> But when she did Bernstein was able to stop hiding — and hating — so much of herself. “My therapy has been in accepting the paradox that light doesn’t come without dark and highs don’t come without lows,” she says. “That if I want to be creative to the extent I am, then it’s going to have a dark side. And it does.”

I think the big danger in trying to put a medical diagnosis on everything is that it gives a false sense of what is normal and abnormal. When I hear statements like xx% of people have issues with depression, one thought is, what if depression isn’t an illness, but just a variant of normal.

Throughout history many, many of the great people, especially creatives struggled with depression. The Greeks actually had melancholy as one of the 4 humors and accepted that a certain percentage of people would be melancholic.

Modern psychiatry and psychology seems to have a norm in mind and people who don’t fit that norm have an illness. See for example back when the DSM classified same sex attraction as a mental illness. Now we realize that it is just a normal variant of human sexuality and not an illness to be treated. Similar thing with ADHD. We are seeing 3 and 4 year olds put on medication. If you look at the life of Thomas Edison it seems he may have had what we would today call ADHD. If he had been medicated to be “normal”, would he have been able to do all those prodigious accomplishments?

Sometimes, there can be great benefit in seeing something not as a disease but just a variant of normal with some advantages and disadvantages compared to the typical, and accepting it.