Heartless precarity

New York Times writer Michelle Goldberg claims that dealing with health insurers brings out the "heartless precarity of American life." This is a nice turn of phrase. (I looked up precarity which seemed like an unusual word. It means the state of being precarious or uncertain.)

But what's the real reason people feel uncertain when they think about or deal with health care? It's not that our American system is uniquely capitalist, unfair, or too expensive and unpredictable. We will never fix that. The real reason is that we Americans have uniquely come to believe that scientific medicine is the best route to salvation for an individual. This is a false belief which confuses and complicates everything for us. 

Psychiatry is the ultimate proponent of the false belief. Mental health professionals are dedicated, or labor under deference, to the proposition that each of us is merely a brain. 

Jon Franklin wrote going on four decades ago, that our deepest thoughts, our every emotion, our aspirations to love, to nobility and goodness, or to hateful revenge and evil domination alike, are all nothing more than complex reactions between neurotransmitters and receptors, interplay between the molecules of our minds.

In my opinion, this is the most vital issue raised by antipsychiatrists, variously exemplified by Thomas Szasz, Big Phil Hickey, and Laura Delano, among many others for whom I have huge admiration. Their personal beliefs may differ from my own in ways that I don't know at all, but we almost certainly agree that psychiatry is the most destructive cultural influence in human history, at least since the Inquisition.

Racism might be the closest runner-up to psychiatry, but as I read history they're merely arms of the same evil social body. Who could believe another person was less human because their skin was a different color, without accepting the fundamental falsehood that humans are all merely bodies, nothing but mud to begin with?

While we hold onto the false psychiatric belief our lives will continue to be full of precarity, and we will accuse random and unknown others of being heartless. Medicine is a good tool to alleviate suffering. It can be used more effectively than it is being used here and now. But we will still suffer, and we will still pay through the nose. As one song I heard long ago says, "We could laugh, or cry, or even say goodbye ...and know these bodies crumble through the years."

Maybe we will become a society that approves of a political policy for murdering fathers who work at health insurance companies.

Mangione, Goldberg and Malis are prophets of doom.

Psychiatria delenda est!