Look at me, I'm Napoleon
One
evening when I was travelling on a bus back home from work, a
normal-looking woman in her early twenties got up from the back of the
bus and walking towards the front. She started loudly complaining that
a Chinese man had hoarded himself two seats. Yes, you there with
Chinese teeth. As the trip progressed, woman had sat down and her rants
had moved on to discuss angels and demons. She had a very interesting
way of speaking in which she stretched the end every word that ended
with an -s for two seconds. Other people in the bus were listening in,
rolling their eyes and trying not to laugh. I thought that it was
interesting how in that particular social context, the babbling
schizophrenic created social cohesion and sense of familiarity among
the other passengers who were total unknowns to each other.
In general, it's pretty undeniable that of all prejudices that exist, the prejudice against the mentally ill people is clearly the smartest. Just think of the enormous suffering that the mentally ill people cause to people who make the mistake of loving them and enable their lifestyle choices, and the destruction that they cause in organizations that give them positions of any kind of responsibility. It is no wonder that this prejudice comes from the gut and is so inborn, and why so many everyday social structures and conventions (starting from the basic hygiene and going from there to the normal interactions between people) are on purpose so complex that mentally ill people cannot follow them but unintentionally reveal themselves to other people. Society could not function otherwise.
Oh, I know, I know. Who are we to judge, since isn't every one of us a little bit crazy and wacky sometimes? I grant that the line between mental illness and health can be a bit vague sometimes, but I still kind of doubt that you could train and create a very successful software engineering, financial management or firefighting team by taking your pick in recruiting from patients in mental hospitals. Objective reality doesn't care about any high ideals of equalism especially in places where controlling it is complex. Every organization that has to compete against objective standards knows this and deeply understands how important it is to carefully select its members, despite all the lip service to the idea how everybody is equal.
One particularly disgusting subtype of mentally ill people are the hoarders, people who can never throw anything away, and in the worst case can't even give up their own feces. Such people sometimes hoard even animals until the smell of hundreds of dead and dying cats becomes too unbearable for the neighbourhood to no longer tolerate. The website "Squalor Survivors" provides a view to what these people are really like. Don't forget to look at the pictures. For an example of a more mainstream hoarder who can at least occasionally clean, see the hilarious web page "Crazy EBay Mom". It is especially hilarious that these people use a cutesy-poo nickname "messies" of themselves (compare this with the euphemisms employed by the fat acceptance movement), since for some reason, they all seem to be women. Inherent differences between sexes just keep rising up wherever you go.
These days it seems to be fashionable in some circles to believe that mental illnesses don't really exist. And this view is not just limited to Tom Cruise. For example, many leftists believe that the mentally ill people are just misunderstood, since they refuse to "fit in the cold capitalist-patriarchal society" but instead "march to their own beat". This naive view is constantly reinforced by Hollywood, which always depicts mentally ill people as slightly eccentric and goofy but lovable individuals who are cruelly oppressed by the mental hospital staff, because they just can't stand their superior warm individuality but want to force them to be cold impersonal machines and wage slaves like the rest of us.
On the other side, the Christian right wingers believe that there is nothing in mental illness that prayer wouldn't cure. In a small way, I am myself sympathetic with this view, just from an atheistic standpoint. This is especially the case with the messies and other similarly behaviourally challenged people who actively deny the existence of the objective reality and the demands that it imposes. Cold exposure to objective reality is a good and easy cure for many delusions (and not just those caused by mental illnesses) and should therefore be used wherever it is applicable. It doesn't work for people with a severe psychosis, of course, but for messies and other such borderline cases a little nudge towards the reality would probably be pretty helpful.
Then there's libertarians. They pretty much have to deny the possibility of existence of mental illnesses from the start, since their whole ideology would pretty much collapse if it turned out that the adult individual is not always fully in control in everything that they choose to do. To their credit, libertarians are at least consistent in this (this seems to be their major virtue in all issues): in their very party platform, the part "Government and Mental Health" explicitly states that they "oppose the involuntary commitment of any person to or involuntary treatment in a mental institution", and that they "favor an end to the acceptance of criminal defenses based on "insanity" or "diminished capacity" which absolve the guilty of their responsibility". Can't get much clearer than that! It's pretty funny that the libertarians don't get the same crap for their antipsychiatry views as Tom Cruise. In the excellent article "Why I am not a Libertarian" by Steve Dutch this issue is actually the very first point, explaining that
In general, it's pretty undeniable that of all prejudices that exist, the prejudice against the mentally ill people is clearly the smartest. Just think of the enormous suffering that the mentally ill people cause to people who make the mistake of loving them and enable their lifestyle choices, and the destruction that they cause in organizations that give them positions of any kind of responsibility. It is no wonder that this prejudice comes from the gut and is so inborn, and why so many everyday social structures and conventions (starting from the basic hygiene and going from there to the normal interactions between people) are on purpose so complex that mentally ill people cannot follow them but unintentionally reveal themselves to other people. Society could not function otherwise.
