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Narcissism: Its Cause and Its Cure

Narcissism: Its Cause and Its Cure  -- the podcast.

Narcissism: Its Cause and Its Cure

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Confront the Beast

In the period 1880-1920, the art of book illustration had what is generally agreed to be its "Golden Age." Incredibly talented artsts like Arthur Rackham devoted their skills mostly to depicting legendary and mythical subjects.

For my money, this is what art should be all about: guiding us, as with an icon, to imagine more vividly. If I am right, the very act of doing so is healing for those who suffer either depression or anxiety. Confront the beast!

Suitable for meditation, than: Rackham dragons.

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.

The Truth about Dragons

St. George in unstained glass.

A friend on Facebook recently posted an article on “Ten Natural Treatments for Depression.” As with most such articles, it is wrong and includes bad advice.

Beginning with the first paragraph:

“Depression is a mental health disorder resulting from chemical imbalances of the brain. It is not a personal defect, failure, or weakness. Rather, it is a medical issue, plain and simple. And, as with any other medical condition, depression requires diagnosis and treatment.”

It is meaningless, to begin with, to say depression results from “chemical imbalances of the brain.” The assertion tells us nothing. What cases the chemical imbalances?

This is like saying psoriasis is caused by a skin rash.

But it’s worse. “Chemical imbalance” itself is only pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. What might constitute a proper “balance of chemicals”? What does the phrase even mean?

Suppose some specific chemical were found in higher proportion in the brains of those experiencing depression than in the general population. This cannot establish cause and effect. Did the chemical cause the thoughts, or did the thoughts cause the chemical?

It is all only a survival of an ancient pseudo-medical myth, the theory of the humours.

“It is not a personal defect, failure, or weakness. Rather, it is a medical issue, plain and simple.”

This is the fallacy of the false alternative. There are not only two choices here, either personal defect or disease. Suppose someone runs into you with their car; is that either your personal defect or purely a medical issue?

It seems the reality is being deliberately avoided; otherwise why ignore one obvious possibility? Why is it impossible that depression be caused by environment? Isn’t it just common sense that it often, if not always, is?

“As with any other medical condition, depression requires diagnosis and treatment.”

This implies that diagnosis and treatment will help. Sadly, whether the current medical treatments for depression do is still highly debatable in medical or scientific terms. There is some survey evidence that people do better if they do not seek such treatment.

Realizing all this may well make you even more depressed. But telling lies is not going to help.

In fact, there are effective ways to fight depression. To begin with, depression is not “a medical condition.”

That is why the book The Truth about Dragons is about to appear.

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.