MEDICALIZATION OF THE SACRED
BY VCXY
“The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise….”. (Foucault, 1977, 199–200)
It is impossible to argue it is “normal” to feel bad, dysfunctional and at odds with the world, even all of your closest ones. Feeling mentally unwell and incapacitated is truly a “real thing”. Trauma and stress are real and everywhere. There is a true need for coping mechanisms to help us when we are in ‘dire’ mental states. Help is what we all hope for, not merely the processes to contain, intervene, medicalize, diagnose, monitor or treat our ‘aberrant’ behavior.
Suicides, murders, drug addiction, sex trafficking, pedophilia and street violence are all forms of chronic relational aggression and abuse which have been relentless yet relatively silent (silenced) epidemics killing us more ruthlessly than any other infectious disease or natural disaster or war. And these very areas are where the institution and, indeed, industry of Psychiatry seems to have insufficient answers. Not only is it the lack of viable resolutions, it has also come up short in integrating many possibilities of other solutions and platforms, culled from sources other than its own myopic framework of understanding, for healing and systemically resolving real societal sickness.
To begin with, personality disorders (such as narcissism, sadism, sociopathy, psychopathy etc.) largely escape the entire possibilities of psychiatric treatment. It is impossible to push the case that the industry attempts to dismantle undeniable instances of collectivized and/or individuated insanity that eventually pave the way for violence/ chronic abuse/ sadism/ fascism/ stripping of the rights of others. Further, we cannot pretend it can effectively moderate and temper the insanities of world leaders actively wielding power, affecting the lives of billions locally and overseas with their instability. In contemporary times its methodology remains (or, perhaps, can only be up to the task of) picking at the weaklings of the horde, those who have already been relegated to the margins and periphery.
The operational imperative of psychiatry has always been whom, in their eyes, society can possibly police, punish and control. Szasz (1961) has noted that the industry’s function is to “disguise the and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations. “Many, like me, are comfortable to go further, and hold that it really renders more palatable the experience of the abuser at the cost of the victim. Needless to say, many poor souls have ended up in mental institutions due to manipulation and strategic coercion by groups of people in their lives, where the focus lay on stripping them of their agency rather than intervening for any true need to heal.
It is difficult to effectively vet and eliminate possibilities of the practice of psychiatry remaining a continuously destabilizing force. Chances are it will remain an institutionalized/collectivized insanity in itself; an utterly futile system in which it defeats its own purpose. Especially so in instances where it cannot even identify and resolve mental stability from within its operational apparatus(es).
“Anurag Kumar, a 25-year-old psychiatrist at the AIIMS in Delhi, died by suicide on Friday after jumping off the 10th floor of the doctors’ hostel. The doctor had blogged his struggle with depression on June 21 with the title ‘A psychiatry trainee’s struggle with depression’. According to the police, Kumar did not leave behind a suicide note.”
This incident is indicative of how the psychiatric fraternity cannot even administer effectively regarding the mental health of victims within the system.
The Western bio psychiatric mode
“The invention of a diagnosis has been central to selling drugs and is also deeply embedded in institutional and economic politics” -(Cvetkovich, 2012, p.99)
Diagnoses of mental illnesses have become necessary to manage the side effects of neo-liberal capitalism. This becomes even more apparent in post colonial societies where exporting mental illness labels to the “Global South” ultimately facilitates neo-colonialism, not unlike contrived structural adjustment efforts from the World Bank group and other developmental authorities, and works to overshadow the real causes of local peoples’ suffering.
With this approach dominating practice across the globe, those who have complaints are conveniently transformed and triaged into “patients with illness(es)”. The treatment process largely strips subjects of the social context that undergirds their suffering. Taking psychiatric medications as part of a daily routine is truly not the same thing as a patient with diabetes exercising self-care and adhering to follow up appointments.
Society still doesn’t have a conception of how to treat kindly, or know how to be responsible to, those whose brain chemistry is a few degrees different than the median. This lacuna is akin to societal helplessness in the face of issues like racism or sexism. However, unlike racism and sexism, the mental health victim is not only systemically impaired; they have real quotidian functional issues that impair their day to day activities. The institute of psychiatry renders redundant their ability help themselves, speak for themselves and even defend themselves. While Racism and Sexism have been in the spotlight for decades and are by nature somehow more obvious and deemed worthy of discussion than mental disability, physical illness hardly carries the same amount of stigma. Unless it’s the one or two instances of instantly recognisable (and socially forgivable) autism, the mentally disabled is a category that is more thoroughly discriminated against than any race or sexuality. The mental health industry has it down to a science and this ‘science’ certainly has never been challenged as much as race or sex as a convenient contingent construct.
