others are needed at this time in her life. These are responses you can expect. Your friend is no longer functioning as she once did—and probably won’t for a while. You Are Needed You are needed when a person experiences a sudden intrusion or disruption in her life. If you (or another friend) aren’t available, the only person she has to talk with for guidance, support, and direction is herself. And who wants support from someone struggling with a case of the “crazies”? But a problem may arise when your friend doesn’t realize that she needs you, at least at that particular time. Your sensitivity is needed at this point. Remember, when your friend is hurting and facing a loss, you are dealing with a loss as well, because the relationship you had with your friend has changed. It’s not the same.

First, to map out the boundaries within which all discussion must go on, I take it for certain that the physical satisfaction of homo-sexual desires is sin. This leaves the homo, no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Second, our speculations on the cause of the abnormality are not what matters and we must be content with ignorance. The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind (Jn. IX 1-3): only the final cause, that the works of God shd. be made manifest in him. This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest: i.e. that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, wh. will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’ Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations wh., if so disabled, we can’t lawfully get. The homo, has to accept sexual abstinence just as the poor man has to forego otherwise lawful pleasures because he wd. be unjust to his wife and children if he took them. That is merely a negative condition. What shd. the positive life of the homo, be? I wish I had a letter wh. a pious male homo., now dead, once wrote to me—but of course it was the sort of letter one takes care to destroy. He believed that his necessity could be turned to spiritual gain: that there were certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, a certain social role which mere men and mere women could not give. But it is all horribly vague— too long ago. Perhaps any homo, who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under Divine guidance will, however, be shown the way. I am sure that any attempt to evade it (e.g. by mock-or quasi-marriage with a member of one’s own sex even if this does not lead to any carnal act) is the wrong way. Jealousy (this another homo, admitted to me) is far more rampant and deadly among them than among us. And I don’t think little concessions like wearing the clothes of the other sex in private is the right line either. It is the duties, the burdens, the characteristic virtues of the other sex, I expect, which the patient must try to cultivate. I have mentioned humility because male homos. (I don’t know about women) are rather apt, the moment they find you don’t treat them with horror and contempt, to rush to the opposite pole and start implying that they are somehow superior to the normal type. I wish I could be more definite. All I have really said is that, like all other tribulations, it must be offered to God and His guidance how to use it must be sought.

The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration.

The 'normal' person must remain open to these abnormalities of which he is never entirely exempt himself; he must take the trouble to understand them. He is invited to look at himself without indulgence, to rediscover within himself the whole host of fantasies, dreams, patterns of magical behaviour and obscure phenomena which remain all-powerful in shaping both his private and public life and his relationships with other people. These leave his knowledge of the natural world riddled with gaps, which is how poetry creeps in.

Triazolam has received significant attention in the media because of an alleged association with serious aggressive behavioral manifestations. Therefore, the manufacturer recommends that the drug be used for no more than 10 days for treatment of insomnia and that physicians carefully evaluate the emergence of any abnormal thinking or behavioral changes in persons treated with triazolam, giving appropriate consideration to all potential causes. Triazolam was banned in Great Britain in 1991.

Driver Behavior & Safety Proper driving behavior is vital for the safety of drivers, passengers, pedestrians and is a means to achieve fewer road accidents, injuries and damage to vehicles. It plays a role in the cost of managing a fleet as it impacts fuel consumption, insurance rates, car maintenance and fines. It is also important for protecting a firm’s brand and reputation as most company- owned vehicles carry the company’s logo. Ituran’s solution for driver behavior and safety improves organizational driving culture and standards by encouraging safer and more responsible driving. The system which tracks and monitors driver behavior using an innovative multidimensional accelerometer sensor, produces (for each driver) an individual score based on their performance – sudden braking and acceleration, sharp turns, high-speed driving over speed bumps, erratic overtaking, speeding and more. The score allows fleet managers to compare driver performance, set safety benchmarks and hold each driver accountable for their action. Real-time monitoring identifies abnormal behavior mode—aggressive or dangerous—and alerts the driver using buzzer or human voice indication, and detects accidents in real time. When incidents or accidents occurs, a notification sent to a predefined recipient alerts management, and data collected both before and after accidents is automatically saved for future analysis. • Monitoring is provided through a dedicated application which is available to both fleet manager and driver (with different permission levels), allowing both to learn and improve • Improves organizational driving culture and standards and increases safety of drivers and passengers • Web-based reporting gives a birds-eye view of real-time driver data, especially in case of an accident • Detailed reports per individual driver include map references to where incidents have occurred • Comparative evaluation ranks driving according to several factors; the system automatically generates scores and a periodic assessment certificate for each driver and/or department Highlights 1. Measures and scores driver performance and allows to give personal motivational incentives 2. Improves driving culture by encouraging safer and more responsible driving throughout the organization 3. Minimizes the occurrence of accidents and protects the fleet from unnecessary wear & tear 4. Reduces expenses related to unsafe and unlawful driving: insurance, traffic tickets and fines See how it works:

It seems unfortunate to me, when millions of dollars are allocated to medical research and the relief of human suffering, that little or nothing is earmarked for help of victims of sex abnormalities. It is frequently considered more appropriate to strengthen the arm of the law against the people who don't fit into acceptable patterns of sexual normalcy, whatever the "norm" may be. In the face of abnormality, sometimes it's considered clever to ridicule or condemn. However, it's encouraging to note that within the past few years, the subject of deviation has not been so carefully avoided by legislative groups or medical practice, and society in general has been even further enlightened, I think, through occasional channels of mass communications media.

He is an abnormal person and a schizophrenia patient, even a criminal and filthy-minded. I neither know his background nor he is my friend; however, I let him come since it is my nature not to humiliate and hurt; conversely, such ones caused me gravely damaged. I cannot believe if someone who claims to be the holder of a high IQ and also has a high status in society, which I always considered and thought of as one of the criminal groups. It is a surprise for me that a son of a bitch still misuses someone, telling me every time strange stories, and previously he talked about it ugly things. He also caused the worst image of Intelligence agencies, pretending as if he worked for them. I have never seen such shameless and morally dead people. I request that someone who exists as that who demonstrated for the last six years should come out to prove its reality; otherwise, disappear if it respects humanity and moral values.

Regardless of how any individual clinician may conceptualize a person’s distress, the current paradigm under which all mental health professionals operate is one that is conceived through a medical ideology with a medical classification system (Caplan, 1995; Frances, 2016). Terms such as “symptoms” are used to describe human behaviors and emotions (Hare-Mustin & Marecek, 1997), while many categories are associated with words like “neurological”, “genetic predisposition”, and “illness”, despite no known biological abnormality to be specifically associated with any DSM -defined category (e.g., Kupfer, 2013).

The problem with “madness” as a general concept was that there wasn’t a base model for a “normal” psychological makeup. Each person was so uniquely different, each society with its own rules and cues, each culture with its norms and penalties meant there was no way to define normal. Yet so many people made a study of abnormal psychology. It was so much easier to focus on the “other” than what similarities we might conceive between them and us.

Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

Critics of the DSM and ICD have argued that disorders are arbitrary labels used to describe typical human experiences that are deemed abnormal. An example of this concept is that different countries have varied expectations and views of what is considered to be normal. A person who claims to talk to spirits might be considered schizophrenic in one culture while being deemed a holy person in another.

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight her impulses and accept them; to love her parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge her mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of others while searching unceasingly for her own identity; to be more idealistic, artistic, generous, and unselfish than she will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egoistic, calculating. Such fluctuations and extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they may signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge, that the individual in question does not cease to experiment and is in no hurry to close down on possibilities.

