Doctor: You know, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. What we call mental illness isn't always just an illness. It can be a communication, it can be a way to work something out.

(This is the doctor's central normalizing statement: Lars is not abnormal, he is just communicating)

Gus: Fantastic, when will it be over?

Doctor: When he doesn't need it anymore.

In this fable, Lars has been scripted to find an extraordinarily unconventional doctor. Not prescribing psychdrugs for symptomatic patients amounts to heresy, or at least is not acceptable practice. I have a psychiatrist friend who is a real life Dr. Dagmar. She had to leave her job because she normalized rather than prescribing psychdrugs.

For example, she treated a young man who unable to keep still, complained of restlessness, fidgeted, rocked from foot to foot, and paced. She told him and his employer that he was not mentally ill, but drugged by the antidepressant he was taking (Prozac), which proved to be correct. Lest this instance seem too obvious, I know of many cases where the presiding physician decided that the problem was not too much drug, but too little. A vast difference of outlook separates the great majority of labeling physicians from the few normalizing ones.

My friend (I will call her Dr. D) has had nothing but trouble from the establishment because of her normalizing approach. Seven years after leaving her first and only fulltime job under pressure, she has been unable to find a regular position as a psychiatrist, even though she is recognized as an authority in her psychiatric specialty. (If anyone knows of a job for a normalizing psychiatrist, please let me know.)

A much more likely response to Lars in real life would have been for the doctor to say: OK. Let's start him on an anti-psychotic medication, since we don't want his symptoms to get worse. If Karin had said, But what about side effects? Aren't they sometimes more dangerous than the illness? The doctor: Karin, I'm sure you realize that he could become much more ill, or even violent.

For drama and comedy, the film enlists the whole community to help Lars. But in real life, perhaps fewer people would be needed; even one person might be enough. Jay Neugeboren’s Transforming Madness (1999) investigated many cases in which there was great improvement or complete recovery from what had been diagnosed as “serious mental illness.” The common thread he found was that at least one person treated the afflicted one with respect, sticking by him or her through thick or thin.

Perhaps Lars is the wave of the future: not drugs, but acceptance. For an outline of this approach, please see my 1999 book, Being Mentally Ill.