While biodiversity is accepted today as a great value, the same is not true of the enormous diversity of psychological functioning that our mind generates, which we could call our psychodiversity.
Thus, standard psychiatry considers in its classification manuals that hundreds of mental functionings are pathological, despite recognizing that it does not have a structured theoretical model that clearly differentiates what is healthy from what is pathological. It is enough to indicate that, for example, less than 100 years ago in a social context of strong sexual repression, masturbation was considered, following the dominant values, as a serious physical and mental alteration . This was pointed out, for example, by the famous book onanism by Swiss professor Samuel Auguste Tissot, the bedside book for much of Western medicine until the middle of the last century. For this author, masturbation caused “a great spiritual disorder, loss of memory, inability to put two sentences together with meaning…”, turning the person “into a rag that had once belonged to the human species”.
It should be noted that Tissot bases his book on masturbation on detailed case studies, claiming that his contribution is rigorously empirical and scientific. Therefore, when we are told about scientific studies, let us first ask what kind of lens researchers have used to observe reality, because we know very well that all perception of reality is based on a previous theory of that same reality, as clearly demonstrated by the case of Dr. Tissot with his Jurassic conception of the world.
From this perspective, we must point out that the current standard psychiatric guideline for evaluating and classifying what a mental disorder is is fundamentally based on gathering the values of the dominant social model, which is not exactly of great scientific rigor and leads to behaviors are considered pathological due to the fact that they do not agree with the established social norms.
Faced with this situation, the debate on the links between science and society is urgent, especially in areas as complex as those that Foucault called “biopolitics”, increasingly topical in today’s world in which what comes from the area is considered unappealable. scientific.
The question we should ask ourselves is what symptoms would be equivalent in today’s society to the symptoms of masturbation for the medicine of past centuries, and what symptoms, clearly linked to mismatches with the dominant social model, in our case of a society based on the values of competition and consumption are today considered pathological.
In relation to this debate, in my opinion, one of the psychological schools that best values and explains psychodiversity is the current called evolutionary psychology and psychiatry, which proposes a theoretical model that is based on one of the most solid theories of science: the evolutionary theory of natural selection.
From this perspective, psychodiversity has been selected because it is advantageous to have a huge number of types of psychic functioning that have appeared in long evolutionary history, rather than having a few types of behaviors. And the reason for this choice is because evolution cannot foresee, in a world that is constantly changing, which functions will be the most adaptive in the future. As there is no way of knowing, evolution has kept a large repertoire of behavioral possibilities that have been adaptive throughout evolutionary history, although some of them are dysfunctional in today’s world.
As noted on the association’s website Evolutionism – Mental Health (http://evolucionismo-saludmental.com/documentos.html), the consequence of these operations is that each subject must do a great job to integrate all that psychodiversity, all that enormous cast of behavioral possibilities (among them, for example, the masturbation to which we referred previously). And this process of integration and maturation lasts throughout the subject’s life, especially until the beginning of adulthood, and requires a medium that facilitates and helps them to carry out this integration, which unfortunately does not always happen. Family doesn’t always help. And power, through its links with standard psychiatry, tries to control psychodiversity at the service of its interests.