In the cases of those who have consistently apparent brain differences, those subjects who have a “mental” disorder more physical than psychological, such as those with severe autism or Asperger’s, it ironically seems they have the most societal support and representation and are typically treated the most kindly.
Many psychiatry professionals, who have accrued years of experience and wrangled with competing views in the industry, have argued about how – apart from the personality disorders mentioned above and some others that escape the institutions scope of treatment, many other varying “mental illnesses”, such as “Bipolar Disorder I/II”, “ Schizophrenia”, “Depression” etc. can be categorically subsumed by the umbrella of Complex Post Trauma Disorder. There has been close to zero counter-evidence offered up by potential challengers in the fraternity since. Truly, we should ask ourselves what honest value is there in inventing additional labels for stress reaction mechanisms without the concrete tactics to meaningfully resolve any of the trauma and stress?
The putative integrity of some diagnostic labels bandied about with a claim to authority by the institutional industrial complex of psychiatry is put to question in practice. Some psychiatrists are, on the one hand, so certain about the specific “illness(es)” they diagnose one with and the benefits of the pills they prescribe while, on the other hand, they do not elaborate on the precise mechanics of the disease or how its ‘cure’ works in terms of neurochemistry. Still, many have the audacity to dance around the question of whether these diagnostic labels and, trust on their part in them, are perhaps rooted in trial-and error experimentation masquerading as robust “science”. Apparently the level of ‘science’ is always robust enough to advise one to ingest medications for months at times, until it becomes intolerable, upon which they make the best educated guess to try another, only to finally adopt newer ‘better’ ones after years of different side effects from the extant pills. Double blind placebo controlled studies are sometimes insufficient to justify practical largesse when it comes to pushing pills. Even when there is a chance to collaborate and improve the scientific explanation and understanding of causality which is necessary for awareness and monitoring one’s self recovery- Endocrinologists are hardly ever brought into the mix. Hormones regulate how you eat, sleep, wake up, have sex, stay alert, sweat etc. and these are the very channels where symptoms of a disorder present themselves and the same channels through which one heals. Yet an Endocrinologist’s perspectives are often viewed as entirely optional in the Psychiatrist’s diagnosis process. Alternatively, the statistics collected on hormonal fluctuations are only assessed in terms of whether the medication might push the patient over the tipping point of side effects, a threat that renders clear the constant battle to justify the putative benefits.
There was once a view of self-preservation, that determined doctors who refused to answer properly on the ‘science’ were considered to be nothing more than witchdoctors. — Nowadays one who holds such a view is criticized for lacking “trust” in Psychiatry. For perhaps a very different yet more appropriate interpretation here, this sentiment from Nietzche has never been closer to the truth: “a casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
While the ‘science’ bears a tremendous responsibility in the patient’s recovery progress, everything the psychiatrists and nurses see is innately subjective. There is very little outside of their personal ethos which ensures their opinions and the way they handle communications impinge on a patient’s recovery in an inpatient setting. There’s no saying what their subjectivities might effect in terms of threatening the patient’s trust, security, self-esteem, understanding of their condition and health. Within psychiatric wards, medical abuse is often under reported, and many times very hard to prove and prevent, to a worrying extent.
The Language of Psychiatry: The Antithesis of Social Justice
It is very difficult for mental health professionals to go down the road of fully acknowledging trauma and stressors in the phase of hospitalization, because the minute they do so, they would have to explain that ultimately their “methodology” (if the rigor of that term even applies to their ad hoc creed of operations) is to make your body, mind and soul, bear more than the entirety of the full costs and full ownership for being a victim. You know the silent motionless gaze of medicalization: “because you dared suffered too hard, and… you should suffer differently, but for compliance with society… for public health… for harmony.”
The purpose of the inpatient psychiatric treatment and approach is to ensure the victim copes with systemic injustice and oppression-as well as its standard for healing, rather than to heal in body, mind and spirit. The path to liberation so as to represent our individualities and to transform the very systems that oppressed us is termed insignificant. Even if the patient does what the program or system requires of one correctly, the system doesn’t know them well enough to properly prescribe a way to succeed. Every subsequent time they ‘fail’ they put the burden entirely back on the patient for not being creative enough, responsible enough and willing to succeed.
