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.