#17 on the 20 Ways the World Could End: Mass Insanity

#17 on the 20 Ways the World Could End
#17 on the 20 Ways the World Could End:


17. Mass insanity
While physical health has improved in most parts of the world over the past century, mental health is getting worse. The World Health Organization estimates that 500 million people around the world suffer from a psychological disorder. By 2020, depression will likely be the second leading cause of death and lost productivity, right behind cardiovascular disease. Increasing human life spans may actually intensify the problem, because people have more years to experience the loneliness and infirmity of old age. Americans over 65 already are disproportionately likely to commit suicide. Gregory Stock, a biophysicist at the University of California at Los Angeles, believes medical science will soon allow people to live to be 200 or older. If such an extended life span becomes common, it will pose unfathomable social and psychological challenges. Perhaps 200 years of accumulated sensations will overload the human brain, leading to a new kind of insanity or fostering the spread of doomsday cults, determined to reclaim life's endpoint. Perhaps the current trends of depression and suicide among the elderly will continue. One possible solution- promoting a certain kind of mental well-being with psychoactive drugs such as Prozac- heads into uncharted waters. Researchers have no good data on the long-term effects of taking these medicines.




The Origins of Insanity
Pender Island, August 15, 2003
www.goodshare.org/insanity.htm
When I was undergoing a 'psychotic episode' in August, 1997, I was much struck with certain facts in the relationship between my current thoughts from 'inside of the episode' and their relationship to my past thoughts in my 'condition of normality' prior to my 'drifting in' to the episode. In particular, I was impressed by the feeling that I was in a hypersensitive or hyperaware state, much as is reported by those who use certain hallucinogenic drugs, and which recalls descriptions by Laing of the 'hypersanity' experienced by those undergoing spontaneous healing through collapse and replacement of the ego by 'cosmic fetalization' and 'existential rebirth' (inner-outer transformation in the manner that snakes shed their old skin, replacing themselves from the inside-out). In my case, I was fortunate in being supported by loving and learned others to the point that I avoided being either institutionalized or drugged by frightened 'normals' projecting their own fears onto me and, as a result, suspending me midstream in the process where I could neither complete the 'letting go' of the 'old me' nor yet reach out far enough to embrace the 'new me'. That this 'being suspended in midstream' and kept indefinitely in the limbo of psychosis by well-intending (but frightened) 'normals', who might otherwise lend their support and assistance to safe passage for those experiencing spontaneous psychic healing, is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the mainstream psychiatry of the 'normals', is an hypothesis that will be critically reviewed in this essay.

Being a student of the history and philosophy of science, I could not help but to cast these findings from my psychotic or 'self-healing' experience, into the terms of science and more particularly, in terms of the evolution of physics with its powerful influence on our conceptualization of the world. My speculations, which I have juggled and reviewed from outside to in and from inside to out over the past eight years, have been building continuously in coherency and self-consistency, to the point of my current attempt to articulate them in this essay.

To present a view that suggests that 'insanity', as in 'schizophrenia', 'bipolar disorder' and 'depression', are not independently arising pathologies in their own right through some kind of innate biogenetic or biochemical 'defectiveness', but are behavioural variations induced in healthy but hypersensitive individuals through their immersion within a 'pathological normality' and are thus the variant, recalcitrant 'children' who are resisting their own assimilation into a 'pathological normality', is a conclusion that has been arrived at by a number of psychiatrists, including Ronald Laing, Thomas Szasz and John Weir Perry.

Still, such a conclusion, even if well-founded, is unsatisfactory until the inductive source of pathology in 'normality', that brings out the contra-normal behaviour that we refer to as 'insanity', can be clearly exposed.

The search for an insanity-inducing source in 'normality' leads one to examine in depth, not only those experiencing 'abnormality', but the thinking patterns of the 'normal' majority who take their own normality for granted even as they judge the behaviours of others to be 'insane'. Since my profession is not 'psychiatry', though I have had much dialogue with those inside of psychiatric hospitals, through my relationships to loved others, judged and labeled with the DSM psychopathology brands, what I bring to bear is a life-long history of research into the manner of perception and inquiry of 'the normals' in our society.

