The first of Comer’s 4 D’s is deviance, which says that normal is relative to culture and just because a behavior is unusual does not mean that it is abnormal. The second D is distress, which simply means that the behavior of the person is causing pain. The third D is dysfunction, meaning that the person’s behavior is preventing them from functioning on a day to day basis. And the fourth D is danger. This one is pretty clear-cut, it simply says that the behavior is abnormal if the person is a danger to him/her self or possibly others. Every one of these D’s have problems with them but if I had to pick my favorite approach it would be the dysfunction approach . I like the idea of dysfunction because it seems to have less problems than the others. For example if someone is sent home excessively for coming to work drunk anyone can realize that their behavior is now making them dysfunctional in our society. But the thing that I don’t like about dysfunction is the threshold problem which we talked about in class. Take the example that I just gave and consider a different person that is holding down their job and not coming to work drunk but is drunk from the time they get off to the time they wake up. Maybe because they canâ
I do think that there are normal forms of abnormality. That is why we have the DSM 4 is it not. And I also think that there are abnormal forms of abnormality. Everyone is different therefore their symptoms of a certain mental-illness may vary from person to person. An example of normal abnormality is a person who is a textbook case of schizophrenia according to the DSM 4. An example of abnormal abnormality is someone who has schizophrenia but hears dogs barking instead of voices. I do not think that we distinguish between the two but we should because maybe a case of abnormal abnormality might not be so abnormal after all and maybe it might even be a whole new mental-illness waiting to be discovered. And of course there are abnormal forms of normality. An example would be spanking two year old for throwing a temper tantrum. To me that is bizarre to spank a two year old. But in our culture it is for the most part acceptable to spank children, even a two- year old who does not know any better. And where do people get that spanking the kid is going to teach him/her better. Maybe make the child afraid but that is all that I can see that it might do. Anyways, our culture sees it as perfectly normal.
€™t cope with life but whatever their reason this person also has a problem but no one would ever know
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