We believe that the arts and humanities are a more natural home for such expressions of life's diversity and that the creative ways in which individuals make meaning in their lives and construct  their own systems of beliefs, values and goals for themselves, is honored and best understood in a context that does not reduce expressions of humanity to judgments of pathology, deviance and aberrations from the "normal". This is in marked contrast to the language of health care and medicine which necessarily measures the individual according to normative, standardized schemas of development and pre-conceived definitions of health and pathology.  We believe that essential freedoms are lost when individual ways of thinking, perceiving and behaving are “managed”, and when differences between people are conceptualized in terms of “illness”, “pathology” or “disorder”.