This evening as I walked the dogs in a nearby park, a man, his pushbike lying on the ground nearby, was setting up a small tent in the shelter of a tree beside the lagoon.  It was raw, raining & quite harsh by California standards, & I felt badly for him.

Most people would describe this man as homeless, as if living in a fixed abode were the only way to live normally.  Social liberals would immediately blame his situation on the likelihood of mental illness, thus easily pigeonholing him and washing their hands of any culpability.This brings up some very important questions.  Is our nomadic friend mentally disturbed or is he not?  Does normality vary, depending on time & place?  And how should we generally define normality versus abnormality in humans, if at all? 

Hierarchies

Perhaps the most important core mechanism that defines each of us emotionally is the machinery of the stress response, even as it operates in those who are ostensibly considered 'normal'.  The scientific background to this concept is that whereas we as humans possess a considerable degree of emotional flexibility, this is not the case with the lower animals.  Let's look for example at the situation in sub-human primates, sitting just a little lower on the evolutionary scale than we are.  There is a rigid, biologically-based social hierarchy to their lives, in contrast to ours, which in contrast is psycho-socially based, because we humans have the unique power to override our behavioral sub-routines.  The pecking order ranges all the way from dominant to subordinate animal.  Each animal is jammed in the pecking order on his or her particular rung of the social ladder.  The dominant animal tends to be proactive, domineering & leader-oriented.  The dominant gets the best food, best sexual opportunities & the greatest amount of behavioral control.  In contrast the subordinate animal gets the left-overs, in terms of both sex & sustenance & fundamentally lacks control.  The subordinate animal has been proposed as a good model for the human condition known as major depressive disorder (MDD). 

What makes humans unique compared to the lower animals is their normal ability to shift flexibly, as the ambient circumstances dictate, between dominance & subservience, between pro-activity & reactivity, in a rapid manner that doesn't get stuck in any position but promptly & accurately re-adapts as the circumstances shift. From this perspective the mood disorders involve the black or white, dualistic tendency toward getting stuck in places of negativity or positivity, even after conditions have changed dramatically for better or worse. 

This brings us full circle to the concept of the stress response, since its machinery is what drives & defines the existence of biological hierarchies.  The stress response machinery, as defined by its cortisol & testosterone levels, displays a consistently characteristic pattern in dominants as well as in subordinate animals, & the pattern typical of subordinate animals is similar to the seen in patients suffering from depression, involving a lack of the flexible capacity to surge in support of coping with the forces of stress & change.  In essence therefore normality is essentially dynamic & flexible, whereas abnormality is defined by a lack thereof.   So in keeping with this biologically-based, evolutionary approach to the human psyche, exactly what do we mean by normality in humans, and where does the concept of dominance fit in? 

An evolutionary perspective

How should we define abnormality?  In contemporary social terms or in evolutionary ones?  Consider the dog, an animal derived from feral wolves & selectively bred for tameness. But if feral wolves were the evolutionary ancestors of domestic dogs, who or what were the ancestors of our modern, so called 'homo sapiens'? Is it possible that we modern humans have become so altered in comparison with our prehistoric ancestors as to merit the term 'homo domesticus' since our modern lives have changes so much since the advent of farming & the decline of nomadism?  

From an evolutionary perspective, where should we draw the line between evolutionary change & the arrival of the ultimately finished product, if ever?  By our original nature we used to be nomadic, living off the land & by the dictum of; an eye for an eye.   We hadn't been tamed as yet, and we responded to real messages coming from our physical environment instead of artificial ones foisted on us by government & religion.  So if some people or even ethnically or racially-defined groups of humans have a difficult time adjusting to the artificial fetters of our increasingly controlling society, with its closed-circuit cameras, its drones, its armed police forces and its eyes in the sky, should we pathologize them with labels such as ADHD, impulse control disorder and hyperactivity, or think of them instead as outliers existing within the current norm, for whom society is an increasingly unfriendly, controlling place, except when we need then in times of war?  And is it possible that these groups of people are indeed too bright to fit in with the straight-jacketed life style embraced by our mediocre, at times callow majority?  Certainly when some people belonging at the warrior tail of the bell shaped curve and presenting with problems such as ADHD & OCD are compelled to be seen by mental health professionals & marginalized by educators & keepers of the peace, they tend to balk at the idea of being mentally or socially altered, in effect socially castrated via the heavy use of psychiatric drugs,rigid rules & regulations so as to 'fit in'. 

The problem with psychiatry

This difficult problem, wherein many supposedly disturbed persons refuse to comply with the recommendations & treatments proposed by their psychiatrists, is very frequent, but too often we respond by trying to force the issue instead of examining it from the patient's point of view, & the last time I  checked, medical care was supposed to be designed from the patient's perspective rather than that of the medical profession, the government or the money driven insurance companies. In summary, it seems that we have entered a brave new world of excessive control, which many living within our modern societies are ill equipped to handle. 

An endocrine approach, based on the concept of hormonal imbalances driven by hormone receptor anomalies such as androgen receptor polymorphism, may help these kinds of people who so often find themselves between a rock & a hard place, to better cope by affording them a kind of mento-emotional clutch.  Abnormalities or outlier anomalies in the sex hormone receptors are the probable driving forces behind many human beings becoming stuck in either stereotypically dominant or subordinate positions within the mental framework of human society, so it follows that hormonal modulation might serve as a useful emotional modulator.