Today, as provost of Harvard University, Steve Hyman is mostly engaged in the many political and administrative tasks that come with leading a large institution. But he is a neuroscientist by training, and in 1996 to 2001, when he was the director of the NIMH, he wrote a paper, one both memorable and provocative in kind, that summed up all that had been learned about psychiatric drugs. Titled “Initiation and Adaptation: A Paradigm for Understanding Psychotropic Drug Action,” it was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and it told of how all psychotropic drugs could be understood to act on the brain in a common way.46 Antipsychotics, antidepressants, and other psychotropic drugs, he wrote, “create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions.” In response, the brain goes through a series of compensatory adaptations. If a drug blocks a neurotransmitter (as an antipsychotic does), the presynaptic neurons spring into hyper gear and release more of it, and the postsynaptic neurons increase the density of their receptors for that chemical messenger. Conversely, if a drug increases the synaptic levels of a neurotransmitter (as an antidepressant does), it provokes the opposite response: The presynaptic neurons decrease their firing rates and the postsynaptic neurons decrease the density of their receptors for the neurotransmitter. In each instance, the brain is trying to nullify the drug’s effects. “These adaptations,” Hyman explained, “are rooted in homeostatic mechanisms that exist, presumably, to permit cells to maintain their equilibrium in the face of alterations in the environment or changes in the internal milieu.” However, after a period of time, these compensatory mechanisms break down. The “chronic administration” of the drug then causes “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function,” Hyman wrote. As part of this long-term adaptation process, there are changes in intracellular signaling pathways and gene expression. After a few weeks, he concluded, the person’s brain is functioning in a manner that is “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” His was an elegant paper, and it summed up what had been learned from decades of impressive scientific work. Forty years earlier, when Thorazine and the other first-generation psychiatric drugs were discovered, scientists had little understanding of how neurons communicated with one another. Now they had a remarkably detailed understanding of neurotransmitter systems in the brain and of how drugs acted on them. And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

in believing that anxiety disorders typically arise from failed efforts to resolve basic existential dilemmas, Dr. W. is, as we will see, running against the grain of modern psychopharmacology (which proffers the evidence of sixty years of drug studies to argue that anxiety and depression are based on “chemical imbalances”), neuroscience (whose emergence has demonstrated not only the brain activity associated with various emotional states but also, in some cases, the specific structural abnormalities associated with mental illness), and temperament studies and molecular genetics (which suggest, rather convincingly, a powerful role for heredity in the determination of one’s baseline level of anxiety and susceptibility to psychiatric illness). Dr. W. doesn’t dispute the findings from any of those modes of inquiry. He believes medication can be an effective treatment for the symptoms of anxiety. But his view, based on thirty years of clinical work with hundreds of anxious patients, is that at the root of almost all clinical anxiety is some kind of existential crisis about what he calls the “ontological givens”—that we will grow old, that we will die, that we will lose people we love, that we will likely endure identity-shaking professional failures and personal humiliations, that we must struggle to find meaning and purpose in our lives, and that we must make trade-offs between personal freedom and emotional security and between our desires and the constraints of our relationships and our communities. In this view, our phobias of rats or snakes or cheese or honey (yes, honey; the actor Richard Burton could not bear to be in a room with honey, even if it was sealed in a jar, even if the jar was closed in a drawer) are displacements of our deeper existential concerns projected onto outward things. Early

I have found it of enormous value when I can permit myself to understand the other person. The way in which I have worded this statement may seem strange to you. Is it necessary to permit oneself to understand another? I think it is. Our first reaction to most of the statements (which we hear from other people) is an evaluation or judgment, rather than an understanding of it. When someone expresses some feeling, attitude or belief, our tendency is almost immediately to feel “that’s right,” or “that’s stupid,” “that’s abnormal,” “that’s unreasonable,” “that’s incorrect,” “that’s not nice.” Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to the other person.I

America is, and always has been, an abnormally violent place. Compared to other high-income nations, the chance you will die a violent death at the hands of another person is ten times higher if you live in the United States than any other place. This is driven by a gun homicide rate that is a mind-blowing twenty-five times higher than that in other advanced countries, but rates of rape and assault are also much higher in the United States. And America’s outlier status as a wildly violent nation isn’t new. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, America’s homicide rates—the primary historic means to compare violence across societies—has been in a class by itself.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create….By some strange unknown inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is creating.

If those same scientists analyzed babies who are born with congenital heart disorders- who have to undergo open-heart surgery the moment they are born, whose tiny chests are opened and doused with icy water to paralyze their metabolisms, who are kept alive by machines and must have a series of surgeries as they grow-they might conclude those children would have worse outlooks than healthy children. Personally, I believe their lives are neither better nor worse, only different. We, on the mountain, and these children with their surgeries are sort of "abnormal," a kind of "mutant," because we both challenged our destiny and wrote a new ending. It's why I identify with them. When I'm with them, my life has meaning, and my heart grows. They are messengers of life, these children with voices made hoarse by the intubation that will often affect their vocal cords. In their raspy voices, they whisper to me that I was right to continue trudging over that mountain...

There is nothing wrong in wanting to get rich. The desire for riches is really the desire for a richer, fuller, and more abundant life; and that desire is praiseworthy. The man who does not desire to live more abundantly is abnormal, and so the man who does not desire to have money enough to buy all he wants is abnormal. There are three motives for which we live; we live for the body, we live for the mind, and we live for the soul.

Our first reaction to most of the statements (which we hear from other people) is an evaluation or judgment, rather than an understanding of it. When someone expresses some feeling, attitude or belief, our tendency is almost immediately to feel ‘that’s right,’ or ‘that’s stupid,’ ‘that’s abnormal,’ ‘that’s unreasonable,’ ‘that’s incorrect,’ ‘that’s not nice.’ Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the statement means to the other person.

He is an abnormal person and a schizophrenia patient, even a criminal and filthy-minded. I neither know his background nor he is my friend; however, I let him come since it is my nature not to humiliate and hurt; conversely, such ones caused me grave damage. I cannot believe someone who claims to be the holder of a high IQ and also has a high status in society, which I always considered and thought of as one of the criminal groups. It is a surprise for me that a son of a bitch still misuses someone, telling me every time strange stories, and previously he talked about it ugly things. He also caused the worst image of intelligence agencies, pretending as if he worked for them. I have never seen such shameless and morally dead people. I request that someone who exists as that who demonstrated for many years should come out to prove its reality; otherwise, disappear if it respects humanity and moral values.

There undoubtedly appear in every generation certain portentous human beings to whose personalities some mysterious destiny gives abnormal power, abnormal capacity for emotion and finally an abnormal closeness to the secret processes of nature.

Entertainment industry doesn’t need someone who is truthful, speaks their mind and has right moral compass. Because the industry is build, sponsored and supported by corporates. The corporates that exploit, extort, bully, human traffic, money laundering ,promotes prostitution and drug use. The corporates that are into dark, evil, abnormally, scary, shameful, disgusting, cults, shady , bad things. If you are talented and good person . They clip your winds, block your shine, destroy you before you rise. That is why there is gate keepers. It is never about art , skill or talent. It is about the person.

When we come to this primary union of you and the person next to you, we find that marriage not only involves a union of bodies but a union of souls. What is the relation between them? Is bodily union a vestibule to soul union or vice versa? A mother kissing and hugging her son back from a European concentration camp gives a real clue to the relationship. Anybody describing this kissing and hugging between mother and son as a bodily action would miss its larger and fuller import in the soul union there. However, if there were not these embraces and kisses between the long-separated mother and son, manifesting deep soul unity, they would be very abnormal people.

And indeed, many trauma-related health problems are dismissed, missed, and misunderstood. But once you understand more about neuroscience, and how our senses and brain translate experience into “biological” activity, the artificial distinctions disappear. If you understand the neurobiology of trauma, you know that a physical “abnormality” is causing the abdominal pain seen with sensitized dissociation. You begin to see that a person’s “worldview” can change their immune system, and that a positive conversation with a friend can influence how a patient’s heart or lungs function that day. The interconnectedness becomes clear.

What is the fundamental fact that remains a constant, whether overt or disguised, in all abnormally developed types of personality ? Is it not that so far as emotions are concerned such people live their outward life in terms of inner subjective factors. Their emotional relationships with their outer world are not objectively realistic. They may be intellectually objective in the matter of their correct appraisal of ways and means to their own ends, and in relation to matters that are of no private emotional significance to them. But the moment their personal needs and aims are involved they lose emotional objectivity and behave on the basis of inner mental situations. All patients live in an individual private mental world and to help them we have to discover its structure.

psychopaths are generally well satisfied with themselves and with their inner landscape, bleak as it may seem to outside observers.

