Psychological work with clients is often difficult not so much because of the very content of their problems, but because people themselves often perceive themselves as ugly exceptions to the correct and impeccable surrounding reality. And indeed: none of my friends have such problems, only I do: everyone is normal, only my mother drinks. Or a brother with Down syndrome. Or I have been diagnosed with a genetic predisposition to mental illness - now I feel spoiled, rotten, bad inside, this poisons my entire existence. Help, please, dear psychologist, otherwise I’m tired of being a nonentity. On the one hand, of course, I’ve seen dozens of such “spoiled” and “wrong” people. But perhaps this is my bias - after all, people usually don’t come to a psychologist with joy, mainly with problems, troubles and difficulties. But I didn’t think seriously about this topic until a friend (a close friend! with whom we shared deep experiences and values) told me that she had been suffering from panic attacks for a long time. And she mentioned that, according to statistics, about 5 percent of the population suffer from them. 5 percent is every twentieth. The figure was seriously impressive: that is, every day on the street we meet tens and hundreds of people suffering from panic attacks; If you count passers-by, then every twentieth person may turn out to be like this. They pass by in the crowd, only to then, behind closed doors, gasp for breath, struggle with heart palpitations, a burning adrenaline wave in the blood, pound as if in a chill and feel the horror of approaching death (this is how the symptoms of panic attacks are described). But they are just walking down the street, they look like ordinary people, and it is not written on their foreheads how exactly they are struggling with their trouble. And then several clients with depression came to see me at once, and they all described their experiences in a similar way : “That’s why all people are like people, and every day at work I lock myself in the toilet and cry for half an hour. Then I wipe my tears and go on working. I’m probably a tearful fool and a wuss (option: weakling), since I have such problems, and others don’t have such problems.” But it’s me who meets them all in my office; naturally, they don’t know each other! This is my experience, not theirs; They don’t know that they are not alone, there are many of them. Yes, they have serious difficulties, but they are not the only degenerate mutants among the impeccable and correct inhabitants of society. In general, I decided to count them - people with problems. At least in general terms and for yourself, in order to more clearly present the overall picture of the “correctness” and “impeccability” of society. And I decided to describe this in human language, using for clarity a social group that we all once visited: a school class. Let’s say that in a regular class there are 30 people, in a parallel class (classes A, B, C, sometimes D) there are three or four classes of 30 people each. There are about a thousand students in the school. Let’s imagine an ordinary typical school and estimate the prevalence of some stigmatizing problems in it - that is, those that people perceive as a shameful stigma and hide. (All numbers are taken from the Internet, mainly from Wikipedia and from scientific and educational sites; the table does not pretend to be absolutely accurate, but I believe it can be used as an attempt to describe the order of numbers).ProblemPercentage of the population suffering from the problemExplanation in human language: how much is it in classmatesOligophrenia , mental retardation affects 1-3% of the population (according to WHO - World Health Organization). It is detected 1.5 times more often in men than in women. The ratio of debility, imbecility and idiocy is 75, 20 and 5%, respectively (these are degrees of mental retardation, in ascending order. Patients with debility can serve themselves and work in non-intellectual jobs, such as a loader or a cleaner; patients with imbecility can serve themselves as much as possible - fastening buttons , eat with a spoon, make the bed; patients with idiocy and themselvesunable to provide service) This means that almost exactly in a parallel school (three or four classes of 30 students each) there will be one or two oligophrenics like Forrest Gump: dull, not very successful morons. Not everyone will be as nice as Forest. The likelihood of meeting an oligophrenic in the stage of idiocy (one who walks under himself and drools) in life is vanishingly low - they are few in number, and they live in special institutions, because... It is very difficult with them at home. Down's disease Frequency in the population is 1 in 700 newborns. It is observed more often in older mothers, but no one is guaranteed a zero chance of the disease: a child with Down syndrome can be born to both very young and absolutely healthy parents. You and your friends have a relatively low probability of having such a child, but in life you are with such children guaranteed to meet. Moreover, they were previously treated like vegetables, kept in special boarding schools and not taught anything, but now they have learned to develop and compensate well, and it turned out that they fit perfectly into the team. Most likely, soon there will be one down child per regular school (about 1000 students). Autism Over the 10 years from 2000 to 2010, the number of children with autism increased 10 times. It is now believed that there is one case of the disease per 150 children (and in 2000, this number was, according to various sources, from 5 to 26 cases per 10,000 children). Why the frequency of diseases is growing is not clear. Either they have become better at identifying them, or some biological and environmental factors are influencing them. But the fact remains: at least one autistic child per school year (three or four grades) will meet. Cerebral Palsy Approximately one out of 400 newborns suffers from such paralysis, that is, about 250 children with cerebral palsy appear in Moscow every year. They occur approximately twice as often as children with Down syndrome. Severe cases, of course, are taught at home, but a child with a mild form may well study in a comprehensive school. One to one or two parallels - with slight motor dysfunction. Alcoholism Alcoholism affects almost 5% of the world's adult population. Every twentieth adult, that is. Men drink more often, with a 5:1 ratio of male to female drinkers, except in the UK; there 4:1 In reality, in every class there is a drinking parent, or even two. If you come to a parent meeting and don’t see a family of “bruises” there, don’t flatter yourself: alcoholism can be drunken or hidden. That is, your child is almost certainly studying with someone who has one or both parents who have strong relationships. And this does not depend on the social stratum: there is alcoholism of wealthy housewives, there is professional alcoholism (a person works in a respectable position, and in his safe he has cognac, which he drinks many times a day, and then he goes home drunk and the family looks for a fifth corner). .. In general, we all live with this problem, it’s just that it has learned to disguise itself better than anyone else. Drug addiction It’s not easy to count drug addicts (they are not eager to participate in the census), but it is estimated that 0.3% of the population suffers from addiction to injecting drugs. That is, in total no less than 1-1.5%. This means that for each school parallel there is either one heroin addict, or a person who manifests schizophrenia (and at puberty it most often manifests itself), or someone who is sick or will become ill with epilepsy. And even if it has not manifested itself now, it will develop during life. Schizophrenia Prevalence in the population 0.4-0.6% (4-6 cases per 1000 people) Epilepsy Prevalence in the population 0.3% (3 cases per 1000 people) Panic attacks up to 5% population, but the disease has exacerbations and periods of remission, so this does not mean that the patient experiences an attack every day. But every twentieth person has had episodes of panic attacks with all the consequences in their life. One of your classmates is definitely suffering from panic attacks. Or even two. You most likely know nothing about this (unless this person is you yourself), but the statistics are merciless: someone you personally know will fall into this lot. Affective.