The Roots of Madness

 

NB Provincial Asylum before demolition.

I have been reading a history of the New Brunswick Provincial Mental Asylum.

A mental patient committed in 1868 kept a diary. In it, he classified fellow inmates as falling into three groups:

“Those that had become crazy about religion…others that had gone crazy about loss of property…and many that had become insane through the immoderate and excessive indulgences of their sensual passions.”

I find it interesting to see a lay classification not influenced by the modern DSM. I think these classifications are much more helpful than “bipolar,” or “schizophrenic,” or “depressed,” which only describe symptoms. It is as if modern psychiatry is trying to avoid looking at causes. But without knowing causes, you are unlikely to find a cure.

I nevertheless think this classification is off the mark on one thing. I doubt anyone actually goes crazy about religion. I can’t imagine the mechanism that would involve. That is the reaction of someone who starts by assuming religion is false—so that an excessive interest in it is automatically harmful or insane. Yes, many insane people seem deeply religious; just as many sick people enter hospitals. That is not evidence that the hospital makes them sick. I’d posit that religion is something many crazy people gravitate towards as a cure. Unfortunately, mental hospitals and psychiatry, then and now, will do everything they an to steer them away from it.

Which leaves two categories: those driven mad by injustice, and those driven mad by guilt. I think that is right, from reading the accounts of various inmates. 

But this can then be reduced to one cause for all mental illness: injustice.

We all have an inner gyroscope, a conscience, which demands justice. Kant argued persuasively that justice is a self-evident truth, a “categorical imperative.” Monotheists assume justice because the universe is governed by a just God. Each of us faces judgement at death, and at the end of time all will be judged. But even non-theists believe the cosmos is necessarily just: this is the doctrine of karma. The ancient Greeks held that the gods themselves were bound by Dike, the moral law.

The matter is obscured by the current misuse of the term “social justice.” 

And the matter is obscured by modern psychiatry because it refuses to recognize morality, justice. Which makes it useless in treating “mental illness.”

For the obvious cause of mental illness is that someone’s internal gyroscope is thrown off by the prolonged experience of some injustice—either done to them, or done by them to someone else. Something within us rebels, says this cannot be, this cannot be allowed to continue. If they cannot take action to correct it, they will and do experience great emotional turmoil and disorientation.

It all seems to me to make perfect sense.

Religion is then indeed the cure, as it is the assurance of justice eventually being done.

Narcissism Is Not Depression

 

Psychiatry generally—and a friend of mine—tend to classify narcissistic traits as “compensation” for low self-esteem, and so classify them as “depressed.” And the preferred therapy is to flatter them and boost their ego.

Einstein is supposed to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting to get different results. This is the same delusion: expecting the same thing to get opposite results.

Someone with low self-esteem is ashamed of their self. They think they are not up to par. The last thing they will want to do is to draw attention; people will see their inadequacy. These are the wallflowers; the ones who will not readily talk about themselves. They will indeed compensate for their low self-esteem, but they will compensate by working hard at whatever they are asked to do, to prove themselves. They will be scrupulously moral, and always want the structure of rules. Rules will reassure them they are doing all right.

Conversely, someone who wants to draw attention to themself is suffering from too much self-esteem, not too little self-esteem. They are proud of themselves. They are suffering from low “other-esteem,” in two senses. That is, in their perception, others are not giving them the admiration they deserve. And they never thought much of others in comparison to themselves. So they are annoyed with the world around them, which had better learn to shape up. The world is not measuring up to their standards.

They will dislike moral standards and rules. They might, after all, be used against them.

You will hear much complaining from those with high self-esteem. You will hear much less from those with low self-esteem. They will not want to show their head above the parapets, for fear of being shot at.

Someone with low self esteem, feeling disappointed, will blame themselves and want to harm or kill themselves. Someone with high self-esteem, feeling disappointed, will want to harm or kill everyone else.

Most narcissists will not go that far, but watch out. They naturally want to destroy anything around them that is good or true or beautiful, that they cannot claim as their own.

And this is where the school shooters and assassins come from.

The Subconscious

 

Freud shows us his imaginary phallus

I have lost two of my best friends to psychiatry. 

The first, whom I had known since first year university, through think and thin, unfriended me emphatically in insult and anger when I questioned psychotherapy. To be clear, these were the words which he apparently found unforgivable:

“You believe you have been helped by psychotherapy. I admit that this is possible. Some people were helped by joining Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, too. But overall… not such a good idea. This may be an extreme example, but it makes the point. And I am not sure it is extreme, actually.”

My being concerned with his welfare was not held in my favour.

Another friend, whom I had cherished and admired for a good thirty years, unfriended me and declared me immoral for scoffing at Maslow and existentialist psychiatry. My argument was that they claimed depression was caused by a sense of meaninglessness, and then affirmed that there was indeed no meaning in life. So going to an existentialist therapist could not be helpful.

I cannot imagine any religious person having a similar reaction over a similar criticism of religion. Certainly not cutting off such longstanding friendships. Among the religious, it is the reverse: they are eager to discuss the issue. They will even knock on the doors of strangers in hopes of doing so.

So I must conclude that the average person who believes in psychiatry holds to his faith more fervently than if it were a religion.

This does not speak well of psychiatry, given that it claims to be scientific. It is obviously something else. Not religion; more like a cult.

As a general principle, if one believes one has the better argument, one enjoys an argument. If one suspects one’s beliefs are untenable, one will refuse to discuss them. Especially if there is something personal at stake.

I think this “true believer” phenomenon is a symptom of the incoherence of materialism. It is our dominant world view: we believe in “science.” But scientific materialism fails to account for the larger portion of human experience. If one is not a total zombie, one discovers this. And then what? Then depression or mental illness occurs: one is out of step with what “everyone knows” is true. At best, one is alienated. At worst, one concludes one is incurably insane. One is experiencing impossible things, things that do not exist.

Psychiatry rushes in as the attempt to reconcile one’s experience with materialism. And partly as Inquisition, rooting out heresies by declaring insanity. 

People then cling in desperation to their chosen psychology, because from their perspective, if they doubt the therapist, they go mad. 

In objective terms, however, it is the psychiatry that is making and keeping them mad.

My first friend accepted that Freud, the founder of psychiatry, was mostly wrong. Of course; he has, after all, been disproven in detail in scientific terms. However, Freud must still be honoured as the man who discovered the subconscious. The subconscious explains everything.

But the subconscious, or Jung’s similar “unconscious,” is actually nonsensical. It is a self that is not ourself, a will that is our will yet not our will, a consciousness of which we are not conscious. 

These are all contradictions in terms.

The obvious truth is that these strange messages or intimations or urges or images are not coming from us. Indeed, they are not by definition. There is a spiritual world. And it is no more a part of us than is the physical world.

Scientology Was Right

 

Why We're All Going Crazy

 

Madness and Civilization

 

A recent article somewhere listed famous people who were depressive or bipolar (‘manic depressive”). 

They could have saved time and energy by simply noting “all famous writers and artists, all famous war leaders, and all famous philosophers.” No mystery, no news: Aristotle pointed this out over two thousand years ago. Problemats XXX:  “Why is it that all those men who have become extraordinary in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are obviously melancholic?”

