Beliefs about madness have evolved long before the emergence of science. From the ancient Egyptians, who believed that the heart controls the mind, to the Middle Ages, when it was thought that evil spirits took over the mind, these beliefs had consequences for how the patient was treated. There was no science in any of these treatments, just beliefs that we held about the behavior of others that did not fit with the norm. We always tried to understand it or explain it. What is important is that these beliefs are always tied to treatment. How we attribute a cause determines how we deal with it. If we believe that the reason why we are fat is because of our genes, then we have limited options. But if we attribute the cause to food intake, then our options become clearer.
The Egyptians practiced trepanation (drilling into the skull), but also relaxation, sleep, and other soothing therapies to relax the heart. In the Middle Ages, with their belief in evil spirits invading the body, the treatment was predetermined. You cannot reason with bad spirits; they only react to violence, and hence we get the draconian treatment of madness of the Middle Ages. Looking from the safety of our modern time, their treatment of chaining, beating, and restraining patients looks sadistic, but they had their reasons; they had their beliefs.
With the rise of science and the eminence of theory, a new set of beliefs was adopted. The Enlightenment in the middle of the 17th century ushered in a new set of scientific theories, energized by the discovery of electricity in the body, and a new understanding of chemistry and biology. In the shadow of this newfound knowledge emerged new lay beliefs about madness. Madness was believed to be due to excess nervous energy, and since the business of pharmacology was still nascent and still morphing from apothecary, their option for lessening this excess energy was to provide a peaceful and nurturing environment that reduces stress and trauma. The way they believed that they could cure madness was by providing “moral” treatment (a mistranslation from the French meaning “psychological” care). Hospitals for the insane became the de jure cure for madness.
During the mid-to-late 19th century in the United States, the Kirkbride Buildings took hold of the imagination. They were magnificent buildings that were a testament to the glory of science over madness. Built to the specification of a physician and Quaker Thomas Story Kirkbride, each ward had expansive windows, wide corridors, fresh hot and cold water, gardens, and recreational outdoor areas. Kirkbrides were more retreats than hospitals. Instead of punishment to drive the evil spirits out, now there was psychotherapy to diffuse the trauma within the individual.
Dorothea Lynde Dix, a retired nurse, went around the country promoting these Kirkbrides as a panacea. An inspired fervent frenzy ensued, believing that civilized societies were bringing mental health science to the unfortunates. Cities clamored to build these symbols of scientific superiority over madness. At its apex, 78 Kirkbride Buildings crowned the landscape across the United States, mostly in the Northeast, half of which have been repurposed and still stand today. They were described as the “cult of curability” as everyone believed that they worked. Designed to accommodate 200-250 patients, these buildings soon became seen as a panacea. As a result, they ended up becoming a warehouse for all sorts of unwanted. When they became too expensive, and the promise of cheaper, more effective drugs came on the market, they were abandoned. By the first half of the 20th century, Kirkbrides and the majority of insane hospitals devolved into dystopian tragedies. Increasingly, invasive treatments replaced “moral” care. Psychiatry, taken over by the much more powerful pharmaceutical industry, started to reel in random grasps for relevance.
The eventual failure of the 19th-century asylums led to the dead-end intervention of pharmacy (insulin coma therapy), biological (bloodletting, organ excising, and purging), chemical (toxification), skeletal (trephination), electrical (electroconvulsive therapy), physical manipulation (rotational therapy), neurological surgeries (lobotomies), and behavioral constraints (straightjackets)—all these therapies had dubious efficacy and definitive harm. All based on lay beliefs with a whiff of scientific method. All eventually shown to be sham, all.
In the 1900s, when psychiatry divorced from psychology and psychoanalysis, it became the turf keeper of biology and chemistry. With the eventual dominance of the pharmaceutical industry, psychiatry became subsumed as a pusher of drugs. With this new overlord came a change in attributions, a new paradigm, and a new meaning of mental illness emerged.
First came the anti-psychiatrists. The infamous Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, who became famous because they were not too radical and they were intellectual enough to make it through the filter of public decorum. Their criticisms were sanitized, discussing issues of ontology such as the meaning of madness, and they broadcast that they wanted to modify psychiatry to help change it to become more humane and more sensitive to the social context. In contrast to this pragmatic and acceptable (by the institution) approach, there are the less famous anti-psychiatrists, the radical Franco Basaglia and Frantz Fanon. These psychiatrists realized that you cannot modify psychiatry; you must revolutionize it, you have to abolish it. These factions helped to bring psychiatry into public focus.
But it was only when the patients themselves started to speak out that radical change became possible. With Mad Studies, which aims to reclaim humanity for patients, patients started to lobby for a new perspective to look at enhancing their well-being rather than pathologizing their behavior. Their criterion of outcome was different; they wanted to feel accepted, they wanted to feel better, and not necessarily to be cured, if that was even possible.
