A friend recently wrote and apologized for taking so long to get back with me explaining the cause of the delay to be “psychological”and “mental health” issues. I know what that means of course. People sometimes have a sense of life being overwhelming and experience difficulties, emotional trauma and conflict. When things get bad and we have trouble coping, we understand the events as involving “psychological” and “mental health” implications.

I find myself questioning this. I find myself inquiring into the legitimacy of what we now accept as the psychological and psychiatric paradigms.

But before I proceed, some disclosure: In high school and college I studied the social sciences. My degree from Ashland, I had a concentration in psychology (they did not call it a ‘major’ then) After my degree, I studied via correspondence with the Ohio University until my G.I. bill funding expired.

In short, I’m qualified to write some pop psychology self-help book to help you adjust to swivelization and delay and delay your eventual “postal” moment, when you go bonkers and shoot co-workers,or your “road rage” response where you turn some lousy, distracted driver into a mulch for cemetery grass. I could give you advice on how to live a “well adjusted”and “mentally healthy” life.

But what does that mean?

We perceive the social sciences to be a medical field for the mind. Mental health. We don’t perceive of it as an institution very similar to law and religion, but consider this.

In the system of law, those with authority make a distinction between human behaviors. Some deviations in behavior, those judged to be detrimental to the political community are “criminalized.” As a consequence, some annoying behaviors can be punished while others cannot.

In the system of religion, those with authority make a distinction between human behaviors. Some deviations in behavior, those judged to be detrimental to the religious community, are deemed “sins.” As a consequence, some annoying behaviors can be punished while others cannot.

The paradigm of psychology is not so different. Those with authority make a distinction between human behaviors. Some deviations in behavior, those judged to be dysfunctional or self-defeating or socially intolerable are labeled “neurosis” and “psychoses.”Those annoying behaviors can be treated rather than punished.

But what are the behaviors that lead to designations?Most often,the psychologists diagnostic manual judges the same deviations in thinking and conduct that are judged by the systems of law and religion. In other words, psychology differs from courts and the priesthood only in viewing deviations from the norm as cause for “treatment” rather than punishment, but still serves to reinforce the norm, most often the same norm embraced by the legislator and the priest, and labels the subject, the individual who deviates from that norm as wrong.

The law calls you a criminal.

The faith calls you a sinner.

The social sciences calls you a nut.

The social sciences, being sciences, operate with a veneer of “objectivity.” This gives the judgments of a psychologist prestige that other enforcers of norms do not share. The judgments of a psychologist are reasonable, rational conclusions based upon the scientific method, not arbitrary or capricious opinions based on personal biases.

To present just one example: when religions call homosexuals “sinners,”homosexuals can stop attending that faith to avoid pronouncements and can, over time, expose the narrow and bigoted thinking for what it is, when states criminalize homosexuality, homosexuals can point out that the laws are often arbitrary(slavery, abortion, drinking alcohol-all legal at one time but illegal at another) and can lobby for a change in law;but when psychologists label homosexuals as suffering a mental illness, the psychologist brings the weight of scientific objectivity to bear against homosexuals. And once homosexuals were designated with a mental illness, their effectiveness for presenting arguments against the bigoted priesthood and the prejudiced legislature becomes nothing more than the irrational ramblings of “crazy”people.

Thus, in many ways, the psychologist’s pretense of “scientific objectivity”makes the psychologists as a much more powerful and dangerous enforcer of social controls than the priest or the legislator or the courts. The psychologist harnesses the power of science to declare that a “deviants” mind is “ill.”That deviation is a “sickness” and the “norm” is “health.”

You can ignore the priest, you can wave a fist at the politician;but when the shrink says you are fucked up, you are fucked up. And everyone knows it’s true. Even you.

But what is “objectivity,” this trait that makes the psychologist scientifically unquestionably?A psychologist will tell you that “objectivity,” being “objective”, is to analyze something with personal detachment, uninfluenced by subjective experience or the influence of ones own personal views.

How can someone be objective? How can I even objectively decide what objectivity is? It is impossible for a human being with subjective experience to know where that experience exerts influence and where it does not. My conception of objectivity may differ from yours: in which case, which “objectivity” is more objective?

The fact is, everything is subjective. We have no way to know how our cultures or our values are influencing and informing our perceptions, our analysis, our conclusions. When homosexuality, for example,was removed as a “disorder” from the diagnostic manual, it was not because shrinks became more “objective”about human sexuality; it was because the culture, the subjective influence shifted, so the definitions of “disorders” also shifted.

There is nothing “objective”about any of that. The social sciences present a pretext to objectivity in order to appear more scientifically credible than other rubrics of social control,but the objectivity and “scientific”basis is really an illusion that now fools no one but the shrinks.

