IntroductionPsychology is described as a noble field in which doctors seek out those who help clients through the human suffering they experience due to psychiatric problems. Controversy exists over what constitutes human suffering to the extent that therapeutic and pharmacological interventions are necessary. The line between normal functioning or the ability to cope 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 confusion is the proposed addition of Complicated Pain Disorder which has the potential to medicalize and dehumanize an adaptive process that occurs when one is deprived of a relationship. What is considered abnormal by one generation can be totally revised in another edition of the DSM. But what is abnormal and normal in our society in a given period? The use of the terms abnormal and normal seems archaic when dealing with symptoms of mental illness given the mathematical origins of the terms. More appropriately, the terms adaptive and nonadaptive refer to the transitory nature of relativity in our thoughts, behaviors, physical symptoms, and psychosocial interactions. Many people I work with have been institutionalized all their lives, thus living for decades without privacy and with little safety from other residents and unscrupulous caregivers. Today they exhibit behaviors that are described as maladaptive because the situation in which they live has changed and the old behavior has not changed. For example, one client was institutionalized for 31 of his 35 years of life. Accumulates objects such as rubbish,...... middle of paper......h ed., rev. text). Washington, DC: Author.American Psychiatric Association. 2010. Development of the DSM-5. www.dsm5.org.Brendel, David (2001). Multifactorial causation of mental disorders: a proposal to improve the DSM. Harvard Psychiatry Review. 2001. 9 (1), pp. 42-45. US Department of Health and Human Services. (1999a). Mental health: a report from 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 SurgeonGeneral's Report 2001.