It'd be interesting to compare to a larger sample. is it Being Alive? Or Being American?

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Yes, i read that. My point was that the study you cite reviewed Americans against some set of diagnostic factors. What if those factors were reviewed against different populations of a "stable" nation -- say China? While i should think a suitably culturally translated set of your BAD questions would also indicate Chinese "suffer" BAD, would they test to the same fraction as Americans against the study's diagnostic factors? if so, then, yes, the broadness of the diagnoses are simply pointing towards BAD. If not, perhaps there is something about Being American.

To attribute these results to Being Alive you'd have to control for cultural variance.

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Sorry for misunderstanding you.

There aren't really any diagnostic criteria for BAD, it's just something I made up to refer to the over-pathologization of human thought and behaviour. For instance, they wanted to put my grandfather on prozac because he was still extremely depressed over a month after my grandmother died. He didn't have depression, he had BAD.

The question of whether a culture had BAD would depend on whether or not that culture's psychiatric establishment also over-pathologizes human though and behaviour.

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Well - you crowd the rats and stress them the start to enguage in
frequent unprovoked tail biting. The rats are not sick they are crowded
and stressed. Some rats are more sensitive to stress and crowding. They
are just more sensitive.

....From someone who is VERY VERY stressed out and freaked out from too
much noise, light and stress in her life. ...and from too much
authoritarianism.... Fear of being locked up or intruded upon by the
authorities adds to the stress.

The only way the system will deal with stressed out people is by calling
them sick because if they did not they would have to recognize that the
society they created was broken and sick.

--- Miri of Mtribe

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I've come to the conclusion that instead of calling everything a disorder - we ought to just recognize that we all function differently and can be generally grouped in clusters of people who function in such-and-such way. So, instead of having obsessive compulsive disorder, for example, we'd say I function obsessive-compulsively. Or something like that.

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