Fast forward to today. Now we have a new set of beliefs dictated by the industry, defining psychiatric disorders as a “broken brain”, a “chemical imbalance, ” or a “neurological mis-wire.” These are the beliefs underlying psychiatry’s “Bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM is perhaps the most obvious approach for reliability in defining madness, at the expense of validity. It categorizes different aspects of madness by willfully discounting the main cause of all these variances—our context in a social environment.
Even if madness were somehow chemically or neurological determined, the behaviors are socially expressed and defined. Being aware of someone’s living conditions can help place the behavior in context. The social aspect of madness is crucial to understanding the behavior. How we see the cause of madness, our beliefs, dictate how we treat patients. Clinicians are less likely to see this social influence. There is an attribution bias with clinicians as they are biased to diagnose a patient‘s dysfunction as internal, stable, and uncontrollable. In reality, most dysfunctions are periodic and cyclical and therefore unstable, and through behavioral therapy, most are controllable.
Most madness is not the dramatic but the mundane. The emergence of ADHD among children and adults is but one instance where psychiatrists are pathologizing greater swaths of behavior, and even if these definitions are valid, then we have to ask how to make it less stressful and disturbing for those experiencing these conditions.
A new belief is emerging that accepts the role of sociology in creating and expressing dysfunction. Only by understanding how beliefs create madness can we predict the future of psychiatric treatment. By exposing the assumptions made about dysfunctional behaviors, treatment options can be better understood. Belief in the cause of a disorder determines what is done to alleviate it. With the social context gaining importance, social prescribing has become a more effective way of treating madness. Social prescribing is providing social services, housing, work, respite, drug treatment, physical therapy, all services that are usually in the realm of social work, psychology, or social services.
With Mad Studies promoting the perspective of the patients who use the mental health care system, the attribution of disease changes again, and a greater emphasis is placed on the external, unstable, and controllable aspects of madness. According to the theory of Power Threat Meaning Framework, ‘madness is a mental strategy that has become mismatched with its current context.’ The context determines the expression of dysfunction. While this approach argues that future treatment requires a population-based approach that offers social prescribing, short-term respite programs, and broad community-based cognitive-behavioral therapies, psychiatry remains stuck on “curing” the “diseases” with medication. A more pragmatic objective would be to focus on alleviating the anxiety and distress experienced by the individual and to aim for personal and functional recovery rather than to aim for a purely clinical recovery. A cure is possible if we redefine what a cure looks like.
With public awareness, the tide is changing, slowly but surely. The seeds are here already, as with the early inklings of Moral Treatment in the late 1700s; it takes time for them to grow. However, change is coming as our beliefs have already changed. Most of us have family members, friends, or personal experience with madness. We know that it is not simply a chemical imbalance or a broken brain. We know how the context plays a large role in how we behave. History has taught us that beliefs change first, and the rest follows. Perhaps the cult of curability, a derogatory slight for those who had the vision to believe in a cure, might materialize in this new ecological age.
Actually don’t dismiss historical notions like the heart controlling the mind or the notion of evil spirits controlling the mind in cases of what they regarded as madness. Our concepts of emotions and mental health are exactly the same, and emotion does drive thinking – you can see this in yourself, and the notion that the heart controls the mind therefore becomes comprehensible. But all intellectual conceptualizations of what we call psychological life but what I will call our consciousness hinder the direct perception and understanding of all the phenomena of mind, and when we undertake this turning toward the content of our own subjective experience we begin to unmask, penetrate, understand it’s content and go further and further beyond this content into the deeper mysteries of mind and existence. And the reason I went on this journey, which is not a journey of books or intellectual activity or anything social or external, but a real living enquiry into consciousness, a journey into consciousness which naturally, obviously, inevitably transforms the brain because the brain obviously structures itself in relation to what it sees, understands, and learns about it’s own operations, and when the brain learns about this thing called consciousness and then journeys into the various modalities or dimensions or levels of consciousness (these are real things but words are not), then the brain radically complexifies and makes far more subtle its understanding of this thing we call the human being which previously the brain would have regarded as a fundamentally biological entity, like the psychiatrist, but subsequently which it could not fail to see as actually consciousness itself, and the human recedes more and more into the ether as an ungraspable mystery WITHIN consciousness, which makes this human life and all human life and all of life and the whole Universe much more interesting. But alas it also makes the human socially and historically accreted existence (civilization/intellect) so fantastically absurd and boring, to the point that living in it becomes a hellish and infuriating absurdity. But I’ve been through what you call a psychosis and the notion of evil spirits is much better at capturing the true experience of the tormenting forces in these non-ordinary psychological experiences which YOU should not pretend to know the first thing about, and the notion of evil spirits does capture the conscious experiences of with an energetic dynamic that confronts you as a separate and often unrecognizable intelligence, and the notion of evil spirit is useful in capturing these qualities. However, the only sane thing to do in the face of such experiences is not to call them self or other, not to call them feeling or evil spirit or anything else, but just to observe and understand them and penetrate further and further into the mysteries of this realm which is actually beyond language, which is