I fear, however, that moderns grab the stick at the wrong end. The assumption seems to be that they did great stuff despite being mentally ill. “High functioning depressives.” Which is absurd, when the highest functioning of us all turn out to be depressives.

“Considered by many to be the greatest English writer in history, Charles Dickens, like many great writers, battled depression for his entire life. It was said that he went through long periods of insomnia whenever he started a new novel.

“To deal with his sleeplessness, Dickens would wander aimlessly around London, once covering 30 miles (48 km) in a single night. On the bright side, it’s been reported that his spirits would lift bit by bit as he made more and more progress on his stories.”

The real story is that Dickens would be driven to write a new novel by the chronic anxiety that caused his insomnia. The act of writing soothed the anxiety and depression.

I am reminded too of Socrates’s comment: “By all means marry. If you marry well, you will have a happy life. If you marry poorly, you will become a philosopher.”

An intolerable home situation, being abused, causes what we call depression.

Depression is principally a sense of loss of purpose and meaning to one’s life. This is the permanently damaging effect of abuse. It can be expressed as sadness or as anxiety, but these are just symptoms: the problem is a lack of meaning and direction. “What is the point of me?”

Art, or philosophy, is an effort to create meaning. One is reaching for the transcendental values, the things that bestow meaning. The artist is reaching for beauty; the philosopher is reaching for truth. And the lawgiver or military leader is reaching for justice, the moral good. With desperation, in such a case, and so with the greatest concentration and energy.

This is salvation for the mentally ill: to stop being "mentally ill" and become an artist, or a teacher, or a shaman.

But don’t many artists end up losing the battle, and committing suicide? Don’t many philosophers?

They do; because art or philosophy is the path, and only the initial path, and not the goal. The quest for meaning begins to yield solid results once it generates and confirms a religious conviction.

Artists who become religious do not commit suicide. Instead, the depression eases and recedes. Religion happens when art or religion achieve their goal.

How Many Souls Fit under a Microscope?

 

I think psychiatry and psychology do enormous harm. “Psyche” is soul. You cannot have a materialist psychology, that does not even believe in the existence of the soul. 

That blanket statement includes Jordan Peterson. While I generally agree with his politics, all he has managed to do in his thinking on psychology, in his rules for life and related videos, is to struggle his own way through a corn maze of miseducation to the unlocked front door of the stable. He is perhaps ready to acknowledge the existence of God. That puts him in the position of a baby about to be baptized; not a leader.

More regrettably, psychology suffuses our culture. We treat it like a religion; except that people seem to cling to their preferred psychological theories more fiercely and with less logic or evidence than anyone ever clings to a religion. Marking it as an idolatry, or, in psychological language, a delusion.

A sample text in a current textbook—in English, not Psychology--is all about the problem of bullying. And it explains, as psychology does, that people become bullies because they have themselves been bullied; or because they have been neglected by their parents, and do it to get attention.

One vital thing is immediately missing in this analysis: free will. As we see here, psychology reduces everyone to NPCs—except the psychologist. You stick in this pin, and you get that response.

The tremendous advantage of this viewpoint is that it eliminates right and wrong. With no moral choices, there is no morality. This is a great boon to those who want to do wrong, of course. Accordingly, psychology promotes evil.

That is actually the perfect philosophy to create bullies. It exonerates them. And it makes it unnecessary, indeed impossible, for them to change their behaviour, to improve themselves—because, after all, they have no free will. At the same time, the psychologists see themselves as gods, having agency over their patients when their patients do not—attracting bullies to the profession. And of course being logically inconsistent, and denying the essential moral principle, that of human equality: do unto others.

All this would be utterly damning even if it were true that bullies are tempted (albeit not compelled) to bully because they have themselves been bullied. But this too is improbable. Being bullied is painful. Experiencing pain, does the average person really want to impose it on someone else? If, for example, you put your hand on a hot stove, and get burned, are you motivated to encourage others to put their hands on hot stoves?

For most people, the reverse. Being bullied would convict you not to bully another. You would develop empathy and a fierce sense of justice. 

And this is just what you find in those who have been abused. Elon Musk is one example. He apparently bought Twitter to end the bullying.

Why do psychologists believe the opposite? 

First, because they simply ask bullies why they bully, and accept the answer. No bully is going to voluntarily take the blame. The obvious dodge is to insist they are actually the victim. 

And, being bullies themselves, the psychologists embrace the explanation.

As for bullying coming from a lack of attention from parents, this is nonsensical, because as a child, in order to get away with bullying, you generally do not want adult witnesses. So it is not what you are going to do if you want attention from your parents. It is the opposite of what you would do.

THis too probably comes from bullies refusing to take responsibility for their actions. So they will shift the blame to their parents: "I wouldn't have been able to do it if they had kept a closer eye on me."

The best approach to psychology is to assume that everything it says will be the opposite of the truth.

I think we all secretly know this. It is more or less the basic principle Freud propounded, when he claimed that everything our subconscious says to us means its opposite. He was actually revealing that tendency in himself.

Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Fairy Tales

Snow White

W.C. Fields used to say “you can’t cheat an honest man.” I always took this for an alibi: an attempt by the con artist to deflect blame. Indeed, a clear case of blaming the victim.

But I have recently heard the same thing from a more reliable source; I think Jordan Peterson. Con artists count on the mark consenting to the con. The mark wants to believe something; the con man just gives them what they want. Anyone with a commitment to reality would have seen through the con, and the mark probably does too. Drink this, and all your troubles will go away. Take this gamble, and you can win a million dollars. Rub this on your head, and your hair will grow back. They are buying a pleasant fantasy, if for a few hours or a few years.

The words of Dr. Martin Luther King also come to mind: that nobody can oppress you without your consent. That sounds harsh, but maybe it is true. Con black men into the notion that they are incapable of doing things for themselves, and need to be taken care of. That requires consent. George Orwell saw a large number of black men taking orders from a white overseer in colonial Africa, and wondered in print, “How are they being fooled? How long are these people going to accept this?” But it appeals to indolence. Don’t we all more or less wish we could be taken care of, like a child?

This is not to underestimate the great difficulty for any individual to buck an oppressive system. It never pays to be an “uppity nigger.” But the greatest resistance is likely to come from the fellow oppressed. A black man trying to get ahead is liable to be accused of “acting white.” He’s a sellout.

Or their fellows will turn kapo. It was his fellow black slaves who beat Uncle Tom to death in the famous novel, at the slavemaster’s bidding. (Yet, and tellingly, it is “Uncle Tom” who is remembered as a supposed sellout. Precisely because he wasn’t.)

The truth is, the black man we does right and works hard is making his neighbours look bad. They want their oppression. It absolves them from effort and from moral responsibility.

The same dynamic is at work among the aboriginals/”First Nations.”

Now apply this to mental illness. Because it is all most obvious, and most extreme, here. Early on, Freud realized that mental illness was the result of childhood abuse. However, he, and every analyst before or after who has realized this, found that the patients themselves would resist. They might not deny it, they might agree, they might even point it out, but they would stop coming to analysis. Not a paying proposition. Freud invented the “Oedipus complex” as a more marketable con. The patients did not want reality, and they did not want cure. Freud grew, on these grounds, to feel contempt for his patients. A con man must harden his heart.

