Chemically Imbalanced by Joseph E. Davis

Author:Joseph E. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PSY000000 Psychology / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

A Common Normativity

As discussed in the introduction, the specific circumstances and sources of discontent participants identified as relevant or contributing to their predicament clustered into the broad categories of performance, achievement, and loss. In an obvious sense, these struggles are different from each other. They are defined against somewhat different standards and typically involved (if they involved at all) different diagnostic categories. Problems with social performance, for instance, presupposed some standard of outgoingness and extroversion, and if a diagnosis (whether formal or just appropriated) was involved, social anxiety disorder was the most common. Similarly, problems with academic underperformance were typically measured against standards of concentration and organization, and ADHD was the most common diagnostic category. And so on with the other types of predicament.

In contrast, when we consider the terms in which participants envisioned amelioration, we find a different pattern. Regardless of the specific circumstances and discontents, restoring right order entailed efforts to conform to quite similar and related norms of being. Being a person who is proactive and optimizing, for instance, was a standard for many participants dealing with underperformance, but the same social norm shows up for participants dealing with achievement and loss. The same was true for the other social norms described below—dealing with emotional efficiency, personal autonomy, and self-approval. The most salient differences between most participants—at least as could be teased out within the limits of my method and a single interview—were matters of emphasis or articulation with respect to their circumstances rather than of different standards. There were some clear exceptions, especially along social class lines. Not everyone shared the same values, much less to the same degree; I do not mean to suggest a uniformity. But the similarity, the family resemblance, stands out and a broadly shared normativity to which it points.10 This is the sense in which we can speak, in an Aristotelian sense, of a “regime,” a coherent vision of the good that governs and orders us.

The emphasis in participant stories was less on where they have been than on where they are now and where they hope (whether by choice or necessity) to go. The crucial norms against which they judged themselves, whether explicitly or implicitly, spoke to the end state they desire—the return of their self-respect, for example, or the reassertion of their control, or getting on with a more productive life free of bad feelings. For most people, the aspiration was not simply to resolve the predicament but to reconceptualize themselves in such a way that they lived more “viably” and predicaments like the one they were in might not arise again.

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