This Way Madness Lies

 

People these days hold to psychological theories with a desperate fervour, a fervour one would never see associated with religion. This was thrown into stark relief for me when a longtime friend, a friend who had stuck with me since back in college days, suddenly refused to speak with me after I said Freud had been disproven. He objected that I had no right to say that, since he had never criticized my Catholic faith. Wait, isn’t Freud supposed to be science? And I realized then that he had, in fact, criticized my Catholic faith now and then. It had not troubled me nor affected our relationship. Although I rarely spoke of it, never tried to evangelize, while he was often talking about his psychoanalysis. The religious are usually eager to engage in philosophical debate, while others refuse. For the religious, everything is subject to question and justification. Not for the psychologized.

Another time, I was organizing a group of writers for a book on personal experiences with depression. And one insisted she would not participate, and objected to the book itself, unless we all pointed out that depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. 

Another longtime friend abruptly unfriended me and stopped answering emails when I criticized humanistic psychology for saying that mental illness was caused by a lack of meaning, yet then asserting that there was no meaning in the universe—you had to invent meaning. Given that they were right on the first point, they had no cure, and probably left patients in despair. I had no idea at the time that he was an adherent. But as a result, he suddenly accused me of being immoral and cut me off.

Consider too the current adherents to the doctrine that one can be “misgendered” at birth, and this is the cause of one’s suicidal depression. If, like Michael Knowles, you reject this theory, they accuse you of wanting to kill them, even of “genocide.” And they become violent.

What is going on here? 

This illustrates the truth that humanistic psychology has stumbled upon: all mental illness is a loss of meaning. Aboriginal people call it “loss of soul.” The sufferer can make no sense of their experiences, and there seems to be no point to their life. This may come from being consistently “gaslit” in various ways growing up; it can come from a delusional or materialistic culture lacking plausible answers and explanations. It can come from being too intelligent to buy honestly the usual facile answers, which might be good enough to bamboozle most everyone else. 

Those who end up with a psychiatrist are healed, if and to the extent that they are healed, which is to say, almost never, by placebo effect. All psychiatric healing is faith healing. They are given some reasonably plausible explanation for their experience, some patchup to preserve the shared narrative, allowing them to limp on accepting that world view.

Precisely because the explanations psychiatry offers are limited and flimsy, just makeshift patches, alibis, people cling to them, and cannot stand questioning. They are hanging on desperately to their life raft. 

By contrast, any of the great world religions have developed, over the centuries, a comprehensive and persuasive account of the psyche and the cosmos. People who can accept one of them can be definitively cured of “mental illness.” And as world views, they are robust enough to easily stand questioning.

Why don’t people turn to religion in the first place? Not because the great religions are not plausible. That is an alibi. Unlike the new psychologies, they have satisfied the greatest minds of mankind for centuries, millennia: the Dantes, the Shakespeares, the Ngarjunas, the Hui Nengs. Religion is rejected by individuals for the same reason religion is on the decline generally in our society—leading to a rising tsunami of mental illness.

People fear religion because it requires an admission of divine justice, personal responsibility and possible guilt. Not even their own guilt, necessarily. Some are mentally ill to avoid admitting the guilt of a parent, or the government, or the society as a whole. The alternative may seem too personally threatening.

Psychiatry and psychology’s great selling point is that it promises healing without any reference to morality, responsibility, or guilt. It’s all just chemicals in the brain, say. Or misgendering. Or mere Oedipal fantasy. No fault no foul. 

The problem is, it does not work. This is why “mental illness” is rapidly becoming more common, more severe, and is now generally considered incurable.

The longer you deny guilt, in yourself or others, the crazier you get, and the stronger the fear of divine retribution gets. You start cutting off entire areas of thought, of conversation; you start unfriending and deplatforming even your closest and oldest friends, or closest relatives.

And that is where we are going as a society.