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."

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.