What does it really mean to be "mentally healthy" in a society that is lost in materialism, consumerism, and moral decay - a society that keeps child abuse invisible, celebrates violence, tolerates racism and classism, denies the equality of women, rationalizes war as essential for peace, and blames the poor for their poverty and lack of education?
In the midst of social turbulence, personal sensitivity to the pain of life's everyday hardships can permeate the heart, mind, body and spirit. However, the behavioral patterns and emotional disturbances that may develop are seldom understood in the social context in which they emerge. Instead, they are reconfigured into concepts of "individual psychopathology" - labels based in theoretical concepts that have become "reified" into "things," especially "brain diseases."
These concepts are not things. These so-called "diseases" have no medical test by which to truly fit the trendy "evidence-based" practices by which they are supposedly "treated." Yet there are plenty of experts to testify to their existence. There are popularized brain scans that show no more than patterns of blood circulation and nothing at all about what is happening with the 10,000 connections of each of billions of neurons. These are evidence for highly complex forms of human social and emotional behavior?! What an insult to reason is often yielded by psychiatric brain research. Certainly, it is laudable to seek to understand how the brain works. But the incredible and highly speculative theorizing that gets repositioned by the media as fact is becoming more and more dangerous to freedom and dignity.
It is so much easier to reduce abnormality in life to abnormality in the brain and to not acknowledge the chronic sickness of the social body - and to blame instead the many individual attempts to adapt or isolate or flee from the chronic chaos, uncertainty, competing demands, inequities, unfairness, emptiness, and injustice all around. Such adaptations are much more conveniently reframed into the metaphor of individual "mental illness."
- Those who "hear voices" telling them there is a conspiracy (when there are, indeed, not a few) should expect to be involuntarily sedated so they can "function."
- Those who question the purpose of life (when the search for answers is abstruse, lifelong, and highly personal) or who find the pace of their lives overwhelming or the emptiness of their hearts too tragically preoccupying should expect to be labeled "depressed" and characterized as suffering from the pseudoscientifically-contrived problem of "chemical imbalances of the brain."
- Those who suffer bouts of malaise and naïveté, misuse their sexuality to impulsively soothe themselves, fall into drug or gambling addictions, or switch into hyperdrive and spend all their money in ways that upset themselves and/or others should expect to be labeled "borderline" or "bipolar" and characterized as dangers to themselves and/or others. They will also be stigmatized, socially rejected, and accused by others of being "too difficult to be around."
- Children who run amok in response to the stultifying, mind-numbing practices of modern education will be punished for their desire to "learn" rather than "to be taught." Like the many truck drivers who bring the goods they must be taught to desire and consume, they will be provided with stimulants to improve their "focus" in the classroom in preparation for one-size-fits-all tests of what constitutes a "good education," while cockroaches roam their walls, and unqualified teachers struggle to teach them what they should know in outdated textbooks, between lockdowns and fire drills.
- Medications and other psychiatric rituals for "treating" the "mentally ill" and so-called "brain-diseased" will instead serve as neurobiological poisons, resulting in irreversible insults to memory, balance, movement, and speech, and even contribute, in and of themselves, to suicidal and homicidal acts.
All of these afflicted social deviants continue to be considered suspects in the quest by contemporary clinical psychiatry and psychology to define normality, academic movements responsive to the sick social milieu which they must try to serve, disciplines that, at their worst, instill conformity rather than questioning, and seek to sustain their own survival at the expense of that of their clients. These fields have, from their very inception, embedded principles of coercion and social control within a publicly professed benevolence that seeks to serve, reconfirm, and rationalize a world gone more awry every day. The difficult world we inhabit is explained away by blaming the individuals living within it who have trouble adapting to its tenets.
This website is dedicated to those of us in the lay and professional community who are increasingly uncomfortable with the world as it is, particularly the world of "mental health practices," and who may have been called "crazy" ourselves for questioning, suggesting alternatives, and criticizing of fields that are slowly but steadily digging their own graves.
At the same time, this website suggests a reconnoitering with psychology and philosophy, a refusal to "throw out the babe with the bathwater," while taking an openly and vehemently skeptical stance toward the contemporary "mental health movement" as it continues to rationalize the dehumanization and alienation of individuals inhabiting a dark age.
Let us at least consider that pathways to personal peace are to be more important than fleeting happiness, pleasure, and especially drug-induced numbness and "symptom amelioration." May we mix our dedication to serving the behavioral needs of others with commitment to social justice and cultural understanding. May we promote a quest for helping to achieve a truly fulfilling life balanced by emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual maturity and contentment.
Herein, some of the contemporary practices of the "mental health" movement may be examined from a less popular perspective - and should be - very carefully.
Take a Chill Pill
If you haven't yet, it is inevitable that you will eventually be diagnosed. If not today, then in your old age. The psychiatric bible, DSM-IV, has grown from 80 diagnostic labels in the 1950s to over 400 today. Interrater reliability is abysmal so you can hope to receive possible multiple labels from different mental health practitioners. Before you"re fully labeled and stigmatized, you may need a few counterarguments. So sit back and surf around our site.
This is the personal web site of Dr. Dave Walker, a licensed psychologist in the state of Washington. The views reflected herein are entirely his own - at least to the extent that any person in an interdependent world can make such a claim.