When I say 'the normals in our society', I am referring to the western culture where the practice of 'diagnosis', incarceration in psychiatric hospitals and the involuntary imposing of drugs, electric shock therapy and surgical intervention to suspend disturbing 'psychotic behaviours' has become established practice supported by the psychiatric profession. As numerous anti-psychiatry authors have pointed out, the attitude towards variant behaviour in other cultures, Native American, Celtic etc. has been far more supportive and has acknowledge the gifted nature of the psychotic experience, the transcendent aspect of getting a glimpse into the invisible otherworld with its poetic rather than materialist essence.

Such supportive and even appreciative attitudes have not vanished, as my own experience indicates, and as the written and spoken accounts of people like Alan Ginsberg ('Howl') testify, ... but there is no 'critical mass' and the formal institutions of our culture have been built up on the basis that psychologically abnormal behaviour stems from biochemical and/or biogenetic defectiveness, rather than from hypersanity, hyperawareness and spontaneous inside-outwards, snake-like self-healing cycles. Thus, if a friend of mine undergoes the type of psychotic episode as myself, for any crisis phases within the episode, I would have to provide a safe-haven for him where he is supported on a round-the-clock basis (e.g. by a team of friends). If, meanwhile, he decides to make a tour of the neighbourhood in the nude or exhibiting some bizarre behaviour, ... the whistles will be blown and he will be taken away to an institution and subjected to involuntary incarceration and drug etc. interventions. The point here is that it is a moot point that the supportive friends of someone undergoing a psychic healing cycle are prepared to provide safe haven and the appropriate nurturing space for the cycle unless the person undergoing it is capable of managing his external interfaces to the point of not inciting others to 'blow the whistle'. Were the 'normal community' more like the community within the 'asylum', the whistle-blowing tolerance bar for bizarre behaviour would obviously rise several-fold.

The background above reviews the current fact that while there are split views within our society as to whether 'psychotic behaviour' stems from hyperawareness and self-healing in reaction to emotional pressures to assimilate within a pathological normality, or whether it stems from innate biogenetic/biochemical defectiveness, the formally established law-supported systems, that respond when psychotic behaviour results in a 'disturbance' to the smooth functioning of society (the established psychological health-'care' system is not rallied into action for non-disturbing psychotic behaviour situations) are based on the latter assumption.
Here, I shall present the core finding that supports the origins of insanity as being resident within a 'pathological normality'.

'Behaviour', according to western traditions of perception and inquiry, is attributed to the 'physical agent' (individual, corporation, nation) rather than to the enveloping (crazy-making) space that envelopes the individual. The worldview of western 'normals' is constructed by mentally modeling what goes on in terms of the behaviours of the 'independent' material agents that populate space, ... a one-sided view of behaviour that fails to see space as a participant in behavioural phenomena.

This assumption, that individuals have 'free will' and that space is a non-participant in physical phenomena (though Einstein and Poincaré and relativity theory suggest that space is indeed a participant in behavioural phenomena) is so deeply and thoroughly imbued in the fabric of our western-minded thinking, that it is difficult to even 'make room' in our minds for reflecting on the feasibility of other mental models.

The suspension of your (the reader's) disbelief in the alternative view that 'space is a participant in behavioural phenomena' may be helped by a couple of familiar examples;
1. The skier and the avalanche.
Would you say that the skier 'causes' the avalanche when it erupts from beneath his skis?
2. The smoker and the forest fire.
Would you say that the smoker who throws an incompletely extinguished cigarette into the forest 'causes' the forest fire?
The short answer in this different way of visualizing 'behaviour' is that, 'no', the skier and the smoker simply 'trigger' the release of stored energy and it is the release of the stored energy that causes the avalanche and the forest fire.
For a more in-depth look at how the oversimplified use of the concept of 'causality' gets us into trouble, a more technical discussion that follows in green that the reader may pass over, depending on her interest.

http://www.goodshare.org/

http://www.goodshare.org/index5.htm

http://www.goodshare.org/insanity.htm