Albert Camus

n contrast to hyper-compliant mental health professionals, there are many artists, philosophers, and psychologically astute people who know that rebellion is not evidence of mental illness but a part of human nature. The novelist and philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) in The Rebel (1951), an inquiry into revolt as an essential dimension of human beings, contrasts life-affirming rebellion with totalitarian-resulting revolution. I will return to another Camus classic, The Stranger (1942), to examine the societally unacknowledged rebellion that takes place for many individuals who psychiatry today sadly pathologizes with so-called autistic spectrum disorder.