Over the centuries, beliefs, dogmas, and cultural interpretations have changed drastically. What in the Middle Ages was considered a mystic like Saint Teresa of Jesus or Hildegard of Bingen would nowadays be considered mentally ill. Each era establishes its own criteria for what is considered normal or not. For many hunter-gatherer cultures, cannibalism was institutionalized not so long ago. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, pederasty was considered a healthy custom, slavery a social good, and tyranny just another form of government. During the French Revolution, it was considered merciful to condemn convicts to the guillotine because it was a quick and efficient death. In early 19th-century Romanticism, any excess, no matter how eccentric or antisocial, was welcomed as a sign of unbridled passion, authenticity, and creative genius. During the second half of the 19th century, with the rise of positivism, most non-Western cultures were considered to be loincloth-clad savages who should be subjected to a rigorous civilizing process by Western missionaries. At the beginning of the 20th century, any prominent thinker, and above all sociologists, considered eugenics to be a moral and ethical tool that should eliminate the 'least fit' individuals from society. This was usually a passive eugenics, through the sterilization of 'individuals prone to conceiving those supposed inferior human beings'; but we must not forget that in many supposedly advanced Western countries, it even reached the murder of newborn babies. This was already a common practice during the early stages of Nazism. Today there are still many cultures where it is considered completely normal to marry off young daughters to wealthy old men; to condemn homosexuals to the death penalty; child labor; the marginalization of 'adulteresses'; imprisonment for exercising the full right to freedom of conscience and belief; animal testing solely for commercial and aesthetic purposes (I am not speaking here of medical research); the plundering of Planet Earth; war; 'collateral' damage; the use of chemical and biological weapons; etc., etc., etc. So: What is the criterion that separates the normal from the non-normal? The sane from that which is cataloged as sickly? These are just rhetorical questions of mine; they do not necessarily need to be answered. This raises other questions like: Is mental illness, on many occasions, a large magic carpet beneath which societies and cultures hide their deepest miseries and their garbage (the ones they have previously created themselves)? When a mentally ill individual is sick, we lock them away under lock and key so they 'won't bother us' or we stuff them with pills. But if society itself is the one that is sick, what can we do? Is prescribing medication simply away of changing people's personalities we don't like? Of course, there are individual behaviors that clearly diverge from the average behaviors of a given society. But in my question, I am focusing on how societies can also be sick, and how the illness of societies is very often the spark that triggers a latent illness in many individuals who would not have developed it otherwise.
