Ah, but what does it mean to ´function normally´? And why is that a worthwhile goal, especially if 50% of population needs to be pumped full of drugs to achieve it. If a guard in a torture camp experiences anxiety and despair, is that mental illness or an appropriate response to a perverse situation? You can ask the same question, albeit on a much lesser scale, about energetic ten year olds forced to sit through boring classes and learn by rote.
There is a lot of bs in psychiatry. That doesn´t mean there isn´t some wisdom there or the potential to help some people, but it is built on top of an extremely flimsy pseudo-scientific foundation, and it´s questionable whether it helps as many people as it hurts. If you find a good psychiatrist and it works for you, that´s great. I still think a fundamental skepticism is warranted, especially given the potential for serious physical and mental damage caused by these (very powerful) psychoactive drugs.
I think to function normally is to not be disturbed by things which bear no reasonable relation to external reality - that to me is the fundamental indication that there's something wrong, which varies from serious mental illness (e.g. psychotic delusions) to low-level depression.
It's dangerous to dismiss the whole thing as b.s., it's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater - we don't want to validate the idea that 'we can't define normal, so therefore there is no basis on which to call somebody mentally ill'.
I think a lot of the reason these things are 'soft' is that we don't have a strong enough understanding of the brain, and certainly no strong diagnostic tools to be able to analysis what's going on in someone's mind in order to determine whether something is 'wrong' for a given definition of wrong. Until then we have to hack away around the problem.
I do agree, however, that skepticism is vital in this area as in every other.
There is a lot of bs in psychiatry. That doesn´t mean there isn´t some wisdom there or the potential to help some people, but it is built on top of an extremely flimsy pseudo-scientific foundation, and it´s questionable whether it helps as many people as it hurts. If you find a good psychiatrist and it works for you, that´s great. I still think a fundamental skepticism is warranted, especially given the potential for serious physical and mental damage caused by these (very powerful) psychoactive drugs.