Pursuit of a ‘Normal Life’: Mood, Anxiety, and Their Disordering

Abstract

Throughout the process of being treated for mood and anxiety disorders, people dream of the “normal life” that awaits them. However, post-therapy, the distinctiveness of clinical normality (i.e., reduced symptomatology) and social normativity become more apparent. In this article we suggest that for people who have long felt socially excluded because of their psychiatric symptoms, being “normally shy” or “normally awkward” is not enough. Instead they aspire to an ideal life. This confusion between means and ends, between a nonsymptomatic self, a normative self, and an ideal self, leads these individuals to long-term self-doubt and confusion about how to reach their elusive goals. Yet, their never-ending pursuit of normative ideals applies to “normal” and “abnormal” people alike. An analysis of narratives of exclusion allows us to reflect the life-long search for social inclusion via a normal life.

Key Words:

• anxiety
• Canada
• depression
• France
• ideals
• norms
• psychiatry

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the people we interviewed and whose activities we participated in throughout the course of our research for their generosity and openness. We would also like to thank our colleagues for their feedback on drafts of this article and the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable comments. Our research was made possible by grants from the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture and the Institute for European Studies at Université de Montréal and McGill.

Notes

All names have been changed, and identifying traits have been removed or altered.

Research on people suffering from social phobia was conducted in Paris by Lloyd for 10 months in 2003–2004. Moreau's research on people suffering from depression was based in Montreal in 2006. Specific objectives and modes of analysis differed between these projects, but the results shared a particular orientation toward desired post-therapy lives. To initiate his research Moreau advertised in the most widely circulated newspapers in Montreal to recruit people suffering from depression. His interviews were primarily with adults in order to maximize respondents' ability to reflect on social phenomena and general behavior (Moreau 2009). In order to speak broadly about depressive states and emotions and to take a critical distance from the psychiatric definition of depression, the advertisements were open-ended in their references to depression, using phrases such as “to feel depressed” alongside “being diagnosed with depression.” This method allowed insight into signs and behaviors that people identified as traits of their depressive disorders outside a strict psychiatric framework, and in turn permitted Moreau to analyze interviewees' definitions of social normality. Lloyd sought interviewees through a support group for people suffering from anxiety disorders in Paris. She attended group meetings and left leaflets explaining her interest in speaking with people suffering from the symptoms of social phobia. The leaflet was phrased to reach out to individuals who had self-diagnosed with the disorder in addition to those who had been formally diagnosed. This was necessary as many French physicians consider the condition ontologically suspect and chose to refer to people with the symptoms of social phobia as suffering from normal shyness, obsessive or neurotic conditions, depression, agoraphobia, or unspecified forms of anxiety. Lloyd looked for people for whom the label social phobia was an important part of their identity and aimed to identify where social phobia fell in their illness trajectory.

France is a country in transition in many ways, with high unemployment, immigration, and an uncertain sense of where the country fits in global economics and politics. Montreal, although in a politically more destabilized Quebec, has a more constant economic and political status as part of Canada. Both Paris and Montreal are destinations of young people hoping to prove themselves professionally, as the economic engines of France and Quebec, respectively. They are both youthful, culturally vibrant cities, but newly arrived individuals can feel alienated by their relative anonymity.

The time frame in which the concept of a “norm” was introduced into France was roughly the same (Hacking 1990).

This hope that medicine will bring about not just a cure but salvation has been discussed in terms of the soteriological dimensions of medicine (Good 1994).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie Lloyd

STEPHANIE LLOYD is a medical anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University, based out of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, Verdun, Quebec, Canada. Her interests include the ways that the “psy” disciplines are informative of how we imagine ourselves as individuals and societies in terms of our actual and possible states. She is currently writing a book, From Subjects to Selves: Social Anxiety Disorder and the Colonization of French Psyches, on the increasing adoption of globalized diagnostic and treatment practices in France and the relationship of these practices with French citizens' perceptions of society and the “social bond.”

Nicolas Moreau

NICOLAS MOREAU is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Sociologist by training, he is particularly interested in questions concerning mental health. He studies how certain mental disorders, such as depressive disorders, are informative of expected behaviors in particular societies and his additional interests relate to sports (the evaluation of sports participation in terms of its impact on social reintegration).