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  • Essay / Psychological disorders: 6.5 versus 93.5 - 813

    As Myers says in his psychology book, “People are fascinated by the exceptional, the unusual, the abnormal” (Myers 2013) . This statement presented in the book is ultimately true. People study people, intentionally or not. The more “different” an individual is from society, the more he stands out and becomes an outcast from the rest of society. Those who suffer from disorders are different, although they can't help it and shouldn't be isolated, but they are. According to the book, 450 million people worldwide suffer from mental or behavioral disorders, which represents approximately 6.5% of the population. (Meyers 2013). This seems strange to me. 6.5 isn't that small of a percent, so why can the rest of the world's 93.5 percent judge the rest of the world's citizens? Since there are three aspects that contribute to leading to a psychological disorder: biological, psychological and sociocultural, it is hard to believe that we do not blame ourselves for these disorders. Even after we, as humans, have categorized other "defective" individuals into the "broken" column, we then divide them again into categories that best align those that are similar. Anxiety, mood, schizophrenia, and many other categories are the labels we group them into. Anxiety is divided into five groups in the book: generalized anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. (Myers 2013). Anxiety disorders seem to have a common social tendency or a more focused inner self. To me, these disorders resemble the way we perceive the world. Each of the disorders listed above tends to be a mental loop or error in the human code. It's not that those in the middle of the paper come from the 6.5%, it's amazing how the normal interacts with the abnormal. It's almost as if normals think abnormals are contagious, they view them as sick and want to try to cure them so that the disease can't spread and the sick individual can be like the rest of society . This world is imperfect and full of human errors, and until we look in the mirror to point out/fix our own cracks in our lives, then we shouldn't be so quick to pass judgment on others. In Myers' textbook he found a quote from Evolution and Ethics by TH Huxley that, in my opinion, is truly better than any other words I could try to find to explain how the world is. “One of the unforgivable sins, in most people's eyes, is walking around without a label. The world regards a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, which is not under proper control” (Myers 2013).