Many of these same professionals are forced to shun or are incapable of apprehending the indubitable capabilities of THC and LSD in the process of individual healing. While towards the beginning of their trajectory into the medical mainstream, psychedelics entered therapeutic spaces and were administered clinically for a variety of reasons. However, due to a nexus between public policy and the industrial psychiatric complex it was the case that for so many years research into their effects on the human mind was controlled or stringently regulated.The literature on this subject is out there for everyone’s perusal and one shudders to term some of it ‘research’ as a lot of it is unabashed propaganda. It is only in recent years that the piecemeal legalization of THC and supervised trials of dosing traumatized individuals with LSD, MDMA and Psylocibin (Magic Mushrooms) provided a whit of acknowledgement of the indisputable healing qualities of these unfairly demonized “street drugs”. Such propaganda goes back to disingenuous socio-polictical interventions to further the neoliberal capitalist fiction of homo economicus, its base unit if you will, and conveniently disregards years of legitimate research and study into their effects in an institutional setting.
Psychiatric treatment and anti-drug laws are always mutually informative (supportive) given the complicity amongst their respective governing institutions. Aggressive warning campaigns against street drugs and the ugliest descriptors of “drug addicts” go hand in hand with intimidating and treating the “mentally ill” who inevitably find value in self-medication. Legalizing and regulating the delivery methods and dosage of self-medication with other forms of chemicals is yet again a solution stigmatised by the institutional-industry complex.
Furthermore, most people who’ve been through hospitalization for psychiatric ‘problems’ never felt the social, moral and agency conflicts they went through were sufficiently acknowledged. And this is literally the only way to even begin healing from CPTSD (meaning any- ironically- “treatable”
mental illness) at the root cause level. The discourse of psychiatry has largely failed to deliver social justice, individual empowerment, freedom, equality, independence, empathy, representations — everything one looks for outside of a temporary toxicity that acts as a chemical stop gap in case we are socially unpalatable to others.
Psychiatry teaches you as a victim to blame yourself more than defend yourself, to swallow the pill and silence yourself ,to carry on as long as your temper holds and suffer the punishment when it doesn’t. No amount of patience demanded from the mentally disabled one is ever told to be enough.
All this below- the DSM 5 definition of “mental illness/disorder” the industry is built upon- could become a joke of itself when anyone calls out all cultures and norms to be mere “collectivized insanity”… And in all honesty, this could be extrapolated to cover everyone’s individualities on planet Earth.
1. A behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual
2. Reflects an underlying psychobiological dysfunction
3. The consequences of which are clinically significant distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning)
4. Must not be merely an expected response to common stressors and losses (ex. the loss of a loved one) or a culturally sanctioned response to a particular event (ex. trance states in religious rituals)
5. Primarily a result of social deviance or conflicts with society
The Sacred- Our Inviolable Consciousness
“Just because I don’t know the meaning of my art, does not mean it has no meaning.” — Salvador Dali
Artists have always been the purest politicians for social/individual justice and representation.
We cannot pretend we can replace, subsume or make irrelevant what Art and Creativity can achieve for the Individual. “Art Therapy”, a phrase coined by the industry is one of redundancy and bears the implication it is supplemental as necessitated in the context of disorders. Art is inherently therapeutic- and far more. Art captures systems of meanings in the worlds we explore, along with their hybridized and contradictory aspects indescribable by words. It provides a platform of psychic violence for the marginalized and disenfranchised, when warring and retribution is still necessary, and borders, buildings bodies are to remain un-breached. At its highest potential, it can bring one’s self to a point of restitution and re-situation in the most fulfilling sense.
It is truly a personal endeavor to recover from psychiatric trauma. Beyond the pills and regimens instilled by psychiatry- The Arts (Dance, Music, Painting, Theatre) are an entire world many individuals should consider engaging with in order to heal. We seem to have forgotten what The Arts are for and there has been a tendency to dismiss them as nothing but cultural tropes rather than the sacred mediums for the shaping of individual potential and potency they actually are. Since the earliest eons of recorded history and perhaps from even before, the Arts have brought individual happiness and an arguably less harsh isolation that was far less cruel to the different and eccentric. Nowadays engaging in the Arts seems to be purely from a consumer perspective and its propagation and rewards reserved for the select commercially successful artists — as if elevating one’s fame and money was an essential factor for determining artistic merit, unless rediscovered instead in a psych ward.
If Psychiatry were to exist authentically, to serve the purpose it claims, Psychiatry needs to dedicate its resources towards individuals finding its place in Art where their Humanity can be understood — the condition which it is to heal.
Despite progress in the last 5 decades, the institution of Psychiatry has continued to disappoint us everyday in many ways. Until the day authentic reformation transpires, many of us may have to relegate it to its appropriate place — to the fringes, to the sanitized spaces dedicated to disempowering all its counterproductive forms of participation in society/ in our minds.