Freedom from resentment and the understanding of the nature of resentment—who knows how very much after all I am indebted to my long illness for these two things? The problem is not exactly simple: a man must have experienced both through his strength and through his weakness, If illness and weakness are to be charged with anything at all, it is with the fact that when they prevail, the very instinct of recovery, which is the instinct of defence and of war in man, becomes decayed. He knows not how to get rid of anything, how to come to terms with anything, and how to cast anything behind him. Everything wounds him. People and things draw importunately near, all experiences strike deep, memory is a gathering wound. To be ill is a sort of resentment in itself. Against this resentment the invalid has only one great remedy—I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism which is free from revolt, and with which the Russian soldier, to whom a campaign proves unbearable, ultimately lays himself down in the snow. To accept nothing more, to undertake nothing more, to absorb nothing more—to cease entirely from reacting.... The tremendous sagacity of this fatalism, which does not always imply merely the courage for death, but which in the most dangerous cases may actually constitute a self-preservative measure, amounts to a reduction of activity in the vital functions, the slackening down of which is like a sort of will to hibernate. A few steps farther in this direction we find the fakir, who will sleep for weeks in a tomb.... Owing to the fact that one would be used up too quickly if one reacted, one no longer reacts at all: this is the principle. And nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment. Mortification, morbid susceptibility, the inability to wreak revenge, the desire and thirst for revenge, the concoction of every sort of poison—this is surely the most injurious manner of reacting which could possibly be conceived by exhausted men. It involves a rapid wasting away of nervous energy, an abnormal increase of detrimental secretions, as, for instance, that of bile into the stomach. To the sick man resentment ought to be more strictly forbidden than anything else—it is his special danger: unfortunately, however, it is also his most natural propensity. This was fully grasped by that profound physiologist Buddha. His "religion," which it would be better to call a system of hygiene, in order to avoid confounding it with a creed so wretched as Christianity, depended for its effect upon the triumph over resentment: to make the soul free therefrom was considered the first step towards recovery. "Not through hostility is hostility put to flight; through friendship does hostility end": this stands at the beginning of Buddha's teaching—this is not a precept of morality, but of physiology. Resentment born of weakness is not more deleterious to anybody than it is to the weak man himself—conversely, in the case of that man whose nature is fundamentally a rich one, resentment is a superfluous feeling, a feeling to remain master of which is almost a proof of riches. Those of my readers who know the earnestness-with which my philosophy wages war against the feelings of revenge and rancour, even to the extent of attacking the doctrine of "free will" (my conflict with Christianity is only a particular instance of it), will understand why I wish to focus attention upon my own personal attitude and the certainty of my practical instincts precisely in this matter. In my moments of decadence I forbade myself the indulgence of the above feelings, because they were harmful; as soon as my life recovered enough riches and pride, however, I regarded them again as forbidden, but this time because they were beneath me.

It therefore requires a certain effort not to believe in a personal God: “No one disbelieves the existence of God except the person to whom God’s existence is not convenient.” There are no atheists so thoroughly sure of their unbelief as to be willing to die a martyr’s death for it. Since atheism is abnormal and unnatural, based not on intuitions but on inferential proofs and fallible reasoning, it is never sure of its causes. The arguments for the existence of God may be weak, but in any case they are stronger than those advanced for its denial. It is even impossible to prove that there is no God. To accomplish that feat a person would have to be omniscient and omnipresent, that is, to be God!

Maybe popularity makes person out of crowd or abnormal.

How do the day’s event(s) compare with the famous quote you’ve picked to write about in So This Just Happened: The Journal for USA Current Events? Journal your thoughts on current events inside, in light of the 101 famous and thought-provoking quotes about the United States of America, democracy and more. Abnormal times call for first person accounts: witness current events compared to the United States of America’s values, laws, and principles. So This Just Happened: The Journal for USA Current Events includes 101 thought-provoking and insightful quotes by Founding Fathers’, famous historical figures, past Presidents and more for you to compare and contrast with current events. With a quote on every other lined journal page; you can write in order or flip to the most relevant quote for the day’s events to write about. Each lined page for you to write on has a spot to write the date at the top.

So I wasn't the only person with vivid dreams that seemed to blur lines between real and imaginary, or the only person who felt everything deeply and yet couldn't seem to connect with someone in a conversation. My helplessness with numbers and difficulty working with concrete facts might be inconvenient, but wasn't abnormal any more. I didn't have to try and ignore my intuition and come up with a logical reason for everything – I could accept the fact that Intuition is how my mind naturally works.

They were all, too, except himself, affected by the altitude. Even Barnard had sunk into melancholy under the strain. Mallinson was muttering to himself; it was clear what would happen to him if these hardships went on for long. In face of such distressful prospects Conway found himself quite unable to restrain an admiring glance at Miss Brinklow. She was not, he reflected, a normal person, no woman who taught Afghans to sing hymns could be considered so. But she was, after every calamity, still normally abnormal, and he was deeply obliged to her for it. “I hope you’re not feeling too bad?” he said sympathetically, when he caught her eye.

People say that a person has a fever, when [in reality] the fever is leaving! The fever which accumulated within the body as a result of abnormal food, the body’s vitality power then creates the fever for the purpose of purification.

In any disease, say smoking-induced lung or heart disease, organs and tissues are damaged and function in pathological ways. When the brain is diseased, the functions that become pathological are the person’s emotional life, thought processes and behaviour. And this creates addiction’s central dilemma: if recovery is to occur, the brain, the impaired organ of decision making, needs to initiate its own healing process. An altered and dysfunctional brain must decide that it wants to overcome its own dysfunction: to revert to normal — or, perhaps, become normal for the very first time. The worse the addiction is, the greater the brain abnormality and the greater the biological obstacles to opting for health. The scientific literature is nearly unanimous in viewing drug addiction as a chronic brain condition, and this alone ought to discourage anyone from blaming or punishing the sufferer. No one, after all, blames a person suffering from rheumatoid arthritis for having a relapse, since relapse is one of the characteristics of chronic illness. The very concept of choice appears less clear-cut if we understand that the addict’s ability to choose, if not absent, is certainly impaired. “The evidence for addiction as a different state of the brain has important treatment implications,” writes Dr. Charles O’Brien. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “most health care systems continue to treat addiction as an acute disorder, if at all.

Personalism therefore includes among its leading ideas, the affirmation of the unity of mankind, both in space and time, which was foreshadowed by certain schools of thought in the latter days of antiquity and confirmed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For the Christian there are neither citizens nor barbarians, neither bond nor free, neither Jew nor gentile, neither white, black or yellow, but only men created in the image of God and called to salvation in Christ. The conception of a human race with a collective history and destiny, from which no individual destiny can be separated, is one of the sovereign ideas of the Fathers of the Church. In a secularised form, this is the animating principle of eighteenth century cosmopolitanism, and later of Marxism. It is flatly opposed to the ideas of absolute discontinuity between free spirits (as in Sartre) or between civilizations (in Malraux or Frobenius). It is against every form of racialism or of caste, against the ‘elimination of the abnormal’ , the contempt of the foreigner, against the totalitarians’ denigration of political adversaries—in short, it is altogether against the fabrication of scapegoats. Any man, however different, or even degraded, remains a man, for whom we ought to make a human way of life possible.

It is vitally important that teachers and parents identify students who are slow processors and not consider them abnormal or deviant persons.