It is also necessary to question what the real underlying purpose of the social sciences is. While we are certainly trained to think of psychologists and psychiatrists as professionals whose goal is to “help”the individual and to “cure” the individual of “mental illness,”when we recognize that designations of “mental illness”actually serve a system of social controls, then we have to question whether “mental health” professionals true purpose is the betterment of the betterment of the individual or is instead, to serve the social order.

To this analysis, consider the social sciences perspective: deviations by individuals are caused by some kind of malfunction in the individual, a failure to properly and appropriately adjust to the demands of our larger society. Therefore, these problematic deviations represent a manifestation of some kind of mental/emotional dysfunction. The individual is “sick”or “ill,” demonstrating an abnormality in the “mind” that must be fixed or “treated”or somehow mended. Social sciences point to the individual as mentally ill and failing to appropriately adapt to society, rather than pointing to society as dysfunctional and failing to appropriately adapt to the needs of the individual.

When we adopt to the social sciences viewpoint we assume, we assume that the individual to be mentally ill and in need of therapy or treatment in order to reconcile the individual to the demands of the social order, rather than looking first at the social order to determine the individual whether or not it is society itself that is “crazy” and traumatizing the individual. In this way, in a broader sense, contrary to the false illusion of objectivity, when we adopt the social science viewpoint we are making a judgment- a value judgment. We are assuming society to be right, assuming its norms to be valid and assuming the individual who bucks those valid, established norms to be dysfunctional,wrong, broken, sick, ill, in need of treatment, or therapy.

But what if the society we live in is broken ? What if this complex dehumanizes us, alienates us, dis empowers us, leaves us feeling useless and purposeless,helpless and exploited?What if the order in question is abusive and fosters social forces of stratification and inequality, creating dynamics that leave people? In such a situation, those individuals incapable of adapting to the demands of such dystopia are not mentally “ ill”at all but actually represent a minority with the internal sense to resist assimilation. Their conduct-objectively, whatever, that means- is better oriented to their survival and happiness than to the conduct of the zombies who march in lockstep as society demands.

So, how we view the irrational subject in terms of mental health depends upon our orientation, the value judgments we make as to the validity and legitimacy of the social order and its norms. Because the social sciences, as already established, serve to reinforce society’s norms, then the social sciences can only work from the orientation that society is right and the deviant is “ill,”that in the conflict between the system and the individual, the individual must be “ treated” to be reconciled to the rather than the other way around.

To adopt the opposite orientation would force the shrink to stop discussion in his group therapy and turn his chair around to address millions of people not in the group.

Not gonna happen.

So now we have an institution, a rubric of control, that convinces us that we are flawed and faulty, that we each are to blame for the pain and trauma and hardship we experience- all due to our emotional and psychosocial “issues,”our inabilities to adapt perfectly to the demands of the larger machine and take our assigned seat and serve the machine. This rubric of control is presented to us in self help and therapy by pop psychologists and has developed into an industry. We pay shrinks to convince us we are fucked up because we live in a dystopic world that traumatizes us and we cannot seem to get with the program.

We adopt medical terminology like “illness” and “sickness” and “disorder” and “treatment,”as if what we suffer, and its causes,are as scientifically identifiable as the virus,and bacteria,and fungus we can view under microscopes. Our mental “illness” is a disease of our “minds”that can be treated just like gonorrhea is a “ disease” of the body that can be cured with penicillin.

We are ultimately mesmerized by psychobabble and never question the difference between a medical doctor, for example, talking about treating plaque build-up in an aorta of the human heart, and a shrink explaining “illness” in the “mind” and its “treatment.”We do not think to distinguish between the two.

In this way, we become susceptible to the idea of psychiatry treating “illness” and disease through the means of medication- introducing compounds into our bodies to alter the chemistry of our brains and our brains neural activities. We passively accept drugging allowing multinational corporations to maintain an industry of psychotropic engineering to keep all of us in our assigned seats and dragging stones up the side of the pyramid- doped to no longer feel the trauma of bewilderment at the meaninglessness of it all.

With the introduction of big pharmaceuticals, administered by professionals who “treat” our “mental illnesses” we lose the capacity to buck the system by losing all capacity to perceive pain and experience disillusionment. We wander glassy-eyed through life while the corporations that provide the pills continue to profit from our mindless complicity.

We are psychosocially engineered. This does not serve our interests in the least. It serves the interests of those who perpetuate dystopia. Our interests would be better served in the absence of pharmaceuticals and the absence of voodoo shrinkhood fully awake and fully aware of the trauma we experience and its root causes; allowing us to collective address those dystopian causes once and for all by toppling the abusive and exploitive order that distorts our lives and diminished our happiness.

Such a solution would ultimately wrest power from the priest, the politician and ……..the shrink.