Sanity and Insanity

Not long ago, the National Post covered an "Anti-psychiatry" convention in Toronto. The coverage was not sympathetic; no doubt the Posties saw this as yet another left-wing victim group. The reporter wrote caustically of "self-absorbed crackpots like the 'shaman' M. Anne Phillips," "who holds that mentally ill people are in fact spirit guides to alternative realities," and that a psychotic episode "'is an indication of a traditional medicine or shamanic calling.'" Is that nuts, or what?

Unfortunately, I too am a crackpot. I have lived in Korea, China, and in the Middle East; my wife is Filipina. It is only too obvious to me, from personal experience, that

1. beliefs that are labelled insane in North America are accepted as simply true in other places; and

2. people who would be declared insane, unemployable, and put on mind-numbing medicines for life in North America are fairly normal members of society, with families and decent jobs, elsewhere.

How then can madness be an "illness" on the analogy of physical illness? To me, this whole notion of "mental health" and "mental illness" is a metaphor misunderstood literally, at the level of puzzling over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

My wife, along with most Filipinos, believes as a matter of course in curses, ghosts, witches, and various magical spirit beings similar to dwarfs and fairies. After all, she has seen some of them herself. She is quite open about these "hallucinations": a few months ago, she phoned me at work, agitated, because she had just seen me waving at her from the end of the street, although I could not have been there. At home, a neighbour who was a witch died, and her house was filled with bees. But the bees all left when her surviving daughter ordered them to do so.

I suspect we Europeans and North Americans all have such "hallucinations" as well; we just ignore them, like our dreams, or at least keep our mouths shut about them. Thirty-five percent of Americans, after all, claim direct contact with aliens. My two kids from a previous marriage once saw Dracula at the head of the staircase, and reported this quite matter-of-factly at the time. Now grown, they still remember it vividly, but know enough to no longer talk about it. My sister says she saw an angel at her window once. Me, I'm not saying. As Samuel Johnson once said, "most of us learn to conceal our tails."

I'm not saying reality is up for grabs; I'm saying that a purely physical, five-senses view of reality is seriously incomplete. Insane, even. But that is the view that the psychiatrists defend to the death--albeit not their own--as the only valid one.

It tends to throw Westerners to discover that all Muslims believe as a matter of course in the reality of "jinn," or genies, creatures one would not dare to mention around a Western psychiatrist. They are in the Qur'an. But then again, any sincere Christian ought to know as much: the Bible is clear that the middle air is thronged with angels and demons, not to mention the saints in heaven, who continue their involvement in this world.

There is, after all, a spiritual reality. This is not a question of "faith." It is, in logical and philosophical terms, not in doubt. The spirit world is the only one we know directly. What is in doubt, as Berkeley proved, is whether there is any physical reality apart from it.

In Korea, people who start "hallucinating," who become directly aware of these spirit presences, commonly become "mudangs," professional shamans, just as Phillips suggests. After an apprenticeship, they can make a decent living telling fortunes, healing the sick, selling talismans. Instead of an illness, they have a career. You may scoff that their imagined reality is not real; but that is actually beside the point. So long as they are allowed to continue believing in it, they are happy and well. Their "sickness" is the psychiatrist's refusal to accept this.

The situation is the same in China or in the Philippines--the "psychotic" commonly become herbalists and healers, "witch doctors," "shamans." Perhaps, in the end, not all those diagnosed in the West with "mental illness" are shamans; but it seems necessarily true that at least some shamans are, in North America, instead drugged numb and declared permanently disabled.

Yet the minute you accept that there is a spiritual reality, it becomes almost necessarily true that some people will have greater insight into it than others. Those who have greater insight into it will almost certainly not be the social "scientists," nor the psychiatrists, the "physicians," who are materialist by ideology.

It is not just that the blind are leading the blind; the blind are leading the seers.