There is an expectation that a trip into the wilderness—even just for the weekend—entails certain risk not found in daily life. A good trip entails a lot of physical effort and teamwork. People expect to be able to cope with the usual demands of the wilderness, and, thus, they develop unusual coping mechanisms. Sometimes, however, for some or all of the people on the trip, events surpass standard coping mechanisms. Then a wilderness-style critical incident has occurred. A critical incident is almost any incident in which the circumstances are so unusual or the sights and sounds so distressing as to produce a high level of immediate or delayed emotional reaction that surpasses an individual’s normal coping mechanisms. Critical incidents are events that cause predictable signs and symptoms of exceptional stress in normal people who are having normal reactions to something abnormal that has happened to them. A critical incident from a wilderness perspective may be caused by such events as the sudden death or serious injury of a member of the group, a multiple-death accident, or any event involving a prolonged expenditure of physical and emotional energy. People respond to critical incidents differently. Sometimes the stress is too much right away, and signs and symptoms appear while the event is still happening. This is acute stress; this member of the group is rendered nonfunctional by the situation and needs care. More often the signs and symptoms of stress come later, once the pressing needs of the situation have been addressed. This is delayed stress. A third sort of stress, common to us all, is cumulative stress. In the context of the wilderness, cumulative stress might arise if multiple, serial disasters strike the same wilderness party. The course of symptom development when a person is going from the normal stresses of day-to-day living into distress (where life becomes uncomfortable) is like a downward spiral. People are not hit with the entire continuum of signs and symptoms at once. However, after a critical incident, a person may be affected by a large number of signs and symptoms within a short time frame, usually 24 to 48 hours. The degree or impairment an event causes an individual depends on several factors. Each person has life lessons that can help, or sometimes hinder, the ability to cope. Factors affecting the degree of impact an event has on the individual include the following: 1. Age. People who are older tend to have had more life lessons to develop good coping mechanisms. 2. Degree of education. 3. Duration of the event, as well as its suddenness and degree of intensity. 4. Resources available for help. These may be internal (a personal belief system) or external (a trained, local critical-incident stress debriefing team). 5. Level of loss. One death may be easier than several, although the nature of a relationship (marriage partners or siblings, for example) would affect this factor. Signs and symptoms of stress manifest in three ways: physical, emotional, and cognitive. Stress manifests differently from one person to the next. Signs and symptoms that occur in one person may not occur in another, who has responses of his or her own.

. . . As for 'normal' people, there are no such persons to my knowledge. If I were to find one, he or she would be so unique that he would be more abnormal than the abnormal . . .

For this reason, I presuppose in my readers no knowledge whatever of the subject, either upon the philosophic, religious, or historical side. Nor, since I wish my appeal to be general, do I urge the special claim of any one theological system, any one metaphysical school. I have merely attempted to put the view of the universe and man's place in it which is common to all mystics in plain and untechnical language: and to suggest the practical conditions under which ordinary persons may participate in their experience. Therefore the abnormal states of consciousness which sometimes appear in connection with mystical genius are not discussed: my business being confined to the description of a faculty which all men possess in a greater or less degree.

My awakening was difficult and long but I did not have to make it on my own. Everyone I met forced me to awake. My parents said I was completely abnormal, not human or normal at all, not like any other child they had ever seen. Then psychologists told me I have a very high capacity to analyze others and make proper deductions, which are very uncommon in human beings. The philosophers I met were astonished at my innate capacity to see things they could not among texts they supposedly should know better than me. And finally, in religious groups, I was able to scare the highest rankings among them, by showing an ability to see that they had to develop through decades of hard work. None of them told me I was an alien but every single person I met has alienated me against my will. At the end of this journey, the awakening was too clear to be rejected. And once I accepted it, everything else was added to me, including my forgotten memories in other planets.

My awakening was difficult and long but I did not have to make it on my own. Everyone I met forced me to awake. My parents said I was completely abnormal, not human or normal at all, not like any other child they had ever seen. Then psychologists told me I have a very high capacity to analyze others and make proper deductions, which are very uncommon in human beings. The philosophers I met were astonished at my innate capacity to see things they could not among texts they supposedly should know better than me. And finally, in religious groups, I was able to scare the highest rankings among them, by showing an ability to see that they had to develop through decades of hard work. None of them told me I was an alien but every single person I met has alienated me against my will. At the end of this journey, the awakening was too clear to be rejected. And once I accepted it, everything else was added to me, including my forgotten memories from other planets.

My awakening was difficult and long but I did not have to make it on my own. Everyone I met forced me to awake. My parents said I was completely abnormal, not human or normal at all, not like any other child they had ever seen. Then psychologists told me I have a very high capacity to analyze others and make proper deductions, which are very uncommon in human beings. The philosophers I met were astonished with my innate capacity to see things they could not among texts they supposedly should know better than me. And finally, in religious groups, I was able to scare the ones in highest ranks among them, by showing an ability to see that they had to develop through decades of hard work. None of them told me I was an alien but every single person I met has alienated me against my will. At the end of this journey, the awakening was too clear to be rejected. And once I accepted it, everything else was added to me, including my forgotten memories from other planets.

As the body and mind deteriorate, the dying are not less themselves. Dementia steals the faculties for expressing the self—language, memory, personality—but the self remains, albeit largely inaccessible to others. The experience of actually being with the demented and dying is one of watching someone move farther and farther away, out of earshot and eventually out of sight. It’s wrong to think, “Because I cannot access something, it does not exist.” Being with someone who is near death undermines such nonsense. If people are as much themselves when there is no chance of further accomplishment, activity, or self-expression, then the fact that the unborn may grow up to great accomplishment, activity, or self-expression is irrelevant. That a precious child with Down syndrome may some day compete in the Special Olympics is irrelevant. Another precious child with a different genetic abnormality will spend all his days in a state that most of us will inhabit only at the end of our lives, if ever: incapable of communication, incontinent, compromised in language, memory, intellect, and personality. The compassion we show to the dying is not earned by the things they “used to be” any more than it should be earned by the things that the unborn might become. We will all end up in a state of total incapacity and inaccessibility, some for a long time and some only briefly.

3. Here ‘the attraction of sexual intercourse between parents and child or grandchild as incest’, ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘abnormal attachment of persons without power of resisting emotions called fixations’, stimulates characters to meet their tragic flaw.

Here ‘the attraction of sexual intercourse between parents and child or grandchild as incest’, ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘abnormal attachment of persons without power of resisting emotions called fixations’, stimulates characters to meet their tragic flaw. Says Bhutta about European fault

Typically, one of the arguments against the ethicalness of chemical castration is that it affects the very core of personhood, part of which is sexual drive and sexual fantasizing, by indirectly acting on the CNS (…) But, I think, an equally good argument could be that it interferes with basic homeostatic processes of the organism, regulated by the autonomic PNS and the endocrine system. Maybe the public tends to agree with chemical castration of sexual offenders, especially of pedophiles, not only because of the terrible acts they have committed, but also because there is a hidden prejudice that the “real or genuine person” of such offenders is a mind that has been captured by hormones, and that there is nothing wrong in “killing off these hormones and liberate the person from their vicious influence” (…) I say it is a prejudice because part of what it means to be a mentally healthy and well adapted individual involves a huge influence of the hormonal component, not only testosterone, but all other hormones, and, as a matter of fact, sexual offenders do not have abnormally high levels of free testosterone.

When I am afraid, I will trust in you. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me? PSALM 56:3–4 SEPTEMBER 10 Life tends to frighten people, for it can be pretty ferocious sometimes, pretty mean. But while fear is pervasive, a Christian, if really a Christian, shouldn’t ever be frightened of anything. (I speak now of abnormal fear, not of normal caution.) If a person is truly living a Christian life, he should not be afraid of anything except God. And when we speak of having “the fear of God,” we really mean living with great respect for God. In Psalm 56, there is a passage that reads, “Even when I am afraid, I keep on trusting you.” If you really believe this and really have it in your heart, you have a power against all difficulty. Life is just packed full of great, big difficulties, and sometimes you say to yourself, “Circumstances are too big for me. I can’t handle them. I haven’t got what it takes.” Oh, yes, you have. There is no difficulty in this world that you can’t handle. This I firmly believe, and this faith is justified by experience with many people.

