The Problem with Medicalizing Suffering
This essay evolved out of a concern that the current practice within psychiatry to categorise human suffering as pathological mental illness and normalise passive pill taking, rather than encourage therapeutic journey, has the unintended negative consequence of preventing people from recovering.
And the psychiatric encroachment into normal human life suffering will create future epidemics of serious mental illness.
For much of human history, religion for all its failings has played an important role in helping us face human suffering.
To the extent that it created a collective cultural consciousness which inspired individuals to follow journeys of transformation, it brought meaning and depth to our lives.
Since the 20th Century organised religion has played less of a role and it seems psychiatry has been replacing it within mainstream society, as an answer to dealing with life suffering.
Think of all the people taking anti-depressants and anxiety medications.
There is nothing implicitly wrong with this, a new priesthood replacing an old one, especially if it deals better with extreme suffering.
If when someone comes along with their suffering of paranoia, they are supported to face whatever happened in their past to leave their body-mind in an overprotective state (often childhood abuse and neglect), then some much needed service has been offered. They will grow from the process and their life will be enriched as will that of the wider society.
On the other hand, if their suffering is medicalised, with the 'priest-like' authority figure confidently identifying the person as 'paranoid schizophrenic', or nowadays more subtly hinting at it with a, "you're basically mad", acute psychosis diagnosis and then stating that you will need tranquiliser medication for life, then the consequence will be a great dis-service to them and to the society that loses them as a creative participant.
The individual being extremely vulnerable in their need will likely take on this new identity as a chronically mentally ill person, sick for life and stay that way.
Attractive benefits come with the package. The individual is likely terrified by what they are experiencing inside and their mind now has an answer to their problems. “I am a paranoid schizophrenic, or a mentally ill person”. It's a great relief when someone at least pretends to understand the mess being experienced inside you and offers to take responsibility for it. Potentially the ultimate placebo maker for any treatment given if the individual buys into it.
Add to this a sense that it's a genetic disease, so you're a 'type' of human, (even if we can't prove it scientifically) and the individual has a sense of freedom from responsibility for their suffering. This is who I am. There is no need to look at the pain inside or what happened or take responsibility for unfortunate behaviour and choices. And neither does the family or wider society. It's effortless. All you need to do it take your pills as this is what humans of this type have to do.
And along the way, you get discharged from the stressful responsibility of maintaining yourself in society, i.e., working to pay for a living. You even get the tranquillisers / anti-psychotics for free.
You become dependent on the 'priest' or others like them who gave birth to your new identity, baptising you into the church, as they have 'saved' you. They are the ones who understand your problems and how to proceed with your life. Not you. And don't try and challenge this authority - it is not really allowed.
There is nothing to inspire working on yourself to grow as a person and recover. Perhaps there is some show of this if your local health authority has the money, so you join the exercise class or well-intentioned therapy class or even a national CBT programme, but if you do so as that mentally ill person, then I don't believe there is any fire there to really change and grow. It's been blown out by the 'priest'. All you do is have the time passed for you, hopefully a little pleasantly and the therapists involved will likely burn out in time if they care enough. Everyone quietly 'knows' you just have to keep on taking the pills for life.
If the pills actually worked to somehow clean the emotional pain and trauma out of people and rebuild their self-identity, then there might be some validity to this approach. I will write more about medications another time, as someone who actually took them.
The extent to which psychiatric medications do appear to work for some people feels creepy to me, like a sad face being brushed over with a painted smiley. A form of behavioural control, leaving the human being unnaturally disconnected from their authentic emotional state.
Somehow the psychiatric profession has lost its healthy instinct and brainwashed itself with all the scientifically unproven ideas on chemical imbalance into believing that what they are doing with medications is best for the patient. It is necessary to believe if you're to be a convincing priest.
The best way to keep up the self-delusion is to not get to know your patients by spending as little time with them as possible and not really listening to them when you do.
Relating to a diagnosis once placed, rather than a person vastly simplifies the clinical process, which is good for meeting targets. The rest may be seen as too complicated and hopeless to deal with. Quietly you know the person is untreatable anyway, so all that matters is persuading them to take the medication to keep their symptoms under control, perhaps.
To me it seems obvious that people taking medications or recreational drugs which alter brain chemistry will have a chemical imbalance of some kind for a while if the body isn't able to rebalance what has been taken on board. Somehow the body needs to be supported back to natural balance if it's not too damaged.
Otherwise, people in a natural state will have a brain chemistry to match their wider state of being. When that state authentically improves, their complex chemistry will naturally shift with it and they become well.
Some people will be more sensitive than others to life difficulties and need to live less stressful lifestyles and we may need to help them with that.
That's the way people are.
What I have discussed here relates to people experiencing extreme spiritual crisis or psychosis.
Unfortunately, the range of human experiences covered by artificially created psychiatric diagnoses has expanded with each new DSM psychiatric manual release.
If it continues, eventually all human suffering will be medicalised.
Add to this the de-stigmatisation of medical diagnoses, where thanks to well-meaning efforts to avoid out-casting anyone, it becomes cool to 'have' read (be) 'anxious… disorder' - “This is who I am. I can't do anything about it… (except take my pills)”, and for me we have a recipe for disaster.
Rather than ordinary life suffering being embraced within the society, transforming the individuals it touches and giving meaning to the lives, what you end up with instead is a society with no role models or collective cultural understanding of how to process life when it offers up difficulty.
Any difficulty is simply identified as malfunction, as if we are machines. Something to be fixed as fast as possible, and of no value in our life. Hence you reach for the pills. There is no movement towards change or growth or increased resilience. The inconvenient symptom is hopefully eliminated and you carry on as if nothing has happened. Just perfect. But not human.
I am pretty sure what you will see as a long-term outcome will be either increased organic illness or extreme mental health problems, suicide or violence, no doubt blamed on the individual being very ill in the first place.
Why? Because the inner pain has not been addressed. And whatever you don't process consciously, becomes unconscious allowing it to fester and take on an independent function of its own working against you.
If wider society embraces the 'malfunctions' listed in these ever-enlarging psychiatric diagnostic manuals, identifying their suffering with them or even manifesting it in suitable form to meet them, then we will deprive humanity of ever more capacity to deal with the problem of being human.
Ultimately we may find ourselves in some science fiction type reality in which human emotion itself is considered pathological and we all take psychiatric medications to suppress being human.
Note: There may always be some people who are too damaged or too disturbed in the way they relate to others in society and so it will be natural for them to be restrained by the society. Whether this is done physically or chemically with pills is for the society to decide, just as it deals with criminal behaviour. This is the realm of medical and judicial mental health.
What I am writing on here concerns therapeutic mental health care which sadly for me has been lost right now to the ever-increasing scope of medical and judicial mental health.