How many people are normal?

I am reading the DSM-5 right now as I am writing an exam in a couple of months.
If I add the % of people with different mental illnesses listed in the DSM-5 and add it up, I bet it comes to more than 50%! Does that mean that at any given time, at least 50% of the people have mental illness? I do not have the time to do it now, but I plan to write the name of the diagnosis and the % of people with that diagnosis and add it up and see if I am right.

So what is normal? 

Observing myself and the people I know well, I realize that less than 20% of people fall into the mentally  healthy,  well adjusted and resilient category. The remaining 80% all have some deficits or the other. Many of them would have been 'normal' if  harsh child rearing practices of rural India, strife in families and joint families, poverty, etc  during their childhood was absent. 

The handful (I found 49 people whom I would label as normal or in excellent mental health among the people I have known all my life) of 'normals' I have seen i.e. people who are intelligent, decent, resilient, adapting to a variety of conditions without losing their mental health or morals or joy of living, who are physically healthy( or taking care of their illness adequately) are admirable. When I ask myself, how come these people turned out okay but the majority of us didn't, I realize that it is a lucky combination of factors they had. The factors they had: 

• Their own high levels of intelligence or at least average intelligence. 
• Intelligent parents who were also excellent in raising children, had an excellent sense of judgement, well-balanced in the face of difficulties which most middle class people of India face. Even if these parents were not above average with regard to child rearing skills, they were at least adequate with no major issues such as major marital discord, dysfunctional personality traits, familial strifes. There are  'mentally healthy ' individuals in my list who were brought up by parents with marital discord.  I observed  that in these families,  at least one parent, remained well-balanced and did not retaliate when verbally attacked by spouse. The calm spouse had a lot of tolerance and this ultimately paid off in that the other spouse came to his/her senses and changed for the better and the kids were sort of exposed to stress by the raging parent and sort of protected by the calm parent. I hope you understand what I mean.
• Excellent and safe environments when growing up. This is very important in India where girls are not safe on streets from lewd men and gropers and this has such a tremendous, damaging and permanent impact on teenage girls exposed to this. 
• Education. If they lacked education they at least had innate wisdom, common sense and good judgement. 
• Freedom to choose their own career and study paths unlike many of us who were either (a)forced by parents to do certain courses such as 'engineering' or 'medicine' or (b) we ourselves chose these courses though we did not have aptitude for it because we felt ashamed to choose other courses when everyone else chose these courses. The people in my list of mentally healthy were mostly married to people chosen by their families based on caste, etc. So that is a huge surprise for me as I am against arranged marriages!
• Fairly decent genetic loading i.e. no family history of major illnesses such as schizophrenia, etc.

In the 49 mentally healthy people I know, one core feature  they all have is  intact self-esteem. The people who are not in this group i.e. the rest of the people I know all have problems with self-esteem; nearly all have displayed behaviours indicating they have low self-esteem. The lower the self-esteem(among those who don't have a diagnosis of mental illness or treatment i.e. typical people) the greater the pathology in their behaviours. Based on this observation of mine, I now have greater faith in Adler's theory of personality  than the dozens of other theories of personality I studied and believed in. 

Based on my armchair research, I believe that if Indian child-rearing practices changed in such a way that children's self-esteem is not damaged but nurtured, we would have a lot more mentally healthy adult Indians. This in turn would go a long way to improve India. 

Child-rearing practices in many families I have observed tend to lead to development of fear, anxiety and shame in children as young as toddlers. This in turn leads to low self-esteem. The practice of shaming, yelling at, hitting children for 100s of their actions such as peeing in the wrong place, crying at the wrong time or place,  getting low marks in school, etc is universal in India. This irrational way of dealing with children damages children.  A cumulative effect of this erroneous ways of dealing with kids is the development of low self-esteem, anxiety and anger which carries into adulthood.

I am very well aware that many factors are not mentioned here such as the temperment of the children, the fit of the child's temperment to the parents' style of care-giving, etc but this is not a research but my own observations based on my interactions with people.

I really wish someone studied these normals and identified what makes them tick. Most studies seem to be focussed on the mentals and trying to identify why they became mental. 

Today, March 6th, 2019, I had a Eureka moment about how I maintain my self-esteem. This came about by a discussion I had yesterday about a female, middle-aged coder(whose coding is not great) employed in one of the biggest software companies of the world based in a developed country's "software region''. This woman's poor work quality combined with extreme hypersensitivity to feedback and  her false accusations of sexism is both holding up work and creating problems for co-workers. 
 I am beset with thoughts such as lacking a 'superior' intellect, lacking 'exceptional' good looks, having many undesirable traits (but not too bad) and this does impact my self-esteem. But one thought I have consistently used to deflect these blows to my self-esteem is telling myself that I am unique. There is no one else in the world like me...with the exact same combination of looks, brains, personality, situation, etc. 
I believe if everyone uses this sense of being unique(instead of wanting to be superior)  it will protect self-esteem and avoid all the damaging behaviours and moods which are a consequence of  poor self-esteem.
I wish I had the patience to research this idea of mine  but I dont have the time or the patience. I suppose I could at least write a proposal but not now...