An addiction is something that controls people—something they feel they cannot do without or something they do to alleviate pain or pressure. It is what people run to when they are hurting or feel lonely. It comes in many varieties, such as drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, shopping, eating, work—and yes, even approval. Like any addict, insecure people look for a “fix” when they get shaky. They need someone to reaffirm them and assure them everything is all right and they are acceptable. When a person has an addiction the things they are addicted to are on their mind most of the time. Therefore, if a person is an approval addict, he or she will have an abnormal concern and an abundance of thoughts about what people think of them. The

From the shameful part, I meditated on receiving and getting connected with the true self’s assurance and understanding. I was able to direct my true self to ask this trait if it needed anything else and how it wanted to release the degradation it held in. It wanted the disgraceful memories erased, as well as removing the chill and sickness in its gut when they flashed instinctively and uncontrollably in its mind. It sought to have all the unmanageable sexual images of its imagination controlled and reprogrammed with normal thoughts. It wanted to feel like it was not a consenting party to the abnormal sexual perversions that were forced upon a young child. The shameful part within me wanted reassurance that the creature I thought I had become was the result of a young mind being molded from wickedness thrust upon it during peak developmental years. It wanted to stop having to always look over its shoulder thinking it had done something wrong. It wanted to wake up in the morning at peace, not immediately expecting the worst. The shame within wanted to stop feeling like bad things were going to happen in life because it was not a good person. It wanted to feel it deserved to be happy and worthy of receiving the good things of this life. After relinquishing all the burdens of the shameful part and communicating what it wanted from the true self, I continued meditating on the connection of the true self’s understanding and the shameful part’s acceptance of that understanding. I visualized unburdening the shame like the outer tarnished skin being removed from a banana, envisioning the negative self-perceptions of myself peeling away and exposing the true clean, white, sweet goodness within. CHAPTER

When I put my stethoscope to a person’s chest what I’m listening for are signs of the heart’s flaws. In a normal adult heart, all you hear are the sounds of the heart valves snapping shut after the blood flows across them. The blood’s flow, as it moves across normal heart valves and around cardiac structures that are smooth and without abnormal perforations, is smooth and silent. It’s called laminar flow, the same quiet, unbroken stream you get if you turn on a faucet just a little. If the edge of a heart valve is rough with scar or calcium, the aperture is leaky or fused shut, or there is a hole in a septum of the heart, the blood will flow through with a whoosh. This is turbulent flow, and it’s also what happens across a water faucet that is clogged or opened wide. When doctors hear a murmur, they’re hearing turbulent flow across something abnormal in the heart. That

For one, there was a disturbing duality with which the man communicated, almost as if he suffered from schizophrenia, or some similar brain and personality identification abnormality.

What does God’s reality look like? What is normal according to the word? As I have said for many years, what the world calls fanaticism and most of the church calls extremism, God calls normal. In the words of Leonard Ravenhill, “Christianity today is so subnormal that if any Christian began to act like a normal New Testament Christian, he would be considered abnormal.

Sexual normalcy and abnormality are personal and subjective concepts. What is unnatural to one [person] is natural to another. What is abnormal under certain conditions may be completely normal under others. And, in any event, to be different is not necessarily to be wrong, or to be sick.

Etiology l Genetic studies provide evidence that bipolar disorder is strongly heritable and that depression is somewhat heritable. l Neurobiological research has focused on the sensitivity of receptors rather than on the amount of various transmitters, with the strongest evidence for diminished sensitivity of the serotonin receptors in depression and mania. There is some evidence that mania is related to heightened sensitivity of the dopamine receptors and that depression is related to diminished sensitivity of dopamine receptors. l Bipolar and unipolar disorders seem tied to elevated activity of the amygdala and the subgenual anterior cingulate and to diminished activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and hippocampus during tasks that involve emotion and emotion regulation. During mania, greater levels of activation of the striatum have been observed. Mania also may involve elevations in protein kinase C. l Overactivity of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA), as indexed by poor suppression of cortisol by dexamethasone, is related to severe forms of depression and to bipolar disorder. l Socioenvironmental models focus on the role of negative life events, lack of social support, and family criticism as triggers for episodes but also consider ways in which a person with depression may elicit negative responses from others. People with less social skill and those who tend to seek excessive reassurance are at elevated risk for the development of depression. l The personality trait that appears most related to depression is neuroticism. Neuroticism predicts the onset of depression. l Influential cognitive theories include Beck’s cognitive theory, hopelessness theory, and rumination theory. All argue that depression can be caused by cognitive factors, but the nature of the cognitive factors differs across

BEWARE OF THE LEAST LIKELY TEMPTATION “Joab had defected to Adonijah, though he had not defected to Absalom.” 1 Kings 2:28     Joab withstood the greatest test of his life, remaining absolutely loyal to David by not turning to follow after the fascinating and ambitious Absalom. Yet toward the end of his life he turned to follow after the weak and cowardly Adonijah. Always remain alert to the fact that where one person has turned back is exactly where anyone may be tempted to turn back (see 1 Corinthians 10:11–13). You may have just victoriously gone through a great crisis, but now be alert about the things that may appear to be the least likely to tempt you. Beware of thinking that the areas of your life where you have experienced victory in the past are now the least likely to cause you to stumble and fall.     We are apt to say, “It is not at all likely that having been through the greatest crisis of my life I would now turn back to the things of the world.” Do not try to predict where the temptation will come; it is the least likely thing that is the real danger. It is in the aftermath of a great spiritual event that the least likely things begin to have an effect. They may not be forceful and dominant, but they are there. And if you are not careful to be forewarned, they will trip you. You have remained true to God under great and intense trials—now beware of the undercurrent. Do not be abnormally examining your inner self, looking forward with dread, but stay alert; keep your memory sharp before God. Unguarded strength is actually a double weakness, because that is where the least likely temptations will be effective in sapping strength. The Bible characters stumbled over their strong points, never their weak ones.     “. . . kept by the power of God . . .”—that is the only safety (1 Peter 1:5).

One thing I know, before my capture I saw myself through everybody else’s eyes, if that makes any sense. Every single person I engaged with throughout the day. I read their reaction to me and saw what they saw, accurate or inaccurate. That hasn’t happened since my escape. I don’t know if this new me is normal or abnormal, but that skewed reflection no longer exists.

Elsewhere I have proposed the dimension of exceptionalism-universalism as the ideological underpinning for these two contrasting approaches to the analysis and solution of social problems. The exceptionalist viewpoint is reflected in arrangements that are private, voluntary, remedial, special, local, and exclusive. Such arrangements imply that problems occur to specially-defined categories of persons in an unpredictable manner. The problems are unusual, even unique, they are exceptions to the rule, they occur as a result of individual defect, accident, or unfortunate circumstance and must be remedied by means that are particular and, as it were, tailored to the individual case. The universalistic viewpoint, on the other hand, is reflected in arrangements that are public, legislated, promotive or preventive, general, national, and inclusive. Inherent in such a viewpoint is the idea that social problems are a function of the social arrangements of the community or the society and that, since these social arrangements are quite imperfect and inequitable, such problems are both predictable and, more important, preventable through public action. They are not unique to the individual, and the fact that they encompass individual persons does not imply that those persons are themselves defective or abnormal.

One useful model for how variability works is the idea of the “allostatic load,” a term coined in 1993 by Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University, and Eliot Stellar, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to denote the weight of the wear and tear on a body as it tries to retain equilibrium in a taxing and stressful world. The lower an individual’s allostatic load, the easier it is for that person’s body to stay healthy. The higher it is—because the person lives in a polluted area, has an infection, suffers food insecurity, or lives with a chronic stressor such as systemic racism—the likelier you are to get sick with various diseases. But in the early years of a disease process, the system’s metabolic strain may not appear in lab work as abnormal results. It takes a discerning doctor to interpret early variations that are signs of disease and to point out the trajectory the patient’s body is on.

Nevertheless, a love that is so deep, bears deeper wounds. The intangible scars on his heart pained more for he never expressed it. But repressed emotions run around as man’s unconscious decides, and since it was not being given its due, it heaved him into a deep well. Outside, it manifested as an abnormally reticent personality. - Unlettered

Nevertheless, a love that is so deep, bears deeper wounds. The intangible scars on his heart pained more for he never expressed it. But repressed emotions run around as man’s unconscious decides, and since it was not being given its due, it heaved him into a deep well. Outside, it manifested as an abnormally reticent personality.

mentioned earlier, hypothyroidism makes the liver and gallbladder sluggish, so that fat is not easily metabolized and cleared from the body. Cells may be less receptive to taking up LDL, so that too much accumulates.7 When a person with healthy thyroid function becomes hungry and needs energy, the body is able to readily burn fat for fuel. Not so with low thyroid function. When one of my patients with abnormal lipid panels (cholesterol and triglycerides) has hypothyroidism, I address the thyroid disorder first, after which the lipids in circulation often reach normal levels.

