IntroductionPsychology is described as a noble field in which clinicians seek out people who help their clients overcome the human suffering they experience due to psychiatric problems. There is controversy over what constitutes human suffering to the extent that therapeutic and pharmacological interventions should take place. The line between normal functioning or coping with the realities of life and psychiatric illness seems to blur further with each new addition to the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). An example of this vagueness is the proposed addition of complicated grief disorder, which has the potential to medicalize and dehumanize an adaptation process that occurs when a person is deprived of a relationship. What is deemed abnormal by one generation in one edition of the DSM may be completely revised in another edition. But what is abnormal and normal in our society at a given time? The use of the terms abnormal and normal seems archaic when discussing symptoms of mental illness given the mathematical origins of these terms. More appropriately, the terms adaptive and nonadaptive speak to the transient nature of relativity in our thoughts, behavior, physical symptoms, and psychosocial interactions. Many of the people I work with have been institutionalized their entire lives, living for decades without privacy and little security from other residents and unscrupulous caregivers. They now display behaviors that are described as maladaptive because the situation in which they live has changed and the old behavior has not changed. For example, a client has been institutionalized for 31 of his 35 years of life. It collects objects such as garbage,...... middle of paper ......h ed., rev. text). Washington, DC: Author. American Psychiatric Association. 2010. DSM-5 Development. www.dsm5.org. Brendel, David (2001). Multifactorial causation of mental disorders: a proposal for improving the DSM. Harvard Review of Psychiatry. 2001. 9 (1), p. 42-45. US Department of Health and Human Services. (1999a). Mental health: report of the surgeon general – summary. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, 1999. http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/mentalhealth /home.html.U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (1999b). Mental Health: Culture, Race, Ethnicity: Mental Health: A Supplement to the Surgeon General's Report 2001.