The Center Cannot Hold:
That is the title of a new book by Elyn R. Saks, law professor at USC, and it seems now a psychology and psychiatry professor there as well.
I was very taken by the gripping narrative of this book. The subtitle is My Journey Through Madness. Here is one short review. Here is an excerpt.
Oliver Sacks liked it too. He called it "The most lucid and hopeful memoir of living with schizophrenia I have ever read."
Why is it that maladaptive behavior has become more common. Is it perhaps because we have become more accepting of it? If misbehavior is discouraged by social approbation, you get less of it. Surprise, surprise.
If proprietary communities could throw the tattooed, the insane, the sloppy dressers into the 'outer dark' (consider the neo-victorian clan in 'The Diamond Age'), things would be much nicer all around.
Hmm. How about people with either a very wide nasty streak or an ugly, tasteless sense of humor?
Why is it that maladaptive behavior has become more common. Is it perhaps because we have become more accepting of it? If misbehavior is discouraged by social approbation, you get less of it. Surprise, surprise.
Or how about this - the symptoms checklists are drafted so broadly that nearly everyone could be diagnosed with something if the mental health professional were creative or determined enough. Since these diagnoses are so easily manipulated they are useful for all kinds of agendas: Rent-seeking for the mental health professionals. Rent-seeking for the pharmaceutical industry. Rent-seeking for the self-help book industry. An easy way to discredit and marginalize agitators, eccentrics, dissidents, protesters, etc. and violate their rights. Etc, etc, etc...
But as her mind is functioning, it's statement about word A. But word B rhymes with A. And word B has other meanings, so turn to discussing them.
Dr Weevil: I read somewhere (forget just where) that London under the Blitz experienced its lowest recorded rates for insanity, committments for alcoholism, street crime, and suicide. People responded positively to an external threat. Suicides found life was worth living if someone was trying to kill you.
This is further proof of the perversity of mankind (grin). It pretty well trashed the prewar bombing theories, advanced by a Douhet, that a civilian populace, if sufficiently bombed, would suffer a sort of common nervous breakdown and be unable to resist.
Basically, it suggests that about 20% of Americans would be "diagnosable," but only 9% of those would be thought to have a situation that impacts their life, 5% would have something that could be called severe, and about half of those really severe. Bear in mind that the above include depression, obsessive-compulsive (which I suspect most attorneys are; it's a field where if you don't have something of that streak you get into trouble). etc..
A friend once observed that most psychiatric texts say good things about obsessive-compulsive. Likely because you have to be something of an OC to go to the work of writing a psychiatric textbook, and authors are apt to see the good side of a trait that they have!
I'm by no means qualified to make a statement like this, but it seems to me that if mental illness is a defect of the "rational mind" as it were, when people are put in stressful situations where the rational mind takes a lower position to more basic survival concerns, you would naturally see less mental illness appear.
Or, more probably the converse is true. The more time people with a mental illness are able to spend doing something other than surviving, the more likely it is the illness will manifest itself.
and:
I never had any idea.
Gee Duncan, it seems both you and Greedy Clerk are a bit remiss in your studies of Marcuse and Gramsci. The Frankfurt School neo-Marxists argued that revolution would be brought about not by some mythical uprising of the workers, but by the steady efforts to champion all transgressions of existing social norms, whether the norms were aesthetic, legal, or social-behavioral. The theory goes that if you could manage to infiltrate a fair number of revolutionaries into the institutions of the dominant social order, they could erode the existing order by privileging the prostitute over the priest, the crook over the cop, the madman over the physiatrist, and that this erosion would eventually overthrow the hegemony of the existing social order. The existing social order destroyed, utopia would shortly thereafter ensue.
This is part of the reason why there was a strange right/left handholding in the 1980's when the mentally ill in the United States were deinstitutionalized. Those on the right hated the idea of psychiatric confinement for individual liberty reasons, and seeing the 'psychiatric hospitalization' visited on anti-communist dissenters in the Soviet Union, not to mention the fiscal issues by maintaining state care for hundreds of thousands, perhaps at times millions of individuals. The notion of deeming political opponents mentally ill has bothered conservatives since the label has so frequently been applied to them by their own opponents. See the recent Berkeley studies for an example. Meanwhile, some of those on the left saw similar individual liberty issues, while others saw the revolutionary possibilities of making mental illness the new norm, or at least a competing norm. Obviously, not all on the left are followers of Gramsci or Marcuse and I would wager that fewer than 5 or 10 percent of people who would describe themselves as 'progressive' or leftists have ever read any significant amount of either philosopher's works, but their works are the animating spirit behind left-liberal/progressive politics in the same way that Hayek's work animates the small government conservatives' movement.
John Fonte wrote a useful summary of this phenomenon within the context of the culture wars for the Hoover Institute several years ago. Eric Raymond also wrote an interesting piece on undoing Gramscian Damage. Clerk, you in particular will probably think Fonte and Raymond are both morons, but you'd do yourself a favor to read some Gramsci, at least if you want to know what First Things underlay your progressive politics. I wouldn't bother with Marcuse unless you're having trouble sleeping.
as to the subject of the post, I read the excerpt, very interesting. May give it a look, thanks Tyler.
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