THE “AWARENESS” SHIELD FEAT. According to the Bible, Joseph obtained enormous prestige in Egypt, when he was able to divine the dreams of the pharaoh, As Joseph earned that feat with a great social prestige, in different traditions the "awareness" of the future, or an inaccessible present, always proved a merit that produces social honor. Weber (1922) considers the prophets, along with the priests and magicians, as examples of charismatic leaders, and this is because "predict " or " perceive" the future has been, in different traditions, a strong feat that has given pride and social prestige those who perform. It postulates a "shield feat of awareness" that is intended to offset the impact on the pride of some future anti-feat. When the firepower that a possible future anti-feat has about pride and social prestige is too high and becomes unbearable, the person can go into that future equipped with a shield feat that will compensate. From that strategy, thinking badly of the future is a way of ensuring the "consolation prize" of having the merit of "prediction”. According to Steele (1988 ), when a person experiences a negative assessment of himself in a particular field, they can initiate a process of self-affirmation activating positive beliefs in another area, thus achieving a positive overall assessment of itself. The pessimistic shield feat "awareness of future failure”, would be a merit that safeguards to offset the impact of that failure on self- concept , an achievement an overall assessment that is not so negative.

It is not only the highly creative who would not whole-heartedly agree with Bowlby’s contention that intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves. For the deeply religious, and especially for those whose vocation demands celibacy, attachment to God takes precedence over attachment to persons. Although such people may succeed in loving their neighbours as themselves, the injunction ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’ is truly ‘the first and great commandment’.15 Throughout most of Europe’s recorded history, it was assumed that ultimate happiness was not to be expected from human relationships and institutions, but could only be found in man’s relation with the divine. Indeed, many of the devout believed that human relationships were an obstacle to communion with God. The founders of the monastic movement were the hermits of the Egyptian desert, whose ideal of perfection was only to be achieved through renunciation of the world, mortification of the flesh, and a solitary life of contemplation and rigorous discipline. It was recognized very early that the life of the anchorite was not possible for everyone, and so the ‘coenobitic’ tradition arose in which monks no longer lived alone but shared the life of dedication to God in communities. Intimate attachments, or desires for such attachments, are not unknown within the walls of monasteries, but they are regarded as intrusive distractions and firmly discouraged. Although learning was not a necessary feature of monastic life, the libraries of the monasteries preserved the learning of the past, and attracted those monks who had scholarly interests. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the monasteries led an intellectual revival, and were pre-eminent in history and biography.16 Perhaps monastic discipline and the absence of close personal ties not only facilitated the individual’s relation with God, but also fostered scholarship. It would, I think, be quite wrong to assume that all those who have put their relation with God before their relations with their fellows are abnormal or neurotic. Some of those who choose the monastic or celibate life certainly do so for the ‘wrong’ reasons: because their human relationships have failed, or because they dislike taking responsibility, or because they want a secure haven from the world. But this is not true of all; and even if it were so, would not imply that a life in which intimate attachments to other human beings played little part was necessarily incomplete or inferior. The religious person might argue that modern psycho-analysts have idealized intimate attachments; that human relationships are, because of the nature of man, necessarily imperfect; and that encouraging people to look for complete fulfilment in this way has done more harm than good.

A few tips to help you further distinguish hypomania is to remember that hypomania is abnormally high or irritable mood, meaning different from what a person usually experiences when happy or upset/irritable. Hypomanic episodes also last for at least four consecutive days. Thus, this abnormally high or irritable mood persists for several days and is accompanied by at least three (or four, if the mood is irritable) of the manic/hypomanic symptoms in table 1.1 for the same four days. Finally, in order to be diagnosed with BPII, you must have also experienced a major depressive episode at some time in your life.

Stage 7: Very severe cognitive decline (severe or late-stage Alzheimer’s disease) In the final stage of this disease, individuals lose the ability to respond to their environment, to carry on a conversation, and, eventually, to control their movements. They may still say words or phrases. At this stage, individuals need help with much of their daily personal care, including eating or using the toilet. They may also lose the ability to smile, to sit without support, and to hold their heads up. Reflexes become abnormal. Muscles grow rigid. Swallowing is impaired.

When the identity of a black person is rapidly changed, threatened, or questioned by racism and oppression, signs of abnormality are present.

neuroscience, and how our senses and brain translate experience into “biological” activity, the artificial distinctions disappear. If you understand the neurobiology of trauma, you know that a physical “abnormality” is causing the abdominal pain seen with sensitized dissociation. You begin to see that a person’s “worldview” can change their immune system, and that a positive conversation with a friend can influence how a patient’s heart or lungs function that day. The interconnectedness becomes clear. As you said, Oprah, everything matters.

Haber noticed that Orr seemed quite undismayed. His reactions were utterly abnormal. On Friday he had been going all to pieces over a mere ethical point; here on Wednesday in the midst of Armageddon he was cool and calm. He seemed to have no personal fear. But he must have. If Haber was afraid, of course Orr must be.

Twisted kicks? Some psycho thrill for the abnormal psych prof? His personal ‘petri dish’ wife, as Arwen called me? Some rehab project of your partner’s that you can study in real time?

Depression may seem completely useless. Even apart from the risk of suicide, sitting all day morosely staring at the wall can't get you very far. A person with severe depression typically loses interest in everything -work, friends, food, even sex. It is as if the capacities for pleasure and initiative have been turned off. Some people cry spontaneously, but others are beyond tears. Some wake every morning at 4 A.M. and can't get back to sleep; others sleep for twelve or fourteen hours per day. Some have delusions that they are impoverished, stupid, ugly, or dying of cancer. Almost all have low self-esteem. It seems preposterous even to consider that there should be anything adaptive associated with such symptoms. And yet depression is so frequent, and so closely related to ordinary sadness, that we must begin by asking if depression arises from a basic abnormality or if it is a dysregulation of a normal capacity.

The nature of the Amazon Leadership Principles is borne out in processes and practices throughout the company. For example, the six-page narratives that the company uses in place of PowerPoint decks to present quarterly and yearly business updates require both the writer and reader to Dive Deep and Insist on the Highest Standards. The Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions process—aka PR/FAQ—reinforces customer obsession, starting with customer needs and working backwards from there. (See chapters four and five for a detailed discussion of both the six-pager and the PR/FAQ.) The Door Desk Award goes to a person who exemplifies Frugality and Invention. The Just Do It Award is an abnormally large, well-worn Nike sneaker given to employees who exhibit a Bias for Action. It usually goes to a person who has come up with a clever idea outside the scope of their job. What’s peculiarly Amazonian about the award is that the idea doesn’t have to be implemented—nor does it have to actually work if it is—in order to be eligible. The stories we tell in part two of this

We investigators often forget to look at things from an extremely paranoid point of view. If your theory of what someone would normally do isn’t helping you catch the person, you have to assume they were doing something abnormal.

A know-it-all. He is a know-it-all. Eggs and peculiar. Animated and audacious. Astute, abnormally knowledgeable. An optimist. Pet-whisperer and the definition of a people’s person. A hopeless—emphasis on hopeless—romantic. But that is Caspian Marks. Oh, my. He is my Caspian Marks.

The Just Do It Award is an abnormally large, well-worn Nike sneaker given to employees who exhibit a Bias for Action. It usually goes to a person who has come up with a clever idea outside the scope of their job. What’s peculiarly Amazonian about the award is that the idea doesn’t have to be implemented—nor does it have to actually work if it is—in order to be eligible.

Maybe just a case of one person's "normal" being another person's Twilight Zone.

change, limitations or abnormalities in the position of the person in their social context. The human heart thirsts for love and the heart that is not loved dies. When the heart is wounded by a lack of love, it fulfils the modern definition of illness. The person suffers impairment in interaction, his or her activity is reduced and the person is unable to participate with others.

