By Patricia Lefave
First posted in June 2007
Under the pen name Krystal Klarity
The mental illness system in general has two significant errors built right into it, which virtually no one trained in it seems to be able to see. Even the ‘mavericks’ who are now opting out, including some psychologist who refer to themselves as anti-psychiatry, don’t see it. I think they are so well programmed in their methods that even they don’t know how to question what they can’t see.
I don’t think most mental health professionals even recognize the double standard upon which their power is based and I don’t think they recognize what is necessary as a baseline of thinking to maintain that power base, especially since the medicalization of human problems has become the norm. I don’t think most of them WANT to know either.
The overwhelming feeling I get when I try to talk to them is that of talking to cult members who are part of a very exclusive and well protected organization; the kind that is liable to get very angry if it gets called a cult. (Because they don’t want the members to know what they are caught up in) So it goes into its cult routine to protect itself from ‘outside’ forces.
The two errors I speak of are a couple of basic ideas.
The first one and the most dangerous in my opinion, is the use of abstraction, presented as generalized truths, to which they compare individuals and then pronounce the individual either ‘healthy’ or ‘ill’ in relation to that abstraction.
Few even notice this even among the ‘mavericks.’
Individual life cannot be abstracted and therefore, the opposite is also true; abstractions cannot be applied to an individual’s life.
It is cookie cutter style evaluation.
The cookie cutter evaluation of life is probably one of humanity’s most significant errors. We don’t need the idea to be promoted by ‘experts’ as psychologically sound. It isn’t. Every time I hear otherwise intelligent people using one of those cultish abstractions, I cringe.
Want an example?
Declarations like; “A mentally healthy person is one who enjoys interacting with all the people around them or with their family.”
With these criteria, Charles Manson could have proclaimed himself mentally healthy. The Rev. Jim Jones may have been able to do the same. Both of those men stressed interaction and ‘family’ as important aspects of ‘belonging.’
Many people get sucked into cults in the first place, and can’t get out of them, because it is abstractions just like the ones used by the mental illness system which are used to program and control them. Yet psychiatrists in particular seem to be oblivious to this. People’s problems are based upon their unique and PERSONAL experience of life from their OWN point of view; not on abstractions.
A pre judgement of reality is being made in statements such as the one above and these kinds of statements are often suggested to people to use to have them compare themselves to that abstraction, but the abstraction itself is meaningless until it is connected to specific detail. What it really means to the individual hearing it depends upon their REAL life, not someone else’s idea or fantasy about how their real life SHOULD be.
A ludicrous presumption exists in the mental illness business that could be stated something like this:
“If the group does not understand what the individual is saying/perceiving, then what the individual is saying/perceiving CANNOT be understood and is therefore, just nonsense.”
The SAME presumption exists in all dysfunctional groups. The basis for it is group arrogance and the group members reinforce that in each other.It does not occur to the group members that if they don’t understand something what is lacking MAY in fact be lacking in their own understanding and not in the individual’s understanding. It may be their GROUPTHINK perception problem. If we are a PART of the problem, we can’t really see it as we do not have an overview. We have to get OUTSIDE the problem before we can see it clearly and that is often a struggle to accomplish, especially if everyone around you does not want that to happen and fights furiously against that. The pressure placed on the individual to give up trying can be enormous. It is not a task for the faint of heart. It is often very, very painful and causes a lot of grief. We mourn our lost illusions. The ‘nonsense’ that they have believed to be adopted as ‘reality’ by someone may in fact be their OWN nonsense which they have yet to recognize for what it is.
It is this attitude of the psychiatric establishment which is often the true cause of the patient’s growing distress or, at the very least, what is re-enforcing the distress which he was already in, when he first walked in the door.
