Interesting. You know, I'm studying anthropology in college, and there is a field known as medical anthropology which holds that illness is a cultural perception. It's easy for western scientists to balk at this idea and plead that there is real scientific data proving illnesses...but ultimately, I think the way we define pathology is very cultural, especially in terms of mental illness, because part of the definition is that we don't act or feel the way we're "supposed to". If you watch documentaries or read biographies about dictators or geniuses, you see a lot of modern scientists trying to explain why these people were different by giving them modern diagnoses--Asperger's syndrome in particular is a popular guess. In a way, I think the western culture does this because we need an easy way to explain divergent behavior. It's not OK in our society to be anti-social. It's not OK to be sad for no reason. Our culture doesn't allow us to accept these things as natural parts of life. But these things don't have to be considered illnesses. Only a few short years ago, they were often ignored or rarely diagnosed.

In non-Western societies, many mental disorders go undiagnosed or are explained in other ways, some of them religious. For example, in Malaysia during the 1980s, these women who worked in factories began to have fits--they'd destroy parts of the factory, become very excited, and seize on the floor. They considered themselves possessed by ghosts and they were cured by being exorcised. If these people lived in America, say, our doctors would suppose that they had a stress-related breakdown, since working in factories in Malaysia was a stressful experience for most people.

I'm not saying that there is no scientific basis to our mental illnesses. But I think defining illness only based on the criteria this fellow suggests ignores the fact that much of illness is defined culturally and is a matter of individual perception.