Bauer considered the fat tissue in obesity akin to malignant tumors. Both have their own agendas, he explained. Tumors are driven to grow and spread and will do so with little relation to how much the person who has that tumor might be eating or exercising. In those who are predisposed to grow obese, fat tissue is driven to grow, to expand with fat, and it will accomplish this goal, just as the tumor does, with little concern about what the rest of the body might be doing. “The abnormal lipophilic tissue seizes on foodstuffs, even in the case of undernutrition,” Bauer wrote in 1929. “It maintains its stock, and may increase it independent of the requirements of the organism. A sort of anarchy exists; the adipose tissue lives for itself and does not fit into the precisely regulated management of the whole organism.

For many years I was an involuntary crazy person!

Brahms is the first great musician in whom historical significance and artistic significance no longer converge as one and the same. He was not to blame for this. Rather it was the fault of his times. Even Beethoven’s most abnormal conceptions were born of the demands of his time and derived from the linguistic and expressive possibilities of that time. Although Beethoven’s will, a creative will so timeless and touched with insight into the future, was somehow in complete accordance with the will of his time; Beethoven was “sustained” by his time. Wagner’s boldest and most coherent works not only articulated the powerful personality of their creator, they revealed the will and possibilities of his time. There is a consonance between personal will and the general will of the time in Beethoven and Wagner, and later in Strauss, Reger, Debussy and Stravinsky. In Brahms, for the first time, these wills become separated; not because Brahms was most profoundly a man of his time, but because the musical possibilities of his time had taken a different direction from his own inclinations, and did not satisfy him. He is the first artist and creator who transcends his historical and musical function.

Everyone says there’s a voice in your head that serves as your conscience. Well, I’ve had lots of time to think about this, and I have my own psychological theory: Everybody has a tiny person in their head. Stay with me. Don’t laugh. This “Tiny Person” talks to itself, which would explain the voices we hear, but it makes its own decisions. People are merely drones controlled by them.

What is the wisest choice for a personal life goal? Should a person seek self-actualization or self-realization? Perhaps neither goal is a realistic objective, especially if human beings lack free will. What I do know is that there is dark pit so deep inside myself that I must fill it. I can pad this black hole with dread or pleasure, booze or drugs, religion or vice, action or indolence, love or hatred. Alternatively, I can fill bleakness and emptiness by increasing self-awareness and ascertain my role in the world. With limited energy resources and lack of mental acuity, I might never attain a plane of higher consciousness. I fear remaining forever blocked in a state of psychological deadlock, forevermore exhibiting prolonged mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and plagued by psychogenic abnormalities brought about from social rejection, grief, vocational lapses, and economic and marital setbacks. In a state of mental incapacity, I might lack the ability to blunt immediate personal destruction. I need to begin a journey that leads to a higher state of awareness, and personal survival depends upon how much progress I achieve purging my mind of falsities and other toxic impurities. While personal survival necessities moving forward in order to discover a mental state of silent stasis and reach the desired endpoint of emotional equanimity, perhaps I will never achieve a mirror-like purity of the mind that is capable of reflecting the world as it really is, without distortion by a corrupted mind.

I’d always wondered how many broken hearts one person could endure. Broken hearts meted out by unexpected tragedy. Broken hearts delivered by the ones who were supposed to love them most. True, physical broken hearts that struggled to continue to beat, marred by fate and health and genetic abnormalities. Sometimes, I felt as if I could endure no more.

If it weren't for the fact that all of us are slightly abnormal there wouldn't be any point in giving each person a separate name.

Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement. Demonstrate respect for each person in the organization. Be deeply committed to learning and teaching. Be fair. Demonstrate character. Honor the direct connection between details and improvement; relentlessly seek the latter. Show self-control, especially under pressure. Demonstrate and prize loyalty. Use positive language and have a positive attitude. Take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort. Be willing to go the extra distance for the organization. Deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation. Promote internal communication that is both open and substantive. Seek poise in myself and those I lead. Put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own. Maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high. Make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

The night shift workers were unusual characters. They ranged from relatively normal to bizarre. It was widely acknowledged within the group that most personalities were abnormal. It was consistent with the sleep deprivation they were subjected to. The winter nights were really long and the days were too short for sufficient restorative sleeping. I was hallucinating while driving atop Mauna Kea! Inside the telescope control room I could feel a presence and would go looking for the person I thought was in the control room with me. I never found them. The summit is a spiritual place according to the Hawaiians. I most certainly had an invisible friend up there!

April 19 Beware of the Least Likely Temptation “Joab had defected to Adonijah, though he had not defected to Absalom.” 1 Kings 2: 28 Joab withstood the greatest test of his life, remaining absolutely loyal to David by not turning to follow after the fascinating and ambitious Absalom. Yet toward the end of his life he turned to follow after the weak and cowardly Adonijah. Always remain alert to the fact that where one person has turned back is exactly where anyone may be tempted to turn back (see 1 Corinthians 10: 11–13). You may have just victoriously gone through a great crisis, but now be alert about the things that may appear to be the least likely to tempt you. Beware of thinking that the areas of your life where you have experienced victory in the past are now the least likely to cause you to stumble and fall. We are apt to say, “It is not at all likely that having been through the greatest crisis of my life I would now turn back to the things of the world.” Do not try to predict where the temptation will come; it is the least likely thing that is the real danger. It is in the aftermath of a great spiritual event that the least likely things begin to have an effect. They may not be forceful and dominant, but they are there. And if you are not careful to be forewarned, they will trip you. You have remained true to God under great and intense trials—now beware of the undercurrent. Do not be abnormally examining your inner self, looking forward with dread, but stay alert; keep your memory sharp before God. Unguarded strength is actually a double weakness, because that is where the least likely temptations will be effective in sapping strength. The Bible characters stumbled over their strong points, never their weak ones. “Kept by the power of God”—that is the only safety (1 Peter 1: 5).

Something I’ve long thought true, and which shows up constantly when you look for it, is that people who are abnormally good at one thing tend to be abnormally bad at something else. It’s as if the brain has capacity for only so much knowledge and emotion, and an abnormal skill robs bandwidth from other parts of someone’s personality.

If we consider the trait of activity, on one end we have lethargy and on the other we have both impulsivity and hyperactivity. It's interesting to me that we accept lethargy as within the range of normal, while the other end of the spectrum is considered abnormal.

I didn't know that you're only supposed to have one personality. I didn't realise that having lots of voices in your head was abnormal. But you are protecting yourself. You are protecting your soul, and that's what I did.

Hey, Tengo, do you know the difference between the English words ‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’?” she asked. “They’re both adjectives describing mental abnormality. I’m not quite sure how they differ.” “ ‘Insane’ probably means to have an innate mental problem, something that calls for professional treatment, while ‘lunatic’ means to have your sanity temporarily seized by the luna, which is ‘moon’ in Latin. In nineteenth-century England, if you were a certified lunatic and you committed a crime, the severity of the crime would be reduced a notch. The idea was that the crime was not so much the responsibility of the person himself as that he was led astray by the moonlight. Believe it or not, laws like that actually existed. In other words, the fact that the moon can drive people crazy was actually recognized in law.

To a sinner, a righteous person is an oddity and an abnormality. A Christian’s goodness is a rebuke to the wicked; his being right-side up is a reflection upon the worldling’s inverted position.

The study of abnormality is one of the main ways that power relations are established in society. When an abnormality and its corresponding norm are defined, somehow it is always the normal person who has the power over the abnormal. The psychologist tells us about the madmen, the physician about the patients, the criminologist (or the legal theorist, or the politician) talks about the criminal, but we never expect to hear the latter talk about the former - what they have to say has already been ruled irrelevant, because by definition they have no knowledge (but that is code for not wanting them to have any power).

