Not a response to parent comment, but does anyone know of studies of people that describe their self-assessment? My impression is that most people think they're weirder than they are, i.e. most people fall within a band of what everyone would call normal, but they often self-assess as weird in one way or the other.
i.e. for parameter X which typically ranges between x and x' and for which people estimate themselves at x1, they typically severely underestimate the size of the range (x,x') and conclude that x1 is outside it, when it's really inside it.
It really depends! Some forms of mental illness come with an inability to understand the illness as one of the diagnostic criteria -- this is part of why so many people are internally resistant to diagnosis.
I was diagnosed as bipolar 2 a few years ago, and I just assumed the mood swings I dealt with were normal. Doesn't everyone occasionally get too enthusiastic during a meeting? Or call in sick because they can't get out of bed? Turns out no, everyone has mood swings from time to time but mine were more predictable and severe enough they were preventing me from doing the things I wanted to. Hence the diagnosis and medication.
This is why mental health professionals are important. It can go both ways -- sometimes folks are just neurotic and overanalyzing themselves, and sometimes they're oblivious to the mental illness they do have. Medication and life changes help, but the first step is to see a professional who can help you sort through whether your mood issues rise to the level of clinical or not.
I think it goes both ways though. We have no real frame of reference for “normal” — most of us only know maybe 20 people well enough to see the inner workings of their mind, and we’re probably related to at least half of them so anything congenital would feel “normal”. It seems pretty common that children of people with undiagnosed mental illness end up feeling weird or crazy until they break free and start to discover the world on their own (see also /r/raisedbynarcissists).
Trauma is a huge factor in mental illness as well, so much so that the definition of a “healthy individual” can only be really anchored to a specific point in time. Some things that rise to the level of clinical (anxiety, depression, BPD, PTSD, DPD) are largely seen as the result of trauma and/or some hereditary predisposition.
Plus people tend to be drawn to like-minded people. I know that personally the people that I am closest with are those who I've bonded with over dealing with similar types of anxiety and/or depression. It's just... harder to connect that way with a dissimilar mind.
Haha, but is it the case that maybe those people (or perhaps even everyone) tell everyone else at some point that they're weird? i.e. one problem with this is that if someone calls lots of people weird, their calling you weird isn't significant. And I'm certain everyone has been called 'weird' at some point in their lives, so merely having been called weird is insufficient to actually be weird.
There's a bias induced by how people act in public. You don't normally see people's quirks, you only see the most normal side of their behaviour. It doesn't occur to you that they also have weird ticks - possibly weirder than yours.
i.e. for parameter X which typically ranges between x and x' and for which people estimate themselves at x1, they typically severely underestimate the size of the range (x,x') and conclude that x1 is outside it, when it's really inside it.