Mental illness is in most cases the result of abuse by a narcissistic parent. But the critical form of abuse is not sexual, or physical, but moral. It is being conned into a false sense of reality and morality. The narcissist, by nature, sees themselves as their own god. By extension, they will set themselves up as their children’s god. They will con their children into embracing various falsehoods and immoralities, as con artists do. This is what gods are supposed to be able to do. This asserts their godhood. The children become accomplices, and idolaters.

If anyone tries to break out of this, they become the scapegoat of the others. Being accomplices in their own abuse, all in the family fear the cold light of the real. They cling to the fantasy—to the point of violence or self-harm if necessary.

Fairy tales are our best source on “mental illness”; they were created to advise children on life. Consider Snow White. She is the victim of abuse by a malicious parent. She escapes with her life. The dwarfs, her spiritual guides, warn her not to commune with “strangers.” Three times her abusive mother, “in disguise,” is able to abuse her again, by appealing to her vanity and her sense of being special. By conning her. This models the actions of an abusive parent; and the tendency of the abused child to keep returning to be abused again. Like a misguided moth, drawn back in to the initial fantasy, imagining the parent has “changed.”

Cinderella doesn’t immediately seem to be complicit in her abuse. But read carefully. When she goes to the prince’s ball, dressed to the nines, her sisters do not recognize her. Yet she does not reveal herself to them. Later, at home, she pretends she was not at the ball. Why? What is she hiding, and who is she protecting?

She is protecting the family fantasy, and her own abuse. She must remain Cinderwench, and they are the better daughters. She is more comfortable in this delusion, and so complicit in it. Only later does she gather the courage to reveal herself.

In Rapunzel, her state of abuse is symbolized by being locked in a tower. Yet she could actually leave at any time. The witch, and then the handsome prince, come and go by climbing her tresses. Why could she not escape herself, by cutting her hair, tying it to the windowsill, and climbing down? This is indeed just what the witch does later.

She is complicit in her own captivity, because to give it up she would have to give up the sesnse, cultivated by the witch, her narcissistic parent, that she is special.

Here we see both the cause of, and the cure for, “mental illness.” It must be a wholehearted embrace of objective truth and objective morality. This will require, as Alcoholics Anonymous rightly point out, an examination of conscience and a Frank confrontation with our own guilt.

Mental illness is ultimately a moral issue.

Psychiatry cannot help, because psychiatry rejects morality.

Rapunzel

MyTube on YouTube--The View from the Summit

More at

www.gerebernus.wordpress.com

What Dogs Dream

As if on cue, this meme just came over the transom into my inbox.

It illustrates the reality that psychologists are generally just making stuff up. All they seem to do is express their personal opinions based on their personal experience, and because they have the “Psychologist” label, people take it seriously.

There is no reason to believe that they have any special insight.

It should be obvious that they can have no idea of the content of a dog’s dream.

Social Science Professions

Don't buy it.

I remember reading somewhere the calculation that, up until about 1924, physicians did more harm than good. They killed George Washington by letting blood. President McKinley died not from being shot, but from the surgeons expanding the wound and fishing for the bullet with dirty fingers. Patent medicines relied heavily on things like cocaine and heroin.

Even today, estimates are that only 27% of what physicians do is justified by any science. The rest is mostly tricks of the trade to reassure the rubes—er, “placebo effect.”

On this slim foundation rests all the immense prestige now enjoyed by the medical profession; and extended, on their example, to so many other professions that claim to be “scientific.”

Most of the rest probably still do more harm than good. I submit that most of them—those based on “social science”—always will. Psychology and psychiatry, modern education, human resources, sociology, social work, modern journalism.

First, scientific methods do not work on human subjects, who are too unpredictable and too conscious of being studied. Studying people as objects is nonsensical, as well as intrinsically dehumanizing.

Second, any profession exists on the basis of a claim of special knowledge not available to the general public. It is therefore essential for such professions to gin up some body of knowledge that would come as a surprise to the uninitiated.

This means that they must from the start reject all conventional knowledge and common sense about their subject—all that we legitimately do know about it.

This makes them systematically harmful. We would be vastly better off if they were prohibited by law. They are actively doing harm, and demanding huge sums of money to do so.

We are seeing proof of this all the time, if we care to look. The Internet is daily demonstrating that the mainstream media, the professional journalists, are less accurate and less reliable than the amateurs, the "citizen journalists." All the studies show that homeschooled children do better than those professionally educated.

My hope for mankind is that these social science professions will soon become casualties of the Internet.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

An ad hoc organization of psychiatrists and psychologists has apparently been formed to call for Donald Trump to be impeached on psychiatric grounds.

They claim that their examination of transcripts from the Mueller report “showed that the president lacked the ability to make rational decisions."

He has shown that his sense of worth is entirely dependent on the admiration from others, such as at the rallies of Trump’s base. Without this external affirmation, Trump has revealed that he feels, deep down, like a loser, a failure, weak, dumb, fat, ugly, fake, “crooked”. We know this because this self-denigrating pictures of himself, Trump projects onto others, whom he transforms into enemies, and compensates consciously by creating a grandiose image of himself as unique, a stable genius, entitled to special treatment, and better at everything than everyone else. 

What makes Trump so dangerous is the brittleness of his sense of worth. Any slight or criticism is experienced as a humiliation and degradation. To cope with the resultant hollow and empty feeling, he reacts with what is referred to as narcissistic rage. He is unable to take responsibility for any error, mistake or failing. His default in that situation is to blame others and to attack the perceived source of his humiliation. These attacks of narcissistic rage can be brutal and destructive. A striking but not unusual example of his lack of caring and empathy is his policy of separating children from their parents at the Southern border. Additionally, he has made the reckless decision to allow an attack of our Kurdish allies, against all advice, shortly after announcement of the impeachment inquiry. These events are closely related and betray his extreme inability to tolerate any challenges against him.

This initiative is instructive in two ways. First, it shows how irresponsible and politicized our professional elites have become. And second, it shows how dangerous psychiatry can easily be to democracy and human rights.

Any competent psychiatrist must be aware that psychiatric diagnoses are pretty arbitrary and unreliable. If you must make a decision, you must, if somebody seems about to commit suicide or the like, but it is dishonest to claim you are authoritative. A recent study showed that half of a random selection of patients formerly diagnosed as schizophrenic were not, but instead suffered from anxiety. We actually have no way of knowing whether it was the first or the second of these diagnoses that was wrong, but either way, 50% were wrong. This is significant because these two diagnoses call for radically different treatments, and both the treatments used have dangerous side effects.

Imagine now applying such standards to making critical decisions of national importance, like impeaching a president.

And it is not just that psychiatrists often get the diagnoses wrong. We also do not know what the diagnoses mean. Psychiatric diagnoses are just lists of symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Lists change with each edition. Whether there is any one underlying psychiatric “condition” conforming to any one list is pure speculation. If so, whether that condition is an “illness” is also demonstrably dubious. Homosexuality used to be in there. Obviously, any sort of political dissent or non-conformity could be in there—and probably has been. Republicanism, for example, could simply be declared a mental illness.

And there is more. The basic standard on which modern psychiatry and psychology is based is “normalcy.” Any deviation from the “normal,” which is to say the average, is classed as “illness.”

