“Every individual has his own insanity”: Applying Vygotsky's work on defectology to the question of mental health as an issue of inclusion

In Volume 2 of the Collected Works, Vygotsky argues for more inclusive treatment of people who depart from the developmental norm. In this essay I review facets of his approach and discuss how they may inform current attention to extranormative mental health makeups, e.g., tendencies toward depression, anxiety, bipolarity, and related neurological influences on personality. I focus on the following sets of Vygotskian tenets: (1) his belief that mental and cognitive differences do not comprise defects or deficiencies, but rather present developmental channels that depart from the evolutionary norm; (2) his assertion that “secondary disabilities” resulting from stigmatization related to difference produce more deleterious effects on one than does the source of difference itself; (3) his belief that feelings of inadequacy, if socially channeled toward productive roundabout means of mediation, can productively promote human growth within existing cultural channels; and (4) his conviction that the goal of education and human development is to promote progress toward a culture's higher mental functions – i.e., those ways of thinking endemic to particular cultural orientations to the world – rather than to remediate sources of difference.