Nobody's Normal How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

Roy Richard Grinker, Lyle Blaker

eAudio - 2021

A Guardian Best Book of 2021 A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma.For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultim...ately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the... more