Now it is self-evident that anyone who rises to become president of the US is not mentally normal. Anyone who does an unusually good job at anything is by this fact demonstrably abnormal. Accordingly, “psychohistorians” have been able, by applying the same techniques used here on Trump, to demonstrate that Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, for example, or Moses, or Muhammed, or Plato, or Michelangelo, or just about any prominent historical figure, were mentally ill. Of course they were; it goes with our definition.

Our leaders are therefore always going to be mentally ill, by present definition, and the charge of “mental illness” can therefore always be used against any political leader, or any person of prominence, that you do not like. Any intervention in politics by psychiatrists or psychologists is therefore harmful to the general welfare. If they do not know this, they are dangerously incompetent. If they do know this, they are dangerously corrupt.

Of course, a prominent leader can indeed go genuinely mad in the proper sense, of being delusional, hallucinating, of seeing things that are not there. If so, this is going to be readily apparent to those around him or her. Nobody needs a psychiatrist to know as much. And every system of government makes provision for this.

But the diagnosis given in the present case is not even superficially plausible. For example, this cabal writes that Trump’s “sense of worth is entirely dependent on the admiration from others.” That is true of politicians generally—always seeking to please the crowds. It is exactly how Trump differs from other politicians. He will confront and disagree with people directly, in public. He seems constitutionally not to need the approval of others to form and keep to his own opinions.

They write:

Trump has revealed that he feels, deep down, like a loser, a failure, weak, dumb, fat, ugly, fake, "crooked". We know this because this self-denigrating pictures of himself, Trump projects onto others.

This is schoolyard stuff: it is that old taunt “I know you are, but what am I?” Projection is a real thing—Jesus warns of it in the New Testament—but in order to level the charge, you must have evidence; otherwise it is you who are projecting. You must show that the people Trump calls losers, failures, weak, dumb, fat, ugly, fake, or crooked are not; and then that Trump is.

The fact that his taunts seem to resonate with the public is already evidence that Trump is not projecting. Yes, Pete Buttigieg really does look like Alfred E. Neuman. Yes, Marco Rubio really is short. If he were projecting, these cruel little japes would not be effective.

What? Me President?

You really would want a psychiatrist to understand how projection works.

They then claim that Trump cannot bear any humiliation, and reacts with “narcissistic rage.” Yet, as above, he actually seems impervious to being humiliated; nothing shames him. Narcissistic rage? If Trump ever loses his temper, it has never been caught on camera. His sharp responses are always delivered calmly and in a matter-of-fact way; as though he were speaking for everyone. He is also notably quick to reconcile, never holding grudges. Witness his treatment of Ted Cruz, or Kim Jong Un, or China’s president Xi. This seems to suggest that his sharp responses are purely a negotiating tactic, calculated, and not expressions of emotion at all. Rather than being emotionally out of control, as the psychiatrists and psychologists suggest, Trump seems to have a remarkable control over his own emotions.

Perhaps this itself should be disturbing; but it is the opposite of what disturbs them.

They are also ignorant, it seems, of current events. They write: “A striking but not unusual example of his lack of caring and empathy is his policy of separating children from their parents at the Southern border.”

They are apparently unaware that this policy was also followed by previous administrations. It is required by present legislation: you cannot legally confine a child because their parent did something wrong. Trump’s emotions do not enter into it.

Now consider this: we put such people in charge of deciding whether any of us is sane or capable of arranging our own affairs. In charge of deciding on and perhaps revoking our right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The likelihood of frequent abuse, on this evidence, is overwhelming.

No wonder, then, that public trust in the professional elites is on the decline.

So What Is Mental Illness?

Bodhidharma.

To begin with, it is not illness.

People generally seem not to realize that calling these things “illnesses” is a metaphor or an analogy. It depends on seeing our souls as equivalent to our bodies.

Yet they are fundamentally different. Our bodies can be seen like a machine that we operate.

But our minds are ourselves. We do not use the mind. We are the mind.

Because we use the body like a machine, it is easy to understand its functions. Each part has proper operations we can recognize. Illness is when some part is not performing its function.

But do we know what the proper function is of a soul? Of a mind? Of a self?

If we do, that is a religious question, not one psychiatry can answer.

Freud proposed that the proper function of a human being is to work and have sex. This reduces the human person itself to a machine. Is that really all there is? If it is, who wouldn’t be depressed?

If this is true, moreover, why listen to a psychiatrist? They are doing whatever they do only to get paid and get laid. This does not involve, notably, either telling the truth or doing anyone else any good. Should you trust them with your soul?

This sounds harsh, but this is what the logic boils down to.

Psychiatry and psychology in general have to rely on the goal of “being normal”; which is to say, being average. Being like everyone else. Again, not an inspiring goal. If mental health means simply conformity, it is a sinister thing: sinister to human freedom, and to human progress. Jews are not normal. Gandhi was not normal. Mandela was not normal. Einstein was not normal. Steve Jobs was not normal. Shakespeare was not normal.

It should be no surprise to us that people who have accomplished any great thing usually show the same symptoms the DSM lists in its descriptions of mental illness. This has become a commonplace recently, but it was already well understood by Plato and Aristotle.

Aristotle’s Problem XXX:

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of a melancholic temperament, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?

Psychiatry has no answer. Religion does. And I think it is possible here to speak for religions generally. What is the proper function of the human person? The proper function of the human soul is to seek truth and good. Many will add beauty.

On this definition, it is entirely possible that the symptoms psychiatry considers mental illness are actually signs of mental health.

Consider Buddhism.

Gautama reveals the Four Noble Truths in the deer park at Banares.

Buddhism’s first Noble Truth is that all existence is suffering, dukka, “ill-being.” That’s one symptom of depression: “depressed mood.”

Buddhism’s second Noble Truth is that suffering is caused by attachment. The third Noble Truth is that one ends suffering by ending all cravings, all attachments. That’s a second symptom of depression, according to the DSM: “Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities.”

The fourth Noble Truth is the eightfold path, which involves, essentially, withdrawing from the world and sitting still, meditating, practicing mindfulness: “A slowing down of thought and a reduction of physical movement.” That’s a third symptom of depression.

Through such meditation, one comes to the critical insight of anatman, anatta: the self is an illusion, “no self.” That’s a fourth symptom of depression: “depersonalization.” “Feelings of worthlessness.”

The ultimate goal is “nirvana”: “cessation,” like the snuffing out of a candle. This sounds a lot like a fifth DSM symptom, “recurrent thoughts of death, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan.” More literally, in Buddhism, suicide is considered an honourable choice, more or less to be encouraged.

That’s five symptoms, meaning, according to the DSM, that any sincere Buddhist is suffering from depression.

Some will no doubt take this as evidence that the religious are insane. Some similarly argue that Muhammed was an epileptic, and the apostles in the upper room were hallucinating Jesus’s resurrection. Mad, all mad. But really, who are you going to believe, the acknowledged best minds of the world’s entire population over at least the past two millennia, or the relatively distinguished panel who came up with the DSM a few years ago?

It seems most reasonable on the evidence to posit that, suffering as they unquestionably are, the average “mentally ill” person is actually functioning better as a human being than the average person.

Religion does, it is true, recognize such a thing as spiritual or mental sickness. There are two forms: error, and sin. The first falls short of the truth; the second falls short of the good.

But religion is where these answers can be found.

Send in the Clowns

I had a little epiphany recently while rummaging through old files.

