"A compassionate and eye-opening examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma--from the eighteenth century, through America's major wars, and into today's high-tech economy. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family's four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather's analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter's experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Nobody's Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. The preeminent historian of medicine, Sander Gilman, calls Nobody's Normal 'the most important work on stigma in more than half a century.'"-- Provided by publisher

Introduction: The road out of Bedlam --Capitalism. Every man for himself ; The invention of mental illness ; The divided body ; The divided mind -- Wars. The fates of war ; Finding Freud ; War is kind ; Norma and Normman ; From the forgotten war to Vietnam ; Post-traumatic stress disorder ; Expectations of sickness -- Body and mind. Telling secrets ; An illness like any other? ; "Like a magic wand" ; When the body speaks ; Bridging body and mind in Nepal ; The dignity of risk -- Conclusion: On the spectrum.