Oh, I know, I know. Who are we to judge, since isn't every one of us a little bit crazy and wacky sometimes? I grant that the line between mental illness and health can be a bit vague sometimes, but I still kind of doubt that you could train and create a very successful software engineering, financial management or firefighting team by taking your pick in recruiting from patients in mental hospitals. Objective reality doesn't care about any high ideals of equalism especially in places where controlling it is complex. Every organization that has to compete against objective standards knows this and deeply understands how important it is to carefully select its members, despite all the lip service to the idea how everybody is equal.
One particularly disgusting subtype of mentally ill people are the hoarders, people who can never throw anything away, and in the worst case can't even give up their own feces. Such people sometimes hoard even animals until the smell of hundreds of dead and dying cats becomes too unbearable for the neighbourhood to no longer tolerate. The website "Squalor Survivors" provides a view to what these people are really like. Don't forget to look at the pictures. For an example of a more mainstream hoarder who can at least occasionally clean, see the hilarious web page "Crazy EBay Mom". It is especially hilarious that these people use a cutesy-poo nickname "messies" of themselves (compare this with the euphemisms employed by the fat acceptance movement), since for some reason, they all seem to be women. Inherent differences between sexes just keep rising up wherever you go.
These days it seems to be fashionable in some circles to believe that mental illnesses don't really exist. And this view is not just limited to Tom Cruise. For example, many leftists believe that the mentally ill people are just misunderstood, since they refuse to "fit in the cold capitalist-patriarchal society" but instead "march to their own beat". This naive view is constantly reinforced by Hollywood, which always depicts mentally ill people as slightly eccentric and goofy but lovable individuals who are cruelly oppressed by the mental hospital staff, because they just can't stand their superior warm individuality but want to force them to be cold impersonal machines and wage slaves like the rest of us.
On the other side, the Christian right wingers believe that there is nothing in mental illness that prayer wouldn't cure. In a small way, I am myself sympathetic with this view, just from an atheistic standpoint. This is especially the case with the messies and other similarly behaviourally challenged people who actively deny the existence of the objective reality and the demands that it imposes. Cold exposure to objective reality is a good and easy cure for many delusions (and not just those caused by mental illnesses) and should therefore be used wherever it is applicable. It doesn't work for people with a severe psychosis, of course, but for messies and other such borderline cases a little nudge towards the reality would probably be pretty helpful.
Then there's libertarians. They pretty much have to deny the possibility of existence of mental illnesses from the start, since their whole ideology would pretty much collapse if it turned out that the adult individual is not always fully in control in everything that they choose to do. To their credit, libertarians are at least consistent in this (this seems to be their major virtue in all issues): in their very party platform, the part "Government and Mental Health" explicitly states that they "oppose the involuntary commitment of any person to or involuntary treatment in a mental institution", and that they "favor an end to the acceptance of criminal defenses based on "insanity" or "diminished capacity" which absolve the guilty of their responsibility". Can't get much clearer than that! It's pretty funny that the libertarians don't get the same crap for their antipsychiatry views as Tom Cruise. In the excellent article "Why I am not a Libertarian" by Steve Dutch this issue is actually the very first point, explaining that
If there is any area where the libertarian platform has been achieved, here it is. Beginning in the 1970's a coalition of liberals and conservatives virtually eliminated involuntary mental treatment. Liberals felt that involuntary treatment was a violation of the patients' civil rights, that patients were being warehoused in institutions, and that society needed to be "confronted" with mental illness by having the mentally ill in the midst of society. Conservatives had much purer motives: they simply wanted to save money. Most of the homeless persons we see sleeping in doorways, and every mentally ill person we see ranting on a street corner, is a product of de-institutionalization.
The texture that the mentally ill people who fall to homelessness add to the cityscape is really not that attractive. They contribute only to the destruction of cities when good people decide that they can no longer take it and flee to suburbs. Since I like cities, I wouldn't want to see this happen, at least in where I live.
For the most part, the "deinstitutionalization" movement that began in the 1960's was *not* motivated by liberal views that mental illness didn't really exist, nor was it motivated by conservative views that prayer could heal all. Its primary motivation was the sincere though ultimately incorrect belief that most forms of mental illness could be treated in non-institutional settings thanks to new psychiatric drugs and other forms of therapy. Mentally ill people were more likely to be helped if they were in group homes or other community settings rather than warehoused in huge "snake pit" mental hospitals. It also was supposed to save the taxpayers money - big mental hospitals aren't cheap to operate.
While it's easy to dismiss these beliefs as hopelessly naive, I'll point out that the failures - the de- or never-institutionalized mentally ill who populate homeless shelters or otherwise act up in public - may not account for anything close to a majority of the mentally ill, they just stand out because of their behavior or appearance. Modern treatments may really be helping many mentally ill people in non-institutional settings.
Peter
http://journals.aol.com/r32r38/Ironrailsironweights/
Posted by Anonymous | 11:57 AM