Are you “psychologically” normal? Professional doctors and psychologists cannot give a satisfactory answer. But it does not mean that all human beings live in a standardized “mental environment”. People rely on common sense to judge themselves and “judge others”, some of which is unscientific, ambiguous and contradictory, and some of which is wise, perceptive and accurate. In order to maintain the stability of their self-understanding, people often think of themselves as more psychologically normal and others as less psychologically normal. People don’t need to figure this out to live well. Often, I think that clarifying this issue is one of the most laborious things psychologists do. The first criterion for distinguishing between psychologically normal and abnormal is the Majority Principle. It’s easy to understand that if your behavior is different from that of most people, you are abnormal. For example, most people are practicing courtesy, you do not; most people will feel happy when they are loved, you do not; most people feel alive is a good thing, you are always thinking of ending their own lives; most people wash their hands for a minute or two, you have to wash a few minutes; most people do not have hallucinations, you can hear in the quiet of the night when someone cursed you and so on. People may be “exceptional” in some of their higher sentiments and emotions, but their intermediate social emotions are in line with the majority principle. In other words, you have the behavior of the majority, but also have the temperament and spirit of the minority, then you are a little powerful. The second criterion for distinguishing between psychologically normal and abnormal is the “statistical principle”. This principle has a lot of overlap with the first principle. But it is a more quantitative way to assess a person’s behavior or psychology. For example, if 95% of the population has an IQ of 90-110, and you have an IQ of 70, that’s a bit…. Then again, 90% of people who experience the Wenchuan Earthquake recover from that massive trauma, but 10% of people have residual psychiatric symptoms of all kinds: fear, nightmares, inability to get rid of memories of fear and sadness, and so on. But again, I hear you protesting: are people with an IQ of 140 also sick? You’re right again, and to answer this query of yours, we need to move on to the next criterion. The third criterion for distinguishing the psychologically normal from the abnormal is the “social value principle”. You may not be in the statistical norm (that is, the statistical majority), but your psychological traits and outward behavior should generally conform to society’s values. The annual prevalence of depression is 4%, and 7% of those people die by suicide, which, after all, does not conform to societal value standards. As an individual, you may be able to find many reasons for suicide, but for society as a whole (or humanity itself), suicide is undesirable. At this point, it’s my turn to protest myself. Is society’s standard of value the ultimate standard? Society’s value standards themselves are constantly changing; what was once considered bad may now be good, and vice versa. In order to answer this question, we also have to consider the fourth criterion. The fourth criterion for distinguishing between normal and abnormal psychology is the “principle of self-feeling”. Simply put, if you feel pain in yourself, you are in some danger. However, there are two kinds of cases: one is when your pain has value, such as for human growth and humanity itself. Loss is a pain, but it may be beneficial to your growth. Indeed, the standard of mental health is not meant to turn everyone into comfort animals; after all, suffering is of immense value in understanding the meaning of one’s own existence. Another situation is when your behavior is clearly problematic and interferes with the normal life and freedom of others while you yourself are painless, such as in the case of certain personality disorders or severe mental illness. Most interestingly, the suffering of people with psychological problems is a meaningless suffering, meaningless to humanity and to themselves. It is a kind of pointless suffering, trivial suffering. 5. The last criterion for distinguishing between normal and abnormal psychology is the “principle of pathology”. This is related to medicine. Those problems that cause damage to the organs and affect the normal physiological functioning of human beings, we call “pathology”. Smaller ones are like dental caries and hemorrhoids, while larger ones are like coronary heart disease and cancer. Similarly, problems that affect a person’s brain and indirectly affect a person’s mental behavior, we call “psychological pathology”. This criterion is still relatively “hard”. For example, we have found that many mental illnesses do involve pathological changes in the brain at the structural, chemical, and molecular levels. Also included in this standard, there are several “sub-principles”, one is the principle of severity, worry and anxiety is normal, uncontrollable worry is a problem; another is the principle of time, temporary worry and anxiety is normal, endless worry is a disease; the third principle is the effect on a person’s social functioning, if the “symptoms’ are so severe that they affect your work, your life, your eating, your living, your friendships, your lovemaking, that is also a problem.