actually that which produced language in the first places. The language I use for myself (not for anyone else) is as follows. We are spiritual energies – the animal spirits, the emotional spirits, which are Earthly spirits, and there are spirits from other realms that enter our consciousness, and there is the silent, formless awareness of all this and all other things in conscious life. These words aren’t concepts, ideas or definitions but rather like descriptive terms, like an artists brush strokes, not meant to equate to reality but to be used to convey it. So you can’t criticize my language conceptually or intellectually – you have to understand the phenomena I’m discussing to be able to criticize it’s efficacy in describing and conveying that thing. And this is true of the origins of the ideas of evil spirits and all the various cultural forms used to describe what we call psychological or spiritual life or consciousness. And I would like to point out that the ORIGINS of language often reveal the true meaning of words in relation to the actual, often revealing deep secrets of the actual. If you trace the etymology of words to their roots it’s overwhelmingly an illuminating and fascinating experience, and the study of these etymologies seems to clarify the mind and clarify it’s self-understanding. It is the later theoretical elaborations or beliefs or propagandas or myths or other accretions that pervert the original meaning of words that tends to render them irrational and unrelated to reality, so you ought to give all historical concepts the dignity of a full etymological analysis before you regard them as mere and obviously delusional beliefs. That is your delusion. Things are far more complex then that, and those that produced historical concepts and theories were of a much higher intelligence historically then we are today, without doubt. We know more, but we are crude barbarians in terms of the subtlety of perception and non-verbal understanding of life and human beings.
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This took me some time to digest. An interesting, valid, and important perspective. I never talk of beliefs as delusional. We cannot exist without having beliefs; 87% of all Nobel Prize-winning scientists are religious. I also agree that I have my own beliefs. Calling them delusional does not help, as the concept, as you have so rightly pointed out. The etymology comes from “deception,” which I am sure you agree the delusional person themselves are not into deception, they believe in their experience. You are accurate in determining that we are constrained by language. Ludwig Wittgenstein made that observation, as many others before him. Perhaps the most complex of problems in science which is why we have moved slowly. The only method we have to explore is to discuss and find some common ground.
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Your belief that psychiatry is really anything OTHER than a fraudulent pseudoscience IS DELUSIONAL….
Your belief that so-called “mental illnesses”, or if you prefer, “madness”, are, in objective reality, any more “real” than presents from Santa Claus, is, again, DELUSIONAL….
But I will give you big points for trying….
Please keep trying….
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Forgive me, beliefs seem to be necessary to a mind that has been devoted to what it wants rather then what is true, because then it is not observing and acknowledging reality intently because it’s energy is focused on getting what it wants. As such, beliefs become necessary merely to produce some kind of false structural order in the operations of the brain which accord to the laws of language and logic if not to the actual reality which we need to understand. So for any truth seeking mind they are advised urgently to be vigilant of all beliefs which need to be eliminated. People who depend on beliefs cannot imagine how one could live without them. People who have understood belief deeply, on the other hand, can’t imagine how people could be so stupid as to still cling on to them when all they do is delude your reality. If you don’t know you need to know that you don’t know, but believing something deludes your brain into thinking it knows when it doesn’t. Who can argue against that? So to be intelligent implies having no beliefs. Try it. It might make you nervous at first to live without beliefs but that nervous energy soon becomes the power of a much smoother operation.
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Dear Zeroxox (this is not actually your real name, or is it?),
I think you are making an awful lot of sense but will make an awful lot more sense to me once I’ve cut, pasted and made new paragraphs out of each sentence of all your comments above.
I am certainly with you about etymology, as far as I understand you, and I suspect Bohr might be, too!
Earlier last evening I checked some etymology of “randomness,” and was delighted to find it associated with a mad, headlong rush or gallop!
If we are patient enough, I reckon we can see that there is no disorder, chaos or randomness, at all, in our cosmos/cosmoses, just as Jung indicated…
Much love.
Many thanks.
And now to patiently cut, paste and separate…
Thanks, again!
Tom.
“Young man who fancy pretty nure must be patient.” – Confucius, “On Patience,” allegedly..
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By the way, beliefs ARE madness – all of them, including believing that mental illnesses exist: not believing, on the other hand, is sanity, because a belief can never be a fact and the holding of a belief is proof that the fact has not yet been penetrated, understood, because if it had there would be no place for a belief. You don’t believe the sun is in the sky when you can see it, and our brains are blighted and clouded and destroyed by belief. Every horror in world history has been perpetrated on the basis of beliefs none of which ever have been, ever can be or ever will be true, because the truth is the reality beyond all words and beliefs, what we call ‘what actually is’, and beliefs about what is are ignorance, blindness, and the acting on them is stupidity. But each one of you will have beliefs. It’s ubiquitous in our social conditioning. You can’t just decide suddenly to have no more beliefs. You have to see them as they arise and see that they are not the fact, then the brain and understanding will do the rest. Constant vigilance of the mind is essential to decondition the brain from beliefs but it requires the brain to grasp the seriousness of this problem first otherwise it would be irrational for the brain to suspend other operations that it presently considers more important if it hasn’t first understood why this is so crucial, and it is, because this vigilance solves all.
