January 17, 2005
-
Topic: THE SOCIAL ROOTS OF OUR MENTAL HEALTH
In a speech given by Daniel Ellsberg to a Veteran’s for Peace conference, Ellsberg said we should have learned the lessons of Vietnam. My education required me to go over there and see what bullshit the war was, the people of today do not need that same expensive education. I think the same applies to mental health. You don’t need a PhD to figure out what brings happiness and what leads to depression. Despite being the wealthiest and most technologically progressive country on the planet, we’re a country also full of depression, despair, cynicism, and violence. This is a topic that, thankfully, transcends simple politics (although it is very much a political issue, just not on the same radar that the environment has reached).
Here’s an article, proving once again my theory that if you’ve ever thought of something, it’s most likely been thought of before. And…like my rants no the ills of schooling, this goes into my rant that our country has made a dire mistake in shifting all the focus of depression onto biology, and so little onto the culture that is an equal cause in depression.
Surgeon General’s Report Is Laudable but Misleading
The Los Angeles Times, Dec 20, 1999
By RICHARD J. DeGRANDPRE
Some weeks ago, I was a guest on public radio and a caller described a study in which children were sent from out of state to the Colorado Rockies to observe the effects of high elevation on their asthma. The children improved, some quite significantly. However, when their families arrived for a visit, the children’s asthma took a turn for the worse, suggesting that an important determinant was psychosocial stress.
The caller asked whether I had heard of similar psychosocial influences regarding childhood hyperactivity. I answered that such cases have been regularly reported, although most are anecdotal. One study, however, from the Journal of Pediatrics, reported differences in the levels of the biochemical serotonin in hyperactive versus nonhyperactive children. When the two most hyperactive children in the study were kept at the hospital, away from home and school, both the hyperactivity and serotonin changed to levels observed in the nonhyperactive children. However, when measured one month after the two children went home, the serotonin and hyperactivity had reverted to earlier levels.
The lesson here is an important one, and one that is not well heeded by the report on mental health issued this month by U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher. A centerpiece of the report is the effort to make mental disorders a legitimate health issue by redefining them in terms of illness and disease. This logic is decades old and assumes that if the public comes to view problems such as depression and schizophrenia in biological terms, a more open atmosphere will emerge, thus reducing the stigma of mental health problems and encouraging individuals to pursue treatment.
As can be seen in the case of alcoholism, where the disease model is accepted by the public, this approach appears to have some merit. At the same time, viewing all mental disorders and addiction as biological diseases–and then treating them as medical problems– will not help stem the tide of psychological despair rolling across the nation. To wit, several of the children involved in school shootings had been prescribed the latest psychiatric drugs. Whatever good the medical model and psychiatric medications did them, it certainly was not enough.
I do not believe these drugs caused these outbreaks of violence. I do believe, however, that the shift toward biologizing and medicalizing psychological distress has begun to blind us to the social roots of many of these problems. This includes the rising challenges of finding meaning in modern life, and the stresses it imposes on individuals and families.
The surgeon general’s report rightly stresses the importance of tearing down the stigma associated with mental problems. But if increasing people’s awareness of mental-health issues comes at the price of turning man into a biological machine, the cost is surely too high.
In a television interview, the surgeon general stressed that “there is no longer a justification for distinguishing between mental and physical illnesses.” This sentiment, which pervades the report is both true and false. The experience of emotional distress is as real as any experience of physical illness, and often more disabling. However, to say the biological underpinnings of mental problems are just as real as for physical illness is false and dangerously misleading.
First, the notion of physical illness implies an inner, biological cause, and independent tests exist for most physical illnesses. In the case of mental disorders, there is not a single biological test. Second, much research in neuroscience and psychiatry shows a basic methodological blunder by failing to distinguish between causation and mere correlation. It is true that psychological states correlate with physiological ones. But these underlying states may represent nothing more than the impact of present and past psychological experiences. The public thus falls into the trap of believing that psychological problems are biological and out of their control.
A decade of focusing on the brain (and forgetting the human context that shapes the mind) has left the public both dazed and confused about the sources of the self. Mending mind and brain should mean a fuller understanding of how nature and nurture combine to create psychopathology; it should not mean turning all that is mental and psychological into something medical and biological. As this happens, people may well be inclined to ask their physician for a quick fix to soothe their (or their children’s) psychological woes, but they are much less inclined to do the hard work of taking responsibility for their and their children’s futures. All the evidence in the world tells us that real human transformation is possible, or at least it should.
Credit: Richard J. DeGrandpre, an adjunct professor of psychology at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, is author of “Ritalin Nation: Rapid- Fire Culture and the Transformation of Human Consciousness” (Norton, 1999)
http://www.coc.cc.ca.us/departments/english/davis_d/surgeongeneral%27sreport.html
Comments (2)
there are lots of ways to see this: disability groups often strongly oppose this “medical model” because it replaces comprehension of human diversity with medications that “fix” things. Alcoholism, drug addiction, for example, I’d argue are appropriate “medical” issues: “hyperactivity” (a different way of filtering information) may not be at all. (Should we have medicated Thomas Jefferson into “normality” so he wouldn’t have wasted his time on all those diverse interests?)
“…proving once again my theory that if you’ve ever thought of something, it’s most likely been thought of before.”
Actually, I think some Frenchman already postulated that theory.
~