The huge increase in diagnosed psychiatric illnesses since end of WW2, but especially during the last 20-30 years, has been one of the defining characteristics of our current era. The "conventional wisdom" of "experts" attributes this increase to advances in the field of psychiatry, more access to medical care, advances in drug therapy of mental illnesses etc. But is this really the case? What if the very nature and structure of contemporary societies is not quite right? What if the rules, expectations and mores underlying modern societies and institutions within them are themselves bizarre, sociopathic and irrational?
Let me start by talking about one of the more sensational categories of "crime" in our era- spree or mass shootings. We can certainly pretend that such crimes are the result of evil and mentally-ill people having “assault” rifles and “semi-auto” handguns. Many liberal morons seem to think that guns, but especially the 'scary' looking ones, have magical powers similar to the ‘one ring’ of Sauron in LOTR. But if that was true, why didn't we see such spree shootings in previous eras? How many war-scarred veterans of WW1, WW2, Korea or Vietnam went about shooting up movie theaters or 1st grade school classes? How many went to a university and ended up killing over 30 people with handguns? Why didn't any of them go Holmes, Lanza, Cho or Brevik?
How do we end up in a situation where men from an otherwise normal middle-class background with no criminal record end up killing with more enthusiasm, planning, skill and ruthlessness than trained killers?
The conventional explanation by "experts" is that all of these spree shooters were mentally ill. They blame everything from adolescence-onset schizophrenia to autism and major depressive illnesses to 'explain' these occurrences. After all, what is a few more epicycles between fellow Ptolemians? But why didn't we have such events in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s or early 1980s? Those decades had many more young adults as well as much higher rates of normal 'crime' and murder. Surely there must have been men like Holmes, Lanza, Cho and Breivik in those years.. but for some odd reason, spree shootings of the type that occur nowadays were almost unheard.
So what changed? What are spree shooters mad about anyway? Isn't it odd that they kill people based on symbolism and social connections rather than personal grudges?
We have also seen a huge rise in the number of children, especially boys, who are now ‘diagnosed’ with various mental illnesses and behavioral conditions such as ADHD. But is that increase based on any real change in human biology within 30 years? How much of this increase is driven by profit and changing the definitions of ‘normal’ behavior. What is 'normal' behavior anyway? How much of what was once considered normal behavior has been deemed ‘un-normal’ by 'experts', administrators, legislators and other 'concerned citizens'? Do these shifted definitions of ‘normality’ help or hurt those displaying such "un-normal" behavior? Does society at large benefit from the 'treatment' of most "un-normal" behavior? If neither the "affected" persons nor general society benefit from such 'classification' and 'treatment'- who does?
The huge rise in the rates of diagnosed depressive illnesses is another intriguing part of our era. While the population-wide rates of most major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, mania and bipolar disorders have also increased over the last 60-70 years, the increase in diagnosis for depression has been nothing short of phenomenal. While the availability of reasonably safe (but not especially efficacious) drugs has made treating depression profitable, there is more to this story than a simple profit motive. What makes so many people, especially women, seek medical attention for depression?
So what is happening? Is there something increasingly wrong with human mind? Or is contemporary 'society' mentally ill?
I tend to favor the later explanation as there is considerable historical evidence that human societies are far more likely than individuals to become weird, unhinged and deranged. As some of you might know, most societies throughout history have actively encouraged its members to believe in all sorts of bullshit from omnipresent anthropomorphic gods and veracity of alleged divine revelations to the infallibility of the marketplace. We have entire religions based on the stated beliefs of people who claim to have heard the word of 'gods' and 'angels' or somehow felt their presence. Societies have encouraged and supported religious rituals which look awfully similar to obsessive-compulsive disorders. Most societies have fought long wars, enslaved or killed millions of other people or shot themselves in the foot because of beliefs which are otherwise indistinguishable from the manifestations of serious mental illness.
Maybe the problem with contemporary society and its institutions is that they are almost totally divorced from what human beings really are and what we truly desire. While our standards of material living are better than any previous time in human history, the same cannot be said about the rules, expectations and mores of societies and the institutions within them. They enforce scarcity of resources and opportunities even though technology has ushered in an era of plenty. They still try to degrade, humiliate and screw over an ever-increasing number and percentage of people- even though there is no rational reason to do so. They try to cripple the personal lives and relationships of those who would have otherwise supported the system- once again, for reasons that are not rational. They try to destroy the lives of an ever-increasing number of people over utterly trivial and farcical reasons- even though they don't stand to gain from such actions.
The funny thing is that, after doing all of the above, contemporary society and its institutions expect people to happily and willingly go along with the increasingly bizarre and irrational demands placed upon them by sociopathic morons. They believe that the choice and information matrix of people today is the same as it was 30-40 years ago. They seem to believe in their ability to keep on dishing ever-increasing amounts of the same shit forever and without consequences. Maybe it is contemporary society and its 'trusted' institutions, not individuals, that are mentally ill.
What do you think? Comments?
I think that it is this divorce from spirit and tradition, that BowTiedIronHide mentions in his comment, and increased secularism, unending progressivism, scientism and consumerism that are causing societies to become unhinged.
Whatever you may think of religion and tradition, they provide a stable firmament out of which societies can grow.
Yet in the modern age we suffer from a sort of chronological snobbery - as CS Lewis once put it.
We live in a perpetual present, worshiping the new god of constant progress, disconnected from history, where we deem everything that was in the past as provincial and outdated.
This causes a collective metaphysical angst to manifest itself at a societal level, because people are being robed of something they don't realize is essential for their existance.
There's also a constant pressure to think that however much progress we have achieved, is still not e enough.
You are right in asserting that "the problem with contemporary society and its institutions is that they are almost totally divorced from what human beings really are and what we truly desire".
What we are seeing is the repressive psyche of an increasingly Faustian society. No amount of clinical diagnosis and pills will cure this.
Man has divorced from spirit multiple times over 10s of thousands of years. The absence of mass individual reflection on the grandiosity of the universe & uniqueness of the human experience keeps taking us full circle. Spirit is energy and energy cannot be destroyed. The ever growing ills & deceit in society isn't a battle for physical resources & political power, those are the meagre rewards for harvesting societies spirit(energy). The more pertinent question is what is the larger unseen reward for harvesting societies collective spirit?