It is problems of living, REAL problems on a social level which includes ALL people, are what make people psycho spiritually ill. That is not a ‘disease.’ That’s life itself with all its unresolved problems and conflicts. It is the life we are co-creating on a collective level which needs to be examined. John Weir Perry referred to psychiatric distress as a ‘spiritual emergency’ and I can’t but agree with that idea. It is a COLLECTIVE spiritual emergency and anyone who tires to project it all onto a selected individual or group, is the one who is “in denial.” This collective spiritual emergency is what we need to be examining, rather than focusing on an individual or group seen as somehow ‘apart’ from us. The illusion created by that is that we are being ‘objective’ when in fact; nothing could be further from the truth. The instant we create a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality we are being subjective. Anything that defines inherent human worth in unequal terms cannot be anything but subjective. The human love of scapegoating it would seem is being used more and more often as one of the main tolls of collective denial.
The second error and one I believe is a profound one, is the almost exclusive focus on the identified patient, meaning whomever is selected to sit before you in the psych ward, or perhaps your outpatient cubicle, at the Community Mental Health Clinics, expressing his or her problem from his/her point of view.
Focusing almost exclusively on the personal psychology of the person who sits before you is not enough. In fact, it is often MORE damaging to him than if you just left him alone. At least all that pressure and invalidation wouldn’t be ADDED to an already intolerable situation then. The mental health of the individual is only part of the collective mental health of a whole society. If this is not viewed in a holistic way, it is not really seen at all.
When a psychiatrist blatantly lies to me, or just refuses to respond to anything he doesn’t want to hear, or doesn’t like, when he operates in a covert manner and tries to manipulate me without shame or conscience, , my ‘trust issues’ are in direct relationship to him and all of that. They are not bubbling up from within a defective brain I am presumed to have which is causing me to ‘think’ the psychiatrist is duplicitous, when ‘really’ that is just my imagination. The ‘delusion’ in that scenario is in the psychiatrist; not in me.
The same is true in dysfunctional group relations anywhere else; family, school or workplace. Denying it isn’t going to make it any less true.
If, as an individual, I am constantly forced to deal with people who lie to me, and then lie to both me and others ABOUT their lying, that is going to have a profound effect on me and on how I relate to them from my position of KNOWING. How could this NOT affect me when people including ‘experts’ deny, that they are denying the reality of it, both to me, and to themselves as well? (I was once asked by a mental health pro if I could, ‘just not see as much as I (you) did.’) This is sort of the way our current society as a whole likes to think isn’t it? Could we not just pretend that life is a certain way and just go into willing and co-operative (compliant) denial about it? Here are some nice suppressing drugs to help you if you can’t space out on your own. Or over there is a new cult you can join that will give you that nice warm fuzzy sense of belonging as long as you are willing to go along with keeping those ‘outsiders’ OUT.
To have to listen to this and to have to put up with this, endlessly, with no resolution in sight, is frustratingly maddening beyond anything those who have not had the experience can imagine. To further be told that ‘withdrawing’ from the presence of such people represents yet another flaw in one’s personal psychology, another ‘sign’ of what is wrong with YOU, only raises the frustration level to infuriating. If psychiatrists understood this very predictable reaction, they would not be surprised that occasionally, those who were placed inside such a psychological trap may lose control and act out aggressively. Indeed, the true miracle may be that so many people manage to restrain themselves and NOT act out, even though under a strain and pressure that is monumental. That is what breaks people most often in my own experienced opinion. That is my opinion whether you WANT to hear it or not.
‘They back you up against a wall’, is a frequently heard description of very long standing, yet those who hear it over and over again, can’t hear what it means in any terms other than the ones in which they have been taught. It isn’t rocket science. The answer is right in the statement. I heard this remark just recently on Global Currents and it was made by an American conscientious objector seeking asylum from the goings on in Iraq . He also said something I said myself when I was recovering from my breakdown and I meant it to show that, despite what others thought about my ‘condition,’ I was determined to recover from it my own way. I had said to a therapist, “I stay sane now by focusing strictly on the reality I am now creating for myself.”
This young soldier said almost exactly the same thing. We BOTH needed to break the relationship with those who would take our humanity away in order to gain and keep power and control over us. Many of the psychiatrized say the same thing, yet those trained not to accept anything at ‘face value’ cannot hear the perfectly obvious, and even predictable, outcome in those statements.
I maintain that mental health/illness is a societal problem and not a neatly contained individual problem. Yet it is treated as though a total focus on the identified patient, apart from that group or family they aren’t ‘enjoying’ is going to solve the problem.