I found there a weathered note from an old friend from grad school, dating to back in the 1980s. She was expressing her delight that I had tried to get back in touch; but at the same time warning me that she was “fragile,” and urging that we not discuss either politics or religion.

I think I may have uncovered here a very early example of the attitude of censorship that has now overtaken the left. This young woman was a canary in the mine—in the academy from which this has all sprung.

At the time, I recall, I found it odd, that she wanted to avoid all talk of religion. Since our graduate field had been religion. And we were of the same religion.

I took it then as expressing some very personal problem; and my friend did indeed seem “fragile,” as she said, always complaining of a bad back, and of a history of depression.

Because it is being expressed through political action, people tend to see the growing intolerance on the left as political. Jordan Peterson calls it “cultural Marxism.”

But perhaps my friend’s case indicates that the first cause is not political, but psychological and spiritual. Marx just offers a convenient political analogue.

And it may be a bit callous to scoff at such fragile people as “snowflakes.” They may be responding to some real spiritual anguish with their talk of “triggers.”

Better perhaps to blame not Marx, but Freud. What we are seeing now may be less cultural Marxism than political Freudianism.

Freud’s thesis, in an A-cup, was that mental illness was caused by repressing natural urges. “Civilization and its discontents” were the problem. Accordingly, if someone like my friend went to a psychiatrist or psychologist with emotional problems, perhaps originally caused by the torment of an aching back, the advice they would be given would be to throw off their “hangups” about conventional morality and start thinking seriously about having sex.

My friend was into that.

And rather than helping, this may well have led sufferers, especially those who like my friend had religious sentiments, into a downward spiral. Increasingly tormented by the voice of conscience, it came to the point that they, like she, could no longer bear any mention of religion.

It all makes you wonder.

But then, why politics too? She could not tolerate politics. And why has this mental illness now spread from individuals like my friend to the political left in general, seemingly a majority or almost a majority of the population?

Carl Rogers.

That may be thanks to Carl Rogers. Rogers was the dominant voice in American psychiatry during the 1960s. He followed Freud, Jung, and the rest of the field in holding that the solution to mental illness was to throw off the shackles of conventional morality and the demands of being civilized and satisfy your natural passions. But he expanded the possible clientele, arguing that we are all suffering from these oppressive influences: we would all be healthier and happier if we adopted psychiatry as our religion and reached our full “human potential,” by which he meant, getting whatever we wanted. This was the meaning of life: “Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced.”

Surely this, perhaps best immortalized by Disney’s Baloo the Bear, was the essential doctrine of the Sixties. “Let it all hang out.” One was supposed to be ashamed only of having “hangups,” meaning moral scruples. The term itself comes from Kerouac; but Kerouac meant something very different. He meant simply things that hold our attention, as a hobby might. Nothing negative about it.

And note the Sixties slogan, “if it feels good, do it.” “Follow your bliss.” “Do your own thing.” “Don’t be judgmental.”

The premise, then, was that the natural man, man in the state of nature, our natural urges, were good; the restraints placed on them by morality, culture, and civilization, were bad. Morality was bad. Civilization was bad. We had to get “back to nature,” “back to the garden,” “back to the land.” Witness too the whole ecology thing.

This is awful advice, if conventional morality and civilization happen to be anything other than ignorant prejudice. And that is not a possible hypothesis. If ignorant prejudice, given original blessedness, where did they come from? If all our natural instincts are right and good how did sin and error, these hurtful demands of civilization, ever come into the world? It could not have come from humans. It must have been some outside agency, then: alien mind control?

Then too, if all preceding generations got it wrong, and we in the Sixties were the first to realize this, we must believe that all our ancestors were idiots.

Logically not credible, then; but fatally appealing. Natural urges are naturally seductive.

But because it was logical nonsense, this fact was bound to become obvious over time. The wheels were going to come off this handcart. What then?

Folks in the Sixties and in the human potential movement were not generally reckless enough to believe that you could always ignore morality in favour of satisfying your natural urges. Manson family aside, most hippies stopped short of murder. Or theft, despite feints like Abby Hoffman’s “Steal This Book,” and talk of “liberating” whatever you wanted. Theft might be good, but unlike most sex, there was the practical risk of being arrested.

This is where Marxism comes in. One could through it at least be working towards a solution: Marx’s communist cloud cuckoo land, in which everyone could just have whatever they wanted.

In the meantime, more immediately, the human potential revolution concentrated on the sexual urges. Sexual sins, we were assured, were “crimes with no victims.” So that any such laws or prohibitions were simply oppressive, and easily abolished.

It was actually obvious form the start that this was not so: abortion. It was never that there were no victims; it was that the victims were defenseless.

And over time, it has become apparent that there are lots more victims too; our ancestors were indeed not just prejudiced self-hating fools. The sexual revolution has been devastating for family life, which means devastating for children. But again, children are voiceless and vulnerable members of society.

Less obviously, it has been devastating for everyone else.

Gradually, the toll has mounted. But that is only the half of it. At the same time, the voice of conscience has become louder and louder, making those who bought in to the doctrine increasingly emotionally “fragile,” terrified of their own shadows, terrified of certain matters being raised.

As we now see all around us.

In Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, chronicling the beginnings of the hippie movement in Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their van trip across America to meet Timothy Leary, he already reports the case of a female passenger who goes suddenly psychotic over thoughts of a child she had abandoned or aborted as a requirement of their free-love lifestyle. She is herself abandoned at the next stop. The van rolls on. 

Kesey's van.

Along with the need for censorship has grown the need to find scapegoats. The original and classic move in this regard was feminism: blame everything bad on men. Women’s urges were still all good: but men were all depraved and their urges immoral. Then whites have become scapegoats, for the obvious reason that they really did play a disproportionate role in forming our “oppressive” culture and civilization. So they are a fifth column that must be suppressed or eliminated. And, of course, the Catholic Church, the right, any memorials to shared history, anyone who will not openly endorse this or that given sexual perversion, anyone who retains the conventional faith in right and wrong.

Some on the right have taken recently to calling this all “clown world.” That is to give it too much credit. It is pathological and objectively evil. Perhaps the beginning of a return to civilizational health is to say so.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Most people are insane.

As we await the results of the British EU election, I am enjoying, sometimes in a perverse way, watching Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad’s YouTube videos of himself campaigning. He engages interested passersby in an exchange of views.

Sargon has been branded by both the left and the Mainstream Media—if there is a distinction here—as “far right.” Yet his views seem, down the line, classically liberal. By any traditional measure, up until perhaps the last dozen years or less, he is on the moderate left. He is also a master of the admirable English tradition of polite political discourse with those with whom you disagree. I would never have his patience.

So why is he frequently attacked with milkshakes? More frequently, in fact, than the less moderate-mannered Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage?

One guy he interviewed, initially intensely hostile, turned out to have views very similar to Sargon’s on every issue he heatedly raised. Right up until Sargon brought up the matter of Pakistani Muslim “grooming gangs” in the north of Britain. At which point the interviewee started ranting incoherently, would not let Sargon state his position, and stormed off. Another bystander, apparently a member of the town council, then came up and told Sargon he was not welcome in their town.

I'd like to link to the video, but, oddly, it seems to have been removed from YouTube. That may itself be telling.

