Doodling about disfunction

[ravan]

As ertla pointed out, There is no such thing as an ability to divide the population neatly into "healthy" and "unhealty", "mature" and "immature", "moral" and "immoral". ... or "functional" vs "dysfunctional". Especially in terms of total personal traits, it isn't black and white, it isn't binary.

Comments

[lysana]

The definition of dysfunction is quite situational. Defense mechanisms that work perfectly against abuse are horridly inconvenient when employed in non-abusive situations. Dysfunction, in my experience, tends to mean "can't deal with the status quo of the space." If it's the majority of the space required to make a living or the like, then it's a condition for which people are encouraged to seek treatment or methods to avoid the stimulus that brings up the dysfunction (which in some cases, like addiction, are often the same thing).

[jemyl]

Why should it get picked apart? It happens to be right on. I think that the problem comes when a person is dysfunctional in so many common situations that they cannot function effectively anywhere but in an institutional very structured setting. Then their situational defense mechanisms and dysfunctions have become the overriding or glaring manifestation of their very being. They don't fit in any normal or nearly normal situation

[ertla]

Right on, and thanks for the citation. I definitely agree with lysana, though jemyl also has a point - some people manage to be dysfunctional in large swathes of their lives, which is probably why there's a tendency to try to categorize the population into "dysfunctional" and "functional", rather than looking at specifics.

The only other thing I'd add is that behaviors can be multi-function. What is the woman in jemyl's example getting out of her behavior, and what other ways does she have of getting those things? Is she, for example, better off on psych. disability than working a dead end job, perhaps one with other problems we don't know about? More usefully, what are various more-or-less successful people getting from parts of their behavior that are sometimes labeled "dysfunctional", and what negative ("dysfunctional") side effects commonly result from behavior considered "normal"?