Abstract
The text provides a description as well as an analysis of mental disorders as socially constructed entities while focusing on the category of normality not only in its medical sense but also in social and cultural one. Our methodology has to be understood as rooted in social constructionism.
We work with concepts created within social anthropology and semiotics but also existentialist psychotherapy or Mad Studies. When postulating mental disorder as a topic of social anthropology, we suggest that mental disorder is one of the key concepts behind the social and cultural understanding of normality: normality in regard to emotions, thinking, and behaviour is to a great extent defined negatively - that is, by what it isn't - with mental disorder being one of its major opposites.
Normality in Western societies is significant mostly in the areas of mental health, sexuality, and gender whereas these areas may overlap; being different in terms of sexuality or gender (as in gender identity or gender expression) may be - and often is - interpreted as a sign of a mental disorder. As for our findings, on a general level we suggest that the binary between the normal and unproblematic on the one hand and a disorder on the other hand is arbitrary.
The border between the two categories has to do with social and cultural rules more than with actual medicine. More specifically, we describe a physician as a constructor who puts individual signs (symptoms) together and forms diagnoses which can change their structure, shift, or even break down completely.
Researching mental disorders as a part of the socially constructed reality allows us to see the power dynamics and questionability of seemingly natural categories such as health and illness, or normality and abnormality.