Disorders and DSM IV

A 'disorder' is meant to not only make you weird/unnormal within a social group, but to reduce your ability to survive. (A friend put it that "weirdness" of character is usually a phenomenon which arises from analysing an individual relative to a SMALL group. That is, in amongst a group of 80, somebody might appear "weird", but in a larger population, say 20 million, there may be 50,000 others like that person. A humorous way to see this is that if a genius is a 1-in-a-million person, there are at least 6,000 geniuses in this world.). Once we've measured averages, we could construct Bell curves in many dimensions, and determine an overall "weirdness" factor for any given person.

As always, things which under many circumstances help people survive (but don't necessarily earn the affections of others in their social group) such as aggression/cunning/lying or even a compulsion to steal are characterised negatively, as disorders. Such a classification is understandable from the point of view of society. [We have an uneasy relationship with social manipulation, finding it at times funny and, usually, a flavour intelligence, which we like, but then, it is also exploitative, and we don't like things which threaten ourselves...so socially awkward people would be more likely to condemn socially exploitative behaviour]

But looking at DSM IV (Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, what psychologists use to diagnose their patients), it seems that a ridiculous number of normal behavioural traits are being called 'disorders'.
What DSM IV contains is nothing more than a moral straitjacket being put on the normal spectrum of human behaviour.
Often, the 'disorders' that it describes are HIGHLY adaptive, or useful under many circumstances. In other areas, its criteria are at times absurd, mutually re-inforcing or contradictory, self-fulfilling, or otherwise useless.