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“In the 1900s, when psychiatry divorced from psychology and psychoanalysis, it became the turf keeper of biology and chemistry.”
I disagree that psychology and psychiatry are “divorced” now, especially the DSM “bible” billing psychologists, which I think is most of them.
Since my experience with psychologists is they are “partnered” with the religions, but also function as funnels to the psychiatrists … to cover up egregious crimes for the mainstream paternalistic religions.
Instead I must admit to being one of the “anti-psychiatrists,” who realize “that you cannot modify psychiatry; you must revolutionize it, you have to abolish it.” As any DSM “bible” billing, ethical psychologist should admit.
Since you can’t bill with an “invalid” psychiatric DSM “bible,” and be “divorced” from the “BS” of the DSM deluded psychiatric industry, psychologists.
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I agree, but just because they share custody of patients does not mean that they are not divorced (pun intended). I agree, however, that the DSM is a source of income to clinical Social Workers, Psychologists, and other peripheral clinical services. It is an edifice that the psychiatrists have used to “allow” reimbursement for all kinds of services. It would be difficult to abolish it outright because so many people have so much invested in it. A similar argument to yours is made by Gary Greenberg in The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. I believe that although the DSM is intractable, it can be sidestepped in the future by outcome reimbursement. Something that was tried already with the ACA and hospital intake recidivism.
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As a doctor, I would imagine you understand why the psychologists want to bill, via the fraudulent manner all MDs do. But as an ethical banker’s daughter, I also do see the systemic fraud (not only of the MDs, but also of my father’s industry) ….
I understand why you say the “DSM is intractable,” but I disagree. I do believe the introduction of the internet, will eventually take down the scientific fraud based, scientifically “invalid,” greed only inspired DSM “bible” billers.
But, only time will tell, and it’s good for intelligent people to discuss these important issues, so thank you for your comment.
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The DSM-5 is BEST seen as nothing more than a CATALOG INDEX of BILLING CODES….
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This is a summary of the book “Beliefs that Create Madness” (2025)
https://www.amazon.com/Beliefs-Create-Madness-Mario-Garrett/dp/B0DCTR5V8D
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Here’s a CHALLENGE, Mario. I say you’re WRONG.
Even if we do fully understand how “beliefs create madness”, the fraudulent pseudoscience drug racket and social control mechanism known as “Psychiatry” should best have NO FUTURE.
Psychiatry has proven a failure, as it was intended. Whether through gross ignorance, or through evil, willful human rights abuses posing as “medical treatment”, the so-called “mental health system” is a BROKEN JOKE. And psychiatry is largely to blame. We have the current “mental health crisis” we do, BECAUSE of psychiatry, and not in spite of it. And It must be 1 or the other, can’t be neither. Could be both….
We need to throw psychiatry on the scrap heap of history ASAP!….
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A rose by any other name will smell just as sweet. There will always be a vacuum for controlling madness. Whether it is psychiatrists or another group. However much we would like to abolish psychiatry, we are unlikely to replace it with something better because it is based on “power.” As long as mad people have little power, there will always be those who will take over control. What is needed is policy. We need to restrain their power and give it back to the client/patient. I think there is a movement, albeit slow, that is doing that now. We are comrades in arms!
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Beautifully written article that elegantly calls a spade a spade yet offers nuanced perspectives. Much appreciated.
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To me, it reads much more like “very carefully crafted & scripted APA propaganda”….!….
Whether we call “it” “madness” or “mental illness” is irrelevant!
As long as we believe that “it” exists at all, things won’t change much.
Real people have real problems with living their lives.
They don’t need the psychobabble gobbledygook, neurotoxins, & quackery of psychiatry!
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I didn’t get the sense that Mario’s advocating for psychiatry. His focus seems to be on the context of misery.
I think what he’s getting at is how much belief systems distort perceptions of reality.
FWIW, I think saying “madness” is as ridiculous as saying “mental illness”: the first is embarrassingly theatrical, while the second is brainlessly medical.
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Yes, I see this more as political dynamics.
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The internet is changing the political dynamics, making policy change less powerful than public sentiment, slowly but surely.
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You are BOTH correct, AND incorrect, Birdsong. I went back & carefully re-read the article from a careful, analytical perspective. No, Garrett is not EXPLICITLY, and literally (in so many words) “advocating” for psychiatry. BUT, YES, his implicit bias screams silently in implication. His whole piece both defends the supposed legitimacy of psychiatry, and perpetuates the false belief that so-called “mental illnesses”/”madness” are any more real than presents from Santa Claus. And thus, YES, Garrett ADVOCATES for the perpetuation of the toxic status quo of psychiatry….