Sargon’s point was that these particular Pakistani Muslims and their brand of Islam were intolerant and racist. The interviewees were apparently adamant that to call anyone who was not “white” racist was racist. An obvious logical contradiction, and an obviously racist attitude.

Sargon’s interlocutors abruptly ceased being rational. It was a plainly hysterical reaction. It was not simply that the two people could not follow Sargon’s argument, either; it was not stupidity. That could not account for refusing to hear it, or for the sudden rage. It was “denial,” in psycho lingo: knowing their own view was wrong, and refusing to accept this.

One of the great benefits of religion is that it teaches that most people are insane. That insight is most helpful in such cases.

This may sound odd. But it is fairly obviously so. Lots of people are now acting just like this guy in the video. It may well be a majority of the public, in the UK or in Canada. Many or most people are denying obvious realities on a variety of topics: not just on immigration, but on feminism, where Sargon is also attacked and not listened to, or on the half-dozen other subjects everyone knows will cause someone to become agitated or even violent if brought up in public: abortion, transsexualism, Donald Trump, and so forth.

Whenever this happens, this fairly obviously happens because one side knows they are wrong, and is consciously in denial. Inevitably, and self-evidently, this is the side that wants to shut talk down and resort to force.

A critical problem with modern psychology and psychology is that, not having any valid philosophical foundation, it denies this basic truth. It defines “sanity” as “thinking the same way most people think.” This is obviously wrong: it is the ad populum fallacy. Einstein thought very differently from his peers about relativity. By this logic, then, he was simply insane.

Religion in general, and Christianity and Buddhism in particular, teaches instead that most people are likely to be fundamentally wrong in their perceptions or assertions. And they explain why: guilty conscience; Buddhism would say “desire.”

Raising a second critical problem with modern psychiatry and psychology: that it ignores morals. A dehumanizing omission. As here, the denial and the hysteria seems always based on some implicit moral issue. Many if not most people are irrational on subjects where their conscience is troubled. Abortion is the obvious example. But it is people who are themselves clearly racist who seem most eager to accuse others of racism: it is a form of instinctive scapegoating. Feminism, too, is arguably best explained as a mask over a tacit awareness of female privilege, and guilt as a result; women have traditionally been placed on a pedestal, at least in the West. They did not have to go out and get killed in the World Wars, Korea, or Vietnam. They were exempt from the draft.

The New Testament has the straight goods:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

Jesus further suggests that this will commonly be the majority.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Buddhism’s claims on this are even more extreme.

If it is indeed the majority, the influence of modern psychiatry and psychology actually appears as pernicious. The appeal ad populum is an easy way to justify immorality, and so to sustain one’s personal madness.

This seems, in turn, the fatal error of modern mainstream Christianity: it has come to simply hold that whatever the majority of the congregation wants to assert as true and moral, is true and moral. This assumption is actually incompatible with religion; man does not create God. So that anyone who is religious will fall away.

Our New Religion and Its Failure

Over the last couple of years or so, I have been working on two books on the topic of depression and anxiety. Working titles: The Truth about Dragons and The Book of Consolation.

In the course of research and writing, I have sadly apparently lost two of my oldest and most valued friends.

The first will not respond to my emails since I disagreed with him over Freud. I do not clearly recall what the exact point of disagreement was; I disagree with Freud on almost everything. I believe it was on Freudianism calling itself “depth psychology.” Since it saw everything psychic/spiritual as a direct reflection of physical things, I think I argued that it actually greatly lacked depth in comparison to a religious approach.

My second friend to shun me actually accused me of moral mendacity for dissenting from Abraham Maslow’s existential psychiatry. Since then he will not respond to emails. My point was that, in saying concurrently that the key to mental health was finding a meaning in your life, and that there is no meaning in human existence, Maslow had no place to lead a patient but permanent despair. A meaning you just make up is meaningless. This is why existentialism has mostly evaporated as a philosophy.

That they would end a friendship of many years over such matters made me wonder. What is going on here?

And here is what I think is going on. Modern psychiatry or psychology is a religion. To them, I had become a heretic. People now rely on their psychologies as their world views, and so feel deeply disturbed if they are challenged. The entire universe is at stake.

Psychology/psychiatry generally pretends to be scientific, but that was never true. Broadly speaking, there has never been any decent scientific evidence for any of the psychiatries or psychologies we have seen come and go over the last century or so. They are visibly held to for reasons other than evidence or experiment. Nor do they work as philosophies: their approach is automatically ad hominem. Anyone who dissents from them is, in effect, declared insane. So they are adhered to neither for logic nor evidence, and cannot be challenged on either ground.

So the proper question is, how well do they work as religions; as comprehensive world views?

And the immediate evidence is, not well. Since we have generally shifted, as a society, away from traditional religious views and towards the psychiatries as substitutes, the incidence of mental illness has, by most accounts, skyrocketed. Suicide is also up. An international survey undertaken by the WHO suggests that rates of recovery for all kinds of “mental illness” are significantly better in the “underdeveloped” world—where folks are more apt to rely on religion rather than a pricey therapist. Other studies show therapists produce a worse or a no better cure rate than a layperson.

Some deficiencies of psychiatry or psychology are obvious. To begin with, they deny the reality of the psyche. Where do you go from there? They deny moral considerations, and morality is, according to long philosophical and religious tradition, if it is not self-evident, a key concern of human existence. They broadly avoid any consideration of a God, which is to say, of any inherent meaning in the universe.

It is a meagre, despairing worldview.

But it is our real religion nowadays, and not our nominal religions anymore.

In writing the first book, I contacted the Toronto Catholic archdiocese to see if I could get a nihil obstat—an official statement by the bishop that there was nothing in the book that ran counter to Catholic doctrine. They wrote back offering to have it looked over by a priest who was also a psychiatrist, to ensure that it was sound in psychiatric terms. When I specified that it was Catholic doctrine with which I was concerned, they said they could not help me. Nobody there was interested.

The New Testament understanding of mental illness is plainly that it is generally a matter of demonic possession. Casting out demons was the precise mission on which Jesus first sent out the apostles, and much historic evidence suggests that it is its legendary ability to cure mental illness that was the primary cause of Christianity’s spread through Europe, later through the Americas, and even today through Africa.

Yet the current protocol for exorcism in the Catholic Church is clear and firm that no exorcism may be contemplated until and unless all “natural,” that is, psychiatric, explanations have been ruled out, by the patient displaying some impossible supernatural knowledge. By, for example, suddenly being fluent in a foreign language, or showing knowledge of some secret matter. Or at least showing a violent aversion to religious objects.

This makes no sense in theological terms. Catholic doctrine holds that demons are real beings. Yet why would a real demon be so stupid as to do something to prove he is there? In order to get exorcised?

In other words, in case of doubt, faith is assigned to psychiatry and psychology, not to Catholicism. Even by the Catholic Church.

This is perhaps one reason for the rapid growth of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements within Christianity. They are the branch that still takes it all most seriously. And that performs exorcisms and healings.

Mighty Bad Advice

The message quoted in full below appeared in my mailbox from a place called “The Mighty.” At first it seemed so mad I did not know whether it was worth trying to parse it: where do you start?

But it shows how messed up our current understanding of psychology is, and why it is not likely to be helpful to those experiencing any of the various forms of spiritual anguish we call “mental illness.”

