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Cayla McNally's picture

Insanity and Standard Deviation

It was mentioned in class that insanity was simply 'one degree of standard deviation' away from what is considered to be 'normal'; however, the question that this leads me to is can there ever really be a consensus of what reality truly is? It is something that is so subjective, so foreign from one person to another, that there can never be any chance of finding an average or calculating standard deviation. This would also rely on the idea that all types of insanity are equal, which is clearly not the case, because there is no way of equating mild depression with severe psychosis. Another question that this line of thinking brought me to was: in a place where there is a higher percentage of people with mental illness, can the 'standard deviation' be considered the same? How does the concept of reality change with people of different states of mind?

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