Do we want a society in which each and every flaw of character is understood as a disease?
Furthermore, the straw-man argument that psychiatry turns "every flaw of character" into a disease amounts to a caricature of standard psychiatric diagnosis, which derives its medical and ethical legitimacy from recognition and alleviation of the patient's suffering.
How much of my father's dark moments were considered an episode or just plain flaw of character, I'll never know.
To the Palestinians, the people he led for so long, Mr Arafat's flaws of character and leadership had been plain for years, yet were irrelevant.
Coe's approach to Johnson is just right: endlessly patient with a mass of material, affectionate, humorous, making no attempt to idealise his subject, whose flaws of character were all too obvious to everyone who knew him.
But the messianic flaws of character that led to Blair's epochal mishandling of the Iraq invasion left the jury out on whether his domestic experiment could ever succeed.
El Diego is a transparent narrative, and you keep seeing in its interstices a startling inner chaos - acute and chronic flaws of character and judgment, and above all a self-knowledge that remains persistently absentee.
Nonetheless, Archytas' opponents are given a fair hearing (e.g., Polyarchus in A9), and Archytas himself is represented as not without small flaws of character (A7).
Sometimes we even believe that people with mental diseases and behavioral disorders suffer more from weakness of spirit and flaws of character than from genuine disease.
In revisiting these flaws of character, the Brabin Inquiry's lines of investigation played up to a long-standing alarmist assumption held by opponents of abortion that it was dysfunctional, 'sluttish' wives, like Beryl, antagonistic to the role of wife and mother, who were the most likely to pursue abortion.
And I felt that the flaws of that character, and her journey, weren't given a chance.