Here is is, verbatum. This is not a parody:

This is for the men who are struggling in silence. 

Hey Mighties, 

There’s something rotten at the heart of masculinity today, and it’s been festering for generations. It’s in the way we speak to our children, how they then speak to their friends on the playground, and how they go on to speak to their friends in workplaces and bars and gyms. They’ll unknowingly teach their own children, someday, to live like this. That is unless we stop it now. We can change, you and I. We need to change, because the effects it has on young male-identifying people living with mental illness are profound. 

That’s why I’m sending this email, because I want you to know, no matter how you identify, that it’s OK for men to be open with their emotions. It’s OK for men to cry and to struggle with a mental illness, and it does not for a single second make them weak or any less than a man. 

And yet, our culture tells men to “man up” if they show what is perceived as weakness. Our culture tells young boys to “act like a man,” and that “boys don’t cry,” so you’re forced to bottle up your feelings and bury them deep where nobody will ever find them. That is until, one day, the pressure mounts. Studies show the effect this has; it’s part of the reason why men die by suicide 3.5 times more than women. 

So, if you’re reading this, identify as male and struggle with your mental health, it’s going to be OK. You’re not weak for feeling this way. Our biology as a species is fundamentally the same, no matter what gender you were assigned at birth. The only thing telling you that men are strong and women are weak is an outdated system of belief that kept women oppressed for generations. 

Likewise, if you don’t identify as male but have men in your life who could do with a reminder, I urge you to pass this on to them. 

We need to stand up as a society and say together in one voice that we’ve had enough. Your gender does not govern your emotions or how you deal with the challenges in your life. True strength lies in reaching out for help, whether that’s to a loved one, a mental health professional, your doctor or someone on a crisis line. It’s OK to be scared. I was scared too when I first did it. Ultimately, though, it’s made things a whole lot better. 

Ready to take the leap, #MightyMen?

--and there is a link right below to an article on “toxic masculinity.”

Me again. Now, it is pretty clear that a if not the fundamental element of depression is poor self-image, low self-esteem. So how does this message address the issue?

By telling the male reader right out of the box that he is “rotten at the heart.” His identity as a man is “festering.” It is “toxic.” Men have “kept women oppressed for generations.”

And, if you are a man, that is all your own darned fault. And so is your depression. It is a question of “male-identifying.” Clearly, had you been a better person, you would have identified as female. You need to change. Men in general could do with a reminder.

And how are you supposed to change? Cry. Submit utterly to the depression. Stop trying to get better. Become more dependent. Accept the concept that you must become and remain subservient to others.

Yeah, that ought to help.

A second issue that seems to be at the core of depression is a loss of a sense of meaning or direction in life. You accordingly crave and need clear answers and clear direction.

Instead, this advice pushes you into a classic double bind. You are supposed to unleash your emotions and cry a lot--just the opposite of what the culture and its norms traditionally tell you is right and moral. Now you have a new and difficult mental conflict. Which way to turn? Who should you believe? Either way, you are wrong.

And anything left that you thought you knew to be true? You must doubt them all. All traditional assumptions are to be doubted, and discarded as the initial assumption. Everything the culture tells you is wrong. It is just “outdated systems of belief.” Even something as fundamental and scientifically incontrovertible as there being a difference between men and women? No, reject the thought, everything must be or become ambiguous. Strength is weakness. Weakness is being “mighty.”

If you were deliberately trying to make someone's mental turmoil worse, you could not do a better job than this. And yet this is what is fed to people who are suffering most grievously. It is hard not to believe it is malicious.

The plain and bitter truth, which should become clear from reading this passage, is that those experiencing “mental illness” are far saner than those claiming to know how to cure “mental illness.” The cure is the disease, and the disease has become the cure.

There Is a Right and Wrong

Somebody visited W.C. Fields in hospital, on his deathbed, and found him reading the Bible. They expressed surprise.

“Just looking for loopholes,” he explained.

And that is the story of much of human life, and much of human history. Everyone wants to be good, but without that difficult bit about doing good. Civilization itself may be seen as the struggle against that tendency, and civilizations have been successful to the extent that they have pulled it off: the ability to accept the difference between good and evil, and to act accordingly. Societies of any kind work to the exact extent that everyone follows the Golden Rule, to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The temptation is always very strong to simply deny that there is good and evil—that lets you completely off the hook. That is why you hear people using terms like “inappropriate” or “negative” for human deeds instead of “wrong” or “evil.” Modern psychiatry and psychology is founded on the premise. You read—as I just have—references to the “myth of pure evil,” claiming that most people who commit terrible acts, even mass murder, do so in the sincere conviction that they’re on the side of the angels. Perhaps they simply “lack empathy” because their brains are wired differently.

“I wanted to understand how ordinary people got caught up in doing these things,” the present author says. “I came to realize that those who come to do evil don’t view it as evil. Evil is in the mind of the perceiver. Most of the Nazis thought they were doing noble work.”

No. This reduces the human person to an automaton, without free will.

If there really were no such thing as evil, if it really were in the mind of the perceiver, all punishments for crime would be no more than the persecution of minority opinions. It would mean we had no right to judge the Nazis at Nuremberg, or to punish anyone at the International Court of Justice for personal peccadillos like mass murder. It never really mattered whether the Nazis won, or we did. Everyone died for nothing.

There is no way Himmler, for example, had a sincere conviction that he was on the side of the angels. Nor those below him. That was why they invented the gas chambers. They found it too troubling to see their victims shot. Better to do it all out of sight, so they could pretend to themselves it was not happening.

Everyone has a conscience. Demonstrably, when a narcissist does something morally wrong, he or she knows perfectly well they are doing something morally wrong. Because they will invariably lie about it. If they did not think it was wrong, they would not. And they have plenty of empathy as well: if they did not have a well-tuned sense of how others experience things, of how others feel, they would not be able to manipulate them so expertly, which they are famous for. Their “emotional intelligence” is through the roof.

Narcissism is like alcoholism. The alcoholic knows perfectly well that taking that next drink is bad for him, and for those around him. He does not lack a conscience. He just wants it; nothing else matters as much. Same with a narcissist.

This is also why not everyone who is raised to have maximum self-esteem, who is spoiled, will end up a narcissist. Everyone has a conscience, and in the end knows right from wrong in their heart. Becoming a narcissist requires a conscious moral choice.

The essential task for either the narcissist is to get back in touch with that natural rheostat or internal gyroscope, with conscience and with reality.

Psychology in general, sadly, takes exactly that solution, and puts it out of reach. By saying there is no reality, no morality, no right or wrong, and no free will. Trapping narcissists in their narcissism, and melancholics in their despair.

A Storm in Port

A case of hysteria is shown to medical students.

A “progressive Christian” article at Patheos opines on “What the Church Needs to Know about Mental Health.”

A few choice quotes from the article and my responses:

“As medical research continues and our knowledge expands, we are beginning to understand a little more of how our minds work.”

Exactly wrong. Empirical science, while useful for our understanding of the physical world, is of little or no value in understanding non-empirical things like the mind. It is like trying to hammer in a nail with a virtual spaghetti fork, or trying to calculate the number of translucent angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

The advent of “scientism,” science as a comprehensive cosmology and as a substitute for religion, has resulted in us understanding spiritual things less and less. Which means pretty precisely “how our minds work.”

