Mental afflictions are caused by a combination of genes and environment, but often require a specific configuration of both in order to manifest. Properly changing the environment, then, even without actually changing the genes, would, in most cases, completely eliminate a given "disorder" -- so why, after having developed some arbitrarily defined mental "illness," are we taught that our thoughts are irrational, rather than that there is a mismatch between our genes and our environment?
Simple: because psychiatrists would be out of jobs if there were no more patients to retroactively treat
Imagine a world where, instead of abolishing slavery outright, we felt like we were doing the right thing by teaching American blacks that all that matters is that they're "cured" of their slavery -- while completely ignoring the responsible system. Instead of stopping slavery at its source, we'd "treat" slaves -- the "patients" -- by setting up slave-freeing services, which would require a small fee for our efforts. "Hey, I can get you off of this plantation. Just sign right here, and we'll have someone come by tonight to pick you up. Who's your insurance company?" In such a world, we could make ourselves feel good for freeing finite numbers of slaves while simultaneously making tons of money by doing so, because there would always be more slaves being born into the system to treat after the fact.
Metaphorically speaking, the solution to mental disorders is to abolish slavery (and to educate the population about its adverse effects). Literally speaking, it's to establish an entirely new societal system.
Mental disorders are not unique in this regard, of course. The underlying problem, itself both fundamental and abstract in nature, also manifests in the forms of: police forces, charity organizations, political lobbyists...
Yeah, fuck those psychiatrists. Trying to help people. Don't they know that the real way to help people is to blog about depressing shit and make up unworkable plans to run away to a desert island?
ReplyDeletePsychiatrists do what they do to make money -- the least altruistic act imaginable. That having been said, some certainly think that they're doing good, and many do. This has nothing to do with the fact that we desperately need to reorient our value system so that the opposite to "disorder" -- or the "mental order" that society promotes -- is not, in fact, just as much disorder as the fabricated demons attacked while causality coasts under the radar.
ReplyDeleteThe point of all of this was really to illustrate the pseudoscience of psychiatry, and how this fairly subjective practice has been used to perpetuate very common, very healthy reactions to horrible environmental parameters. It's in the mental health industry's interest to perpetuate "mental disorders" -- and to treat their symptoms with medication just enough so that patients are too numb to attempt to change the environment that gave them their "disorder" in the first place -- because what else would they do with their lives if they didn't have any patients?
ReplyDeleteSo you feel terrible all the time, are socially isolated, freak out in confined spaces, or have trouble sleeping. Is that really your fault, or is it the case simply because you have a brain that was designed to chase things, embrace warm temperatures, interact only with natural sunlight, know less than thirty people during its lifetime, and perform dances? Isn't it suspect that prescriptions are written in an almost knee-jerk fashion without first performing peer-reviewed experiments on patients in order to determine whether there is some objective, qualitative state that their brains have entered into which is not shared by people who are just kind of down in the dumps? Does it matter, anyway? Why aren't we helping people who have problems but are not "victims" of mental disorders? Maybe every single "ouch" in the world should be evaluated on its own terms; maybe then, we would finally realize that we need to treat the problem at its source and at least temporarily neglect the symptoms. Would you rather go to the doctor to get a flu shot or to pick up a box of tissues?
Never trust a multi-million dollar industry that claims to be science but does not partake in experimentation. It's one thing to conduct a study of the efficacy of a pill -- that is science -- but it's another altogether to conduct a study of which hard, objective mental phenomena constitute clinical depression.