What if often does best is teach the I.P. to hide the truth from the mental health professional who can’t bear to hear it, and won’t even acknowledge it. Let alone DEAL with it. The sense of being trapped in a surreal alternate universe invented by psychiatrists themselves grows very strong when you sit face to face with them.
You also soon learn that if you try to relate to the majority of them as equals, it won’t work. It offends them. If you suggest there is something wrong with their thinking, it only pushes their pre-programmed buttons and you will most likely get the automated dismissal response; “All these people seem to like to turn reality around and suggest that it’s the psychiatrist’s thinking that isn’t right.”
This is seen as a standard part of psychiatric ‘humour.’
This is also ironically true. The psychiatrist may not share that amused ‘assessment’ with the I.P. but he and other experts may well share a little chuckle together about how predictable those ‘crazy’ people are. Again, this is ironically true to us ‘crazy’ people as well, though the psychiatrists would rarely understand why.
Most patients recognize, eventually, that they are trapped at a nexus of MEANING which nothing will penetrate. That recognition is often the point at which the I.P. may start to laugh at the absurdity of it which will THEN be psychiatrized, again at the nexus of meaning, as ‘laughing for no reason.’ This too may seem hilarious to the patient if he or she hears it stated, as he or she is indeed, ‘laughing because there is no reason’ in the judgements of psychiatry, or anyone else involved.
When mental health pros accept their current training as 'reasonable' and a foundation for thinking that they believe works, based on genuine understanding, they have made a decision. That decision is this: That the psychiatrist's understanding of the patient's problems is 'superior' to the patient's understanding of his or her own problems, and perhaps even superior to his or her perception of his/her own life.
Once that is accepted without question, the psychiatrist feels he can legitimately control the patient for his/her own good and any resistance to this imbalance of power can only be a flaw in the identified patient. So it goes and goes, indefinitely from there; a never ending saga promoted by a system which can never admit it is wrong about anything.
That is often an apt description for many dysfunctional families too, the one the identified patient isn't 'enjoying' and so must be made to accept him/herself as 'mentally ill.'
Frequently the identified patient finds him/herself in exactly the SAME power struggle that brought him/her into the system in the first place. The only difference is that the new protagonist (the psychiatrist who has taken over the role from someone else) and all his blind supporters (the ACTors) have a power that the original individual and/or group did not have; the power to FORCE their paradigm of beliefs on the identified patient. If the much loved behaviourist tactics don't seem to be working, that is very often exactly what they do The public at large turns a blind eye to it. After all the person to whom it is being done is not considered to be as human as they are, so he or she could not possibly feel the same way. Of course the public too is programmed by the system to see the problem as neatly contained within the identified patient and with whatever is considered to be 'outside forces' being largely irrelevant to the outcome.
It is this attitude of the psychiatric establishment which is often the true cause of the patient’s growing distress or, at the very least, what is re-enforcing the distress which he was already in, when he first walked in the door.
It is problems of living, REAL problems on a social level which includes ALL people, including those who perceive themselves as 'normal,' which are making people psycho spiritually ill. That is not a ‘disease.’ That’s life itself with all its unresolved problems and conflicts. It is the life we are co-creating on a collective level which needs to be examined.
John Weir Perry referred to psychiatric distress as a ‘spiritual emergency’ and I can’t do other than agree with that idea. It is a COLLECTIVE spiritual emergency and anyone who tries to project it all onto a selected individual or group, is the one who is “in denial.” This collective spiritual emergency is what we need to be examining, rather than focusing on an individual or group seen as somehow ‘apart’ from us. The illusion created by that, is imagining we are being ‘objective’ when in fact; nothing could be further from the truth. The instant we create a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality, we are being subjective. Anything that defines inherent human worth in the unequal terms of a double standard cannot be anything BUT subjective. The human love of scapegoating it would seem is being used more and more often as one of the main tools of collective denial.
When you have a false premise (like the one psychiatry has been eagerly promoting as the world’s ‘salvation’) nothing works.
So THEY must ‘let it go.’
We all need to fix the REAL problem.
ONCP
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