I don’t quite agree. I think that it is an institutional problem, so it is both political and clinical.
The US medical establishment evaluates physiological health with optimal models, so diagnosticians and therapists encourage all to be as healthy as they can be. So there is no such thing as being “too fit”. Nobody is going to suggest that there is some clinical basis why you should display more diabetes or heart disease simply because other people may have these conditions.
Whereas mental/emotional/behavior health is evaluated this way, using normative models. It functions as a sort of statistically objectified populism, where baseline and pathology are determined not by what works best, but rather, how common a condition is.
So, in my 40s, am I employing a maladaptive strategy in life by almost exclusively using verbal communication instead of non-verbal? Or are most of the people around me employing a maladaptive strategy by stubbornly refusing to verbalize their feelings? Depending upon how one frames it, it could go either way, but the normative model makes the former a pathology simply because fewer people think of it that way.
I think of this sort of diagnosis and therapy as being misanthropic and useless. It’s best use is not to help people “fit in” to some arbitrary schema, but to help people to customize their cognition.
Another annoying double standard is that physiological diagnoses are rightly understood to be transitory, whereas there seems to be a popular perception that mental/emotional/behavioral diagnoses are somehow permanent. Nobody ever claims that YOU ARE the flu or broken leg you had ten years ago, yet they might suggest precisely this with a DSM V diagnosis.
