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How do you define good mental health? This controversial, counterintuitive, and altogether fascinating book argues that "psychological normality" is neither a desirable nor an acceptable standard.

Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health is a groundbreaking work, the first book-length study to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. Its author, Dr. Steven James Bartlett, musters compelling evidence and careful analysis to challenge the paradigm accepted by mental health theorists and practitioners, a paradigm that is not only wrong, but can be damaging to those to whom it is applied--and to society as a whole.

In this bold, multidisciplinary work, Bartlett critiques the presumed standard of normality that permeates contemporary consciousness. Showing that the current concept of mental illness is fundamentally unacceptable because it is scientifically unfounded and the result of flawed thinking, he argues that adherence to the gold standard of psychological normality leads to nothing less than cultural impoverishment.

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The long title of this collection of essays is disingenuous. Bartlett (visiting scholar, Willamette Univ.; senior research professor, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis) includes chapters on his own intellectual journey from neuroscience through the social construction of mental health, and presents his views as an eminent cultural psychologist within and outside the academic sphere. However, he devotes much of the book to lamenting society's uncompromising demand for conformity--specifically in the realm of human psychological experience and its unsettled continuum of moods from misery to joy. The author describes what he sees as the obsession for pathologizing problematic encounters between behavior and society, and he longs for a return to an "individualized, human-centered, nonregimented, nontaxonomic understanding of psychological problems." He is vehement in arguing that the categorization of psychiatric disorders and the demand for empirical evidence-based practice (to cite two examples) are outrages perpetrated against the imagination and the kind of original thought valued by the liberal arts. And he bemoans the ostentatious condescension used by journal editors in the guise of maintaining scholarly "standards." Unfortunately, Bartlett's petulance serves to mask his stirring evocation of the need to stand up for humanity. Summing Up: Optional. Comprehensive collections. E. A. Danto City University of New York Hunter College

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Steven James Bartlett , PhD, is visiting scholar in psychology at Willamette University, Salem, OR; is senior research professor at Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR; and has published 14 books and monographs and numerous papers in the fields of psychology and epistemology.