No need for psychiatric contortions; no shock waves; no need to conjure up deep-seated anxieties and conflicts. It is combat exhaustion—instead of something ominous and mysterious. It is, quite simply, just having had too much. Of course, in more technical terms, combat exhaustion can be thought of as an abnormal reaction to the stress of combat, its manifestation being unique to the person who develops it, channeled into a specific form by the person’s own individual personality and background experience. But it is only one of many abnormal reactions. A soldier who has had too much might choose to surrender or convulsively go forward. He might panic and get killed; he could get himself wounded or wound himself; he might even go to the chaplain or decide on the relative safety of a stockade. He might—if he’s so disposed—develop psychosomatic complaints, get angry, or, in some cases, become totally unreasonable. He can become neurotic, begin to shake, refuse to move, or go completely hysterical. He might even become grossly psychotic—hold imaginary rifles, hear voices, or see his grandmother in every chopper that flies by. “You will be treating these men, and the treatment is simple. For most it will just be rest. In more severe cases, those soldiers whose functioning is beginning to be impaired, who can’t rest, you will medically put to sleep. They are given enough thorazine to put them out and left alone for a day or two. They too, though, like the troopers who are merely resting, stay near the aid station. The more disturbed patients, those troopers who for the moment may be truly disoriented, who have completely stopped functioning, who for any number of reasons appear to need more than a short rest, are sent to an evacuation hospital. But they are never lost to their units. Their group identity is never tampered with, and they know they will be going back. And they do go back. And they are accepted by their units. Believe me, the casual, yet efficient way it is all handled, the official emphasis on health rather than disease, and the lack of mumbo-jumbo have taken the stigma out of having had too much. To the men, it is just something that happens; and more important, it is something they realize can happen to anyone. It is handled that way and it is presented that way. “Gentlemen, it works.

Maybe, abnormal is not defined by a list of ettiquette rules you don't follow or even the symptoms listed in the DSM manual. Maybe, it isn't defined by a person's anger or how they react to prolonged emotional, physical, psychological or sexual abuse. Maybe, it isn't in the rituals people do to cope when they are hurt, lost or confused. Maybe, abnormal is found not in how we live or even in how we survive. Maybe, abnormal is something as simple as going against choosing the right. Maybe, madness is in the things we do that goes against the very nature of all that is good and true. Maybe, just maybe, normal is something as simple as not hurting someone for your own gain.

This brief family history obviously does not demonstrate frank insanity, such as psychosis, mania, or severe depression. But it does suggest that FDR’s relatives had personalities abnormal enough to arouse the attention of average people.

The following information really should be placed on all very high altitude job adverts and company contracts: WARNING – Very high altitude commuting presents many known health risks to sea level adapted humans. Some of the documented conditions are headaches, forgetfulness, confusion, irritability, aggression, hallucinations, visions, light headedness, fatigue, fainting, sore throats, runny noses, digestive disturbances, changed personality and panic attacks. Development of cancer, anemia, high cholesterol, heart, lung, brain, and blood oxygenation issues have occurred in very high altitude workers that have resulted in disability and premature death. The nearest fully equipped hospital accident and emergency facility is typically one to two hours away. Numerous very high altitude workers have been killed due to fatal mistakes on the job. Workers are expected to use a variety of company supplied drugs to offset the daily very high altitude sickness including "RX-Only" prescription medical oxygen. Daily long term self medication is known to damage human health. The work environment is comparable to a Faraday cage and Faraday Cage Sickness (FCS) may occur in long term workers. Radiation levels are abnormally high and long term radiation sickness may result. Blood oxygen levels are typically in the region of 80% and the medical profession regards this as a health risk. Extreme night shifts are associated with causing poor health and lifelong sleep disorders. Low oxygen environments are associated with the onset of irritability, fatigue and Sleep Apnea. Repeatedly reporting observations of abnormal behaviors in workers to upper management may result in your contract not being renewed or termination without notice. Permanently sickened workers are unlikely to qualify for corporate government disability payments, which may lead to a lifetime of extreme poverty.

Grinker interviewed them each personally and repeatedly over two years, and gradually assembled a detailed list of ingredients that make for mental health. THE STUDENTS at George Williams College had been active in their local YMCA, and their connections to that organization, their church, and their communities were long and deep. “Uncertainty about the future is minimal,” Grinker noted, among these “upright young men.” They came from white- and blue-collar families in the Midwest. They had slightly above average IQs, average college grades (mostly C’s), and no childhood or adolescent conflicts with their families. Two-thirds said they had been disciplined firmly by their parents, with well-established boundaries for conduct, but they saw these constraints as beneficial and reasonable. Except for four people with abnormal mood states (two with hypomania and two with depression), two stutterers, two people who displayed paranoid thinking, and one person with recurrent nightmares, the great majority (85 percent) lacked even the mildest mental abnormality. Grinker noted that though the subjects enjoyed team sports in high school, “only sometimes did one claim to be the leader of a social, work, or sport group.” These men were better designed to be followers than leaders: “The average subject has had practically no trouble with those in authority” and even “maintains that he would abide by rules which he considered to be unfair.” Overall there is a “picture of an individual who would be submissive to authority, but not slavishly.” Searching for a term less loaded than “normal” to describe these people, Grinker called them homoclites, a Latinate term he invented to indicate “those who follow a common rule.

Observe the people and you will notice many abnormal personalities in modern corporate controlled society.

proof that aging is normal—it is just something we all happen to do. So many stresses are involved in “normal” living that the physiology might be considered under abnormal pressure all the time—from noise, pollution, negative emotions, improper diet, smoking, alcohol, and so on. Just “the disease of being in a hurry” hastens aging in almost everyone today. If meditation counters these factors, then it might reveal something entirely new about the aging process. Wallace set out to measure a group of adult meditators for what is called biological age. Biological age shows how well a person’s body is functioning compared to the norms of the whole population. It gives a truer measure of how the aging process

The city lady appeared for a moment as if she were about to back away; but then she looked out into the crowd where she saw one person indicate his own head with his index finger then slowly revolve the finger. The city lady herself was possessed of physical abnormality. She was double-jointed, and in reply to Birdshot’s traveling pellets, she stuck out her hand and began rapidly revolving her thumb a full three hundred and sixty degrees. In his fascination Birdshot forgot to continue his part of the performance, but continued to stare until the lady brought her own performance to an end, but there in the wet snow, in the cold December night, Birdshot Sprouse experienced a unique kind of communication which he had never felt before with another human being. He had reached out to touch someone and that someone had not turned away, but had reached back.

These temperaments were described by the early-twentieth-century German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, the first modern researcher on abnormal personality, who also noted the link between insanity and genius. He recognized the benefit of a little mental abnormality, either in “the initial stages” of severe mental illness, or in “mild, borderline states of mental disease,” which is what I mean by abnormal personalities or temperaments. If we removed the insanity from these people, Kretschmer said, we would convert their genius into merely ordinary talent. Insanity is not a “regrettable . . . accident” but the “indispensable catalyst” of genius.

A person that is humble of heart doesn’t care about being the center of attention. They are interested in pleasing God rather than taking front stage. The spirit of witchcraft, in contrast, likes abnormal attention, but most importantly, attention behind the scenes. People operating in witchcraft don’t want to share your attention with others but want to keep you totally for themselves.

After I started working extreme night shifts, I began to think that someone was in the telescope control room with me. I would look for the person many times and would never find them. I eventually stopped looking for the person and accepted that it was my oxygen starved mind playing tricks on me in a very abnormal environment.

Neurobiologists have traced the apparent absence of social fear to abnormalities in the amygdalae of people with Williams. These almond-shaped clusters of neuclei, buried deep in the brain, help process emotions and regulate our fight-or-flight response to danger. In people with Williams, they react more dramatically than normal to images of disasters, such as fires, or plane crashes, which researchers think may explain why people with Williams often develop anxiety disorders. Conversely, they respond with abnormal indifference to images of people making fearful or angry facial expressions. The amygdalae of people without Williams tend to be extremely sensitive to those expressions since we have evolved to see them as warnings. Getting to close to a hostile person, or an aggressive ape, probably cost many of our ancestors their lives. Seeing a look of panic on someone else's face and starting to run probably saved the lives of many more.

14 One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. 2 There in front of him was a man suffering from abnormal swelling of his body. 3 Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” 4 But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way. 5 Then he asked them, “If one of you has a child[a] or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?” 6 And they had nothing to say. 7 When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: 8 “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. 9 If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. 10 But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. 11 For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” 12 Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.