An old lesson

Almost fifteen years ago, I wrote about what it means to debate the "Existence of Mental Illness." My friend Rodney Yoder commented from his own bitter experience that being locked up in, e.g., Chester Mental Health Center, is social segregation or correction, punitive as a matter of explicit and implicit policy. It is not medical help, "...and the average person understands this all too well."

The window dressing of psychiatry demeans both medicine and the law precisely because it encourages the public to pretend ignorance of social policy choices. There are standards of behavior which simply will be enforced one way or another, and legitimate scientific medicine never has much to do with that. The function of so-called "mental illness" is at least to deflect responsibility, and at best to encourage faith or hope for future progress. 

The problem is it wastes honest human effort in present time, and it ruins the public fisc. Yoder, as an avowed atheist, would argue that this is ever the result of religious faith. His mentor Thomas Szasz, and his expert witness Nelson Borelli, both wrote long and eloquently (as no compliment) that psychiatry is best seen as a state religion.

Two weeks ago today, the American election demonstrated some serious impatience with continuing poor results from social policy choices. The world is on edge, and people want change. They may not know exactly what change they want. They may bounce around between increasingly radical promised "solutions" for years. Nobody knows what will happen, but the understanding of the average person is much better than the authorities apparently believe.

People are not generally stupid, they're smart enough to survive. Some are infinitesimally "smarter" than others, but only for moments at a time. We have (contrary to elitists on our left) no real competent educated class; and (contrary to delusional reaction on our right) there certainly is no subspecies or race "higher" than the simple diverse majority, however deplorable or morally upright they may be. There certainly will never be "brain treatment" breakthroughs to afford broad salvation.

The Jewish High Holiday Prayerbook contains a page I memorized many years ago, which is the best prescription I can think of:

In well doing rather than in well being seek your salvation.

Leave for awhile the narrow sphere of your concerns, and with Israel's ancient seers ascend the mount of vision. Thence behold the millions of your fellow beings madly struggling for air and light and a place in the sun, and tearing each other's flesh in the panicky scramble.

The pang of compassion will grip your heart, a pang that for ought we know is the stirring of God within you. 

And you will cry, Oh that men were united to do Thy Will with a perfect heart!

Then descend into the valley where men die struggling. Thither take the vision, the pang, and the prayer, and transmute their urge into deeds of love. 

No apologies to my friend Rodney Yoder for being religious. And no apologies to the IDHS plantation overseers for being antipsychiatry.

We simply have to work.