It has probably in large portion caused the current growing epidemic of “mental illness.”

“Until surprisingly recently these same disorders would have resulted in institutionalisation”

Deinstitutionalisation is far worse than institutionalisation. It is far better to keep the mentally ill safe and warm in an asylum however seedy, or better, a well-lit sanatorium in some rural setting, with time and a lack of distractions to work out their problems, than to throw them out to freeze and starve to death on the pavements. This is a large part of the current epidemic of “homelessness”: the emptying out of the mental hospitals. It was and is really a cost-cutting measure by governments, masked as a humane move, and it is appallingly cruel.

“Medical science has identified a wide variety of mental disorders caused by a combination of genetic, biological, physiological and environmental factors, that cause people a great deal of suffering. As with other medical conditions these vary in severity and cause a range of different symptoms.”

There is almost no scientific support for the idea that mental disorders are genetic, biological, or physiological. This is a popular concept largely because it makes them seem more physical, and so more “scientific,” in the scientistic sense of the term. Scientism thinks only physical things are real. And it avoids moral issues. Lots of people prefer to avoid moral issues, usually for the obvious reason that they are aware of behaving immorally.

Literally speaking, medical science has never identified a single mental disorder, unless you count truly physiological conditions like epilepsy. All it has is lists of symptoms—that is what the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) is, and it is from this that psychiatrists work. Whether these relate to any underlying disease is purely hypothetical. Let alone whether a symptom relates to one disease or several or many happening to share the same symptoms, whether this is really a symptom of a disease or some spontaneous treatment for the disease, and what the mechanisms might be that cause the symptoms. Medical science does not know.

“The church has done a lot of damage to people by failing to recognise that mental health is a real thing, and that it needs to be taken as seriously as physical health.”

The church has always, until it yielded this turf to scientism, known what spiritual affliction (i.e., mental illness) was, and certainly understood it as a real thing. It is medicine that does not know, and that often tends not to believe that the mind (i.e., soul) and its concerns are real.

“Once identified, most mental health problems are entirely treatable.”

This is a fudge. “Treatable,” yes, in the sense that, say, a fever is treatable by aspirin, but virtually all of them are now incurable. It used to be largely taken for granted that those who suffered a spiritual affliction could in principle and often would get well. That is how, for example, confession works. And being “born again.”

Besides not themselves curing the condition, there is the issue that simply taking pills as painkillers can distract the patient from working through the problem, helping make it permanent. And then too, is drug addiction such a good thing?

I do not advocate avoiding “psychiatric medications.” Any port in a storm. But we can surely do better, and used to do better.

What Makes a Narcissist?

Narcissus, Cave, 1890.

What makes a narcissist?

The official answer is that nobody knows. Mayo Clinic’s web site says “It’s not known what causes narcissistic personality disorder.” WebMD says “The exact cause is not known, but there are several theories.”

WebMD cites two: narcissism is caused by “parents who put their children on a pedestal,” and “children who are ignored or abused.”

There is an obvious contradiction here: if we accept both theories, that would mean that opposite actions can produce the same result. Moreover, we have seen, and it has been generally confirmed by studies, that children who are ignored or abused tend to develop depression in later life. This is an opposite condition, involving low, not high, self-esteem. So we are also positing here that the same action can produce opposite results.

The obvious conclusion is that option two is false: narcissism is not caused by childhood neglect or abuse.

Our best source for understanding the psyche is literature and legend. So the best place to look for clarity is the original Greek story of Narcissus.

According to the story, Narcissus was an unusually handsome youth, who fell in love with his reflection in a pool—an image of complete self-absorption.

However, in the story, Narcissus’s narcissism was not cased by seeing his reflection in the pool, and it was not caused, directly, by his good looks. He was self-centred and callous before this. “Many a youth, and many a damsel sought to gain his love;” writes Ovid, “but such his mood and spirit and his pride, none gained his favour.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3. 339 – 509, trans. Brookes More). This cannot have been because of his own opinion of his looks; he had not yet seen his reflection. Had he, the effect of seeing it later could not have been so mesmerizing. Falling in love with his reflection was divine punishment for his lack of empathy in spurning the nymph Echo—not its cause.

He was basing his essential narcissism, then, on the adulation he was receiving from others. This would seem to confirm excessive praise in youth or childhood as the cause of narcissism.

This is again confirmed by the tale of Tantalus, another narcissistic figure, and an archetypal child abuser. He was, according to legend, first especially favoured by the gods; from this he developed insatiable expectations.

It is important to note that neither legend, Narcissus or Tantalus, attributes narcissism directly to upbringing or to the actions of others. In both cases, although such circumstances are a temptation, the narcissism is shown as a moral choice, and a moral fault, deserving of punishment, not something that has been done by others to the narcissist.

This being so, it is possible that an abusive or neglected childhood could lead at times to narcissism, and a pampered, spoiled childhood might not. This may be one reason the roots of narcissism are mysterious for psychiatry. It is predisposed to see things as diseases, not choices, and it rules out ethical considerations a priori.

Where does the idea that narcissism comes from childhood abuse or neglect come from?

Pretty plainly, it comes from the clinical testimony of narcissists.

Beginning with Alice Miller. We have seen that she was herself a narcissistic child abuser, and we have seen that she attributes narcissism—which she lumps in with depression—to parents who did not love unconditionally, but instead set standards for the child, in order to “earn” their love.

In a way, this rings true, and one can see how it works. A young child is raised being told they are absolutely wonderful. But sooner or later, in the natural course of things, the outside world will require them to prove themselves. They will, for example, be marked at school. Sooner or later, they will not get the top mark in some subject. Sooner or later, they will fail at something. Sooner rather than later, for the narcissist: being innately wonderful, they are less likely to have made that initial effort. Sooner or later, their parents will need to direct some of their attention elsewhere—to a new child, to their own needs, to making a living.

Because their expectations are infinite, the narcissist will find this traumatic. At this point, they have a choice. They can revise their distorted opinion of themselves, buckle down to improving, and grow up. Or they can decide they have been tricked or betrayed—by their parents, by the system, by any others who have done better than they. The latter is the easy, lazy option. A narcissist is born.

The same equation works of the narcissist is confronted by some moral choice: should he grab the candy from the store, say, or waive his desires until he has the pocket money to buy it. Any kid might give in to such a temptation; a spoiled kid more than another. Then conscience begins to trouble the narcissist. He can either admit to himself his fault, and amend, or he can deny, blame the Jews or the capitalist system or the Catholic Church and their nagging morality, and double down.

Then it is in the nature of a narcissist, once confirmed in their path, that they will never again accept personal responsibility. If they are being told they are mentally ill, or for that matter have done wrong, they will then as a matter of course blame their children. Hence the tendency to abuse them. But failing that, the next obvious line of defense is to blame their own parents. Confronted by an analyst, it is the natural line to take.

A friend of mine had a father who drank excessively. He was distant from his children, by their report; he ignored them. At one point, oppressed by his own unspecified problems, he had an analyst come in on house visits. After several sessions, the psychiatrist assembled the family in the living room and announced to the children, “the problem here is that none of you love your father enough.”

The analyst was being manipulated by a narcissist. Narcissists are good at that.