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I don’t think he defending psychiatry. He’s just facing reality.
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Bill, I cannot sit idly by and see Santa and his presents so maligned, especially not having been misinformed as maybe a six-year-old that there was no Santa (AND told not to reveal this to my kid sister and brother) and then waited to be told ditto re “Holy God.”
Six deccades later, I discover that of course Santa exists, for how else could all this possibly happen –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAD_Tracks_Santa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w70ekCS3J6I
– and realize that, “God” being all-that-is-and-that-is-not, if anything, at all, the only thing God cannot possibly do is to exist, in the sense of standing our from or like all the rest of creation.
Peace and joy, love and laughter.
Tom.
PS: Bill, did you notice that, even while firmly and consistently eschewing attempts at definitions of either “psyche” or “iatry”/healing, and disavowing all spirituality, as psychopharmacologists began to embrace a “bio-psycho-social-spiritual model” of “mental illnesses/disorders,” they quietly de-emphasized “hyperreligiosity” as a supposed “psychiatric symptom?”
And we fell for that!
And, before they lost their nerve and no longer spoke of “double depression” but of “dysthymic disorder.”
And we fell for that!
When I mentioned “personality disorder” to our then 16-year-old, Liz burst out:
“‘PersonALity disorder?!’ Ya can’t have ‘a personaALity disorder!’ Your personality, that’s, like, who you ARE! That’s like, the rudest thing – ever!”
But we fell for that one, too, did we not? Some of us, anyway?
Like an a**hol* is not an a**hol* but has a “narcissistic” or a “borderline personality disorder!”
Or like we came to the right planet with the wrong personality, or to the wrong one with the right one?
And “temperament” no longer exists, at all, at all, of course, any more than does “character!” Abloished!
And, much as “alcoholism” meant you drank more than your doctor, I guess “hyperreligiosity” must have meant that you were more or religious than and/or differently religious from your psychiatrist.
And, as Thomas Szasz pointed out, “gambling disorder” is what used to be called bad luck.
And “burnout”/”physician burnout,” when it affects psychiatrists, who are not ordinary human beings, is not a mental disorder, at all, at all, even though it necessarily contains “depression,” but “a psychological condition!”
Until Science and Medicine thoroughly ridicule, debunk and disassociate themselves from the nonsense that is (contemporary, coercive, Pharma-inspired) Psychiatry, they remain implicated – which is a good thing, if it promotes our general, goodnatured and humorous skepticism about them all, mind you!
Rather than witnessing Science or Medicine ridiculing Psychiatry, however, what we see, instead, is Psychiatry contaminating and corrupting Science, in general, and Medicine, Neuroscience, Psychology and Sociology, in particular – not to mention Neuropsychiatry, of course.
Following her slightly hope-inspiring opening, “I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been DIAGNOSED [my capitals, but with no such hint in either tone or in transcript] with a brain disorder, schizophrenia…”
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight/transcript ,
Jill then referred to her brother’s “schizophrenia” “brain disorder” as a fact, and tells of how she embarked on years of fruitless search for it down microscopes, it seems, before revealing that, to the extent that she, herself, has failed to make her dream part of our common, shared reality, using her own criterion, she, herself, might be…well, we all might, mightn’t we?!
It struck me that the truest statement in all that amazing talk of Jill’s is possibly also the least scientific one – apart from her brother’s “schizophrenia brain disorder:”
“And, right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.”
That comes at approximately Minute 4:33-4:46 of
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight/transcript
I find fascinating how, for the most part, Psychiatry and Religion continue to instinctively adopt a hands-off approach to one another, intuiting the self-destruction they’d risk by openly taking one another on, bringing to (my) mind Jesus’s reported words:
“So the master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.”
– https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2016%3A1-13&version=NKJV
If we would be “sons and daughters of Light,” then I wholeheartedly agree with Mario that we should avoid ad hominen attacks, trusting that each is doing her/his best as best they know how, psychiatrists included, at any moment, and that in this we are all equal.
Funnily enough, in this,
https://jesuit.ie/blog/bill-toner/reflections-on-original-sin/ ,
Jesuit priest Bill Toner refers to Jesuit priest John Moore’s work, on Page 4 of which
https://www.jesuit.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Original-Sin-by-John-Moore-SJ.pdf
(in his point 4.), John refers to a third person’s work in refuting the concept of “Original Sin,” but also, presumably quite unintentionally, pointing a way towards Enlightenment!:
‘4. “It is inconceivable that the flawless pre-fall human life that is postulated could ever have existed”; pain receptors are an essential part of our survival mechanisms and presumably always have been.’
This is really funny when you realize that we humans do not actually possess (peripheral) pain-receptors or nociceptors, so that the way out of our suffering is not through any mind-over-matter approaches but through learning to control our very minds, themselves!
When some scientists wish to investigate the nature of certain subatomic particles, I believe they take an incredibly sophisticated approach – they simply hurl them as hard as they can against others and see what happens to them.
In my crude attempts to investigate what Science might be, I have tried to observe what happens both
(i) When scientists or others try to define what “Science” might be
and
(ii) When Science of any kind collides with such forces/entities as Politics/Power, Money and Religion (with other organized religions, that is).
re (i) “Science is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.”
– from
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/mar/03/science-definition-council-francis-bacon
Clearly, this suggests some real, identifiable, even “?scientific” distinction between “the natural world” and the or a “social world,”without suggesting precisely when we human beings became unnatural – not to mention refusing to entertain the possibility of any Many Worlds or Gaia hypotheses’ having any validity!
Perhaps it was when Eve bit into the Apple, or when we first learned to make tools or fire or to create art or when we retained fight-or-flight reflexes which scientists consider no longer best served our “survival” that we became unnatural, or fell from Grace?
Speaking of Francis Bacon, who is said in that article to have coined the term “science,” on Page xiii of his book “They Flew: A History of the Impossible,”
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280074/they-flew/
Carlos Eire writes:
“As Francis Bacon (1661-1626) once suggested, doubting is essential for inductive reasoning: ‘If a man will begin with certainties,’ he warned, ‘he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.’ Nearly four centuries after Bacon’s death, his warnings apply as much to doubts about the dogmatic scientific materialism he engendered as to doubts about events considered absolutely impossible by that dominant worldview. Bacon might have been peeved or bewildered by this assertion, but it is nonetheless valid.”
Carlos goes on to point out that Bacon’s younger contemporary, Descartes, of “Dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum” (“I doubt, therefore I am — or what is the same — I think, therefore I am”) wrote:
“Everything must be doubted.”
re (ii): Depending on which entity, if either, retains integrity during a collision, we see one or both entities shatter, don’t we, and revelations emerge.
When honest women and men of love, of courage, of conviction, of faith or of honest science, such as Socrates, Jesus or Joan of Arc, or psychiatrists Viktor Frankl (of “Man’s Search for Meaning”), Thomas Szasz, Loren Mosher, Joanna Moncrieff or Pat Bracken, or monks/priests/pastors such as Thích Quảng Đức, Meister Eckhart, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (pastor son of a psychiatrist/neurologist) or Richard Rohr selflessly stand their ground in the face of great challenges, refusing to crumble, worlds change radically for us all, do they not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
As a toxic, claustrophobic egg pushes its chick to break free, may our worlds, now in turmoil, bring us all to Peace.
Peace, Bill!
And thank you!
Tom.
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So in the book of the same title, I was a little bit more explicit. I am vehemently against psychiatry as managed today. The only conciliation is that the biological aspect is important and must not be discarded. In the book I paint a more dystopian picture of the current state of psychiatry. In particular the prevalence of dangerous medication and the over-reaching power of diagnosis of even such normal behavior as grief (I am a psychologist-gerontologist). If my magic wand works I would abolish psychiatry outright. But I do not have that power. I am also aware that psychiatrists and their pharmaceutical industry they are wedded to are the most powerful lobby among us all so far, so we have to work with them. I have written extensive against psychiatry from a more academic perspective especially on Alzheimer’s disease. All available for free http://www.mariogarrett.com
In the short review here, I had to balance the argument to highlight the beliefs aspect in psychiatry.
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I’m trying to hasten the day, when, you understand that the “beliefs aspect in psychiatry” mean that psychiatry is the religion of science….
Psychiatry is a medical religion.
Much of religion can be seen as non-medical psychiatry….
These are only just ideas….
but they are all true….
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Absolutely, but then I would question “truth”. Are we after the ‘hand of god” or what Ian Hacking and Larry Laudan call utility and technology? Just because we can predict does not mean that we know the truth. A cockerel might think he controls the sun with his crowing. I think we were on the right path with “Moral Treatment” it was just taken too far.
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“change is coming as our beliefs have already changed. Most of us have family members, friends, or personal experience with madness. We know that it is not simply a chemical imbalance or a broken brain. We know how the context plays a large role in how we behave. History has taught us that beliefs change first, and the rest follows. Perhaps the cult of curability, a derogatory slight for those who had the vision to believe in a cure, might materialize in this new ecological age.”
Yes, context is everything. Today I reflect on the cheerful, loving, silly and altogether pleasant time I spent with my grandchildren this weekend. Then I looked up at my son and told him that I didnt experience one day of his childhood with his older sibling like this because of the chaotic, manipulative and injurious behaviors his sibling exhibited and subjected us to. Living in That context transformed and warped all our lives to such a degree that all these years later, I am still reeling. And Still astonished being close to other such warm, loving & accepting creatures: my grand children. They don’t let a moment go by without expressing affection and joy for each other, us, or just being alive and reveling in the world.
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Thank you very much indeed for an absolutely enthralling essay!
Now, Mario – or anyone else, please – can attempt to offer us any satisfactory and/or “scientific” definition of sanity or of
“madness,”
disorder,”
“dysfunction,”
or “science,”
even in the context of the above, please, then I, for one, will be extremely grateful, for I, for one, know none.
I happen to view what we call Western Science as another belief system, child of Abramic/Aristotelian religions/philosophies/belief systems.
Whereas dualistic Judaeo-Saulines artificially divide our world into right and wrong, and triadically into divine, human and natural, I see such divisions as entirely artificial – and therefore also, of course, as entirely natural and divine, too.
Whereas what dualistic Western scientists artificially divide our and other lifeforms’ evolution into adaptive and maladaptive, and our worlds and behaviors into orderly and disorderly or chaotic, random and predictable etc. and triadically divide our worlds up into human, animated and inanimate, I view this division…as entirely artificial and therefore entirely natural and divine.
“There is not only one God: there is ONLY God!” some say.
Others assert that there is only Consciousness and the phenomenological world, the Unmanifested and the Manifested, Source and The Rest.
I kind of assume that there may well be Aonsciousness, Bonsciousness et cetera ad et ultra infinitum, also, but I think we might do well to start from where we are and with any attempts to define our crucial terms, to recognize and to address our most basic assumptions, to uncover our presumptions and to ask if all the spiritual teachers, from Lao Tzu to Buddha to Socrates to Jesus to Jung to Tolle who have ever suggested that “madness” a.k.a. “sinfulness” or human suffering is merely spiritual unconsciousness were really so very wrong.
I am already extremely grateful for an extremely insightful essay.
I thank for my my ingratitude –
God’s gracious gift to me –
The God Which dwells inside us all
The God which is To Be.
Peace!
Tom.
“If I knew then what I still don’t know…!?”
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Tom,
A lot of questions, and I can only add more questions. But by discussing, we can focus more tightly on the right answer. I had a hard time defining the topic of madness. Is it mental health, mental disease, behavioral problems, crazy, and at the end, I used the term that patients themselves use, mad and madness. Madness exists, but we still do not know what it is. My solution in the book, not in this short review, was to address the anxiety that it creates. So I do not address the cause only how it is initiated, but not to cure, but to understand it. People who say madness is all a creation of the establishment fail to include the anxiety and problems it creates for the individual and their families.
With an amorphous and nebulous concept, therefore, the beliefs we hold determine how we interpret these complex behaviors and feelings. My interest in beliefs is that it directly influence how we treat the individual.
The theory I eventually settled on is a mismatch one. A learned behavior in a unique context where the context changes, but the behavior doesn’t. This explains schizophrenia quite well and applies to a lot of other conditions. It is a learning issue. There are familial trends that are erroneously labelled as genetic.
As for the definition of science…well, you preempted me as that is my latest study. I am looking at the philosophy of science, from Popper, Kuhn, Laudan, Lakatos, Cartwright, Hacking etc and what I am coming up with is that religion and science are in fact not that different. Strange as I am not religious and have no interest in religion. So I have to say, “watch this space.” More to come.The book will be published this year (I hope.) “Disruptive Scientists in the Shadow.”
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“The social aspect of madness is crucial to understanding the behavior. How we see the cause of madness, our beliefs, dictate how we treat patients.”
Thank you for such a well-balanced & thoughtful article on how our societal beliefs influence the way we understand and treat behaviours that we term “madness.” On a personal level I relate what you write to my own life experiences. When 1st diagnosed with Bipolar & medicated for it, I unquestioningly accepted everything told to me by my doctors & what I read about this “mood disorder.” Accepting that I had a chemical imbalance that needed to be treated with lifelong medication, I blindly accepted that I’d have to be sedated for life & simply accepted that the cognitive dysfunction that came along with the meds was inevitable and that no alternative outcome was possible. After 22 years of living without hope of a different future, I stumbled across literature that said otherwise & learnt that the science underpinning everything my life was based on was not scientific at all. No longer believing that I had a chemical imbalance & that psychiatric drugs were at all necessary, I began a slow taper off them. Fast forward a couple of years and I had gained a new lease on life, achieving a state of cognitive clarity and emotional stability that I had never dreamed would be possible again. Surprisingly, even a psychiatrist decided I had been misdiagnosed with bipolar. My life was no longer defined (and limited) by a psychiatric diagnosis. It was a momentous shift for me, and it all started with a change in my own beliefs about the factors which caused my initial psychotic break. I realise your article addressed how generally held social views about “madness” affects the way we approach it rather than individual views, but I think stories like mine illustrate the excellent points you make. Our behaviours are driven by our thoughts which are shaped by our beliefs. Thank you for your insightful article 🙂
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You made a courageous journey that most falter to accomplish. Every day is a readjustment. Thank you for yoru personal comment.
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“But by discussing, we can focus more tightly on the right answer.”
Like what, or something like what you said, Mario: Thank you very much for this response.
While Science remains indefinable, probably because it does not exist and never can, the scientific method obviously has much to recommend it, and by trying to apply it here now perhaps we may indeed make some progress?
Let us,therefore, start with some incontrovertible known knowns, shall we?
1. “The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
― G.K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of the White Horse.”
2. “There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distill it out…”
— William Shakespeare’s Henry V.
3. Good/Love made God, that Comedian still playing to an audience too scared to laugh.
4. God invented alcohol so that (we) the Irish would not conquer the world (and the Irish so that we would realize a language needs no word for “evil”), and Humour so that the English would (and the English for Julian of Norwich)…
5. …midges (and the Wall) so that the Romans would leave the Irish, the Scottish the Welsh mostly alone to continue as funloving criminals in spite of “Christianity”/Saulianity…
6…and Patrick (the Wall) and Howard (the Schubiner) so that we would remember that doctors are not really evil, even if we cannot trust them all, yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvogKDr_NzM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYK7utae7Cg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qINdA6E14Sk
7. Oh, and the French so that we’d have a language with no word for “mind” or for “madness,” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Jehanne d’Arc, Jean-Marie Vianney, later “Jean-Marie-Baptiste” Vianney (8 May 1786 – 4 August 1859, Le Curé d’Ars (pronounced “arse”)….and Quebec,
https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/smq/2015-v40-n2-smq02067/1033041ar/ – Quebec being for great beauty etc. and for
“La folie, c’est de n’avoir pas d’autres normes que soi-même:”
“Madness is Conforming to One’s Own Norms, and No Others.”
In short, perhaps madness is merely temporary humourlessness: When we laugh, we get it; when we don’t, we don’t- yet: Comedy = Tragedy + Time?
If you agree, then perhaps we may proceed?
Much love, mirth and music: Comfort and Joy!
Tom.
Festina lente!
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Ah!! but there is a problem with such mirth! The individual is distressed. There is an internal balance that has been tipped. We love harmony even in madness. We like everything to have its tone, its balance, that fits nicely into an order. Look at all philosophers and the core message is that there is some music out there in the universe that we fail to listen to, But is that real? Or are we yearning for order because that is how our little brains can comprehend the immensity and complexity of the multi-universe?
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Wow, that is downright poetic! Thank you, Mario!
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I watched the videos. I have nothing but respect for physicians and psychiatrists. The system they are in, especially for psychiatrists, is, however, based on a house of cards. Even physicians in other specialties look down on psychiatrists. The problem is Critical Theory, meaning that the institutions themselves are established in such a way as to switch priorities from cure/care to managing conditions. Not by choice but by historical precedence. In the 1900s, from one speciality arose: psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology. Each marked their turf by distinct and exclusive methodologies, biology, subconscious, and learning. However, now we know that all three methods are needed.
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Nope. Wrong again, Garrett. Neither the fraudulent pseudoscience of psychiatry, nor the culture-specific HUMAN VOICE ART of “psychoanalysis” are valid sciences. Psychology might legitimately claim some scientific validity, or at least honestly tries to….But psychiatry only ever lies, and psychoanalysis just flat out fabricates from a social construct….
NONE of them are “needed”, except maybe some psychology, ok?….
Please stop your impotent defense of psychiatry. Or at least try to be more honest about it….
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I think you are misconstruing my argument. I am not protecting psychiatrists, especially what they do. In this short article, this is what I had to say ” With the eventual dominance of the pharmaceutical industry, psychiatry became subsumed as a pusher of drugs.”
So now we get to the pseudoscience aspect of your argument. Here again, I think you misinterpret my writing. I have itemized all the “therapies” that were banned in psychiatry and related them to a belief system at the time. Just as today’s belief system will also change, as it already is. I like to argue and discuss, but please refrain from ad hominem insults of dishonesty.
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That’s some progress towards understanding, Garrett. And nope, my criticisms are not “ad hominem”, nor are they intended as “insults”. I’m discussing “principles, before personalities”, a la A.A.’s 12 Steps. I’m not saying that you’re “protecting psychiatrists” at all.
2 comments above, you write, “I have nothing but respect for psychiatrists and physicians”. Then, a few lines later, discussing psychoanalysis, psychology, & psychiatry in toto, you write, “However now we know that all 3 methods are needed.”
Apparently, you still see psychiatry as valid & needed. I’m saying that psychiatry is NEITHER valid, NOR needed….
My hope is that RFKjr stays in office long enough to excise the toxic
social infection which is psychiatry, i.e., “21st Century Phrenology, with potent neuro-toxins”.
I claim that psychiatry has done, and continues to do, FAR MORE HARM than good. And I know because I’m a surviving victim of it….
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Bill Bradford,
Maybe you are right. I do not know what the best approach is. My intention is to take what works and make it contribute to the solution. I understand that psychiatry has and continues to hurt a lot of people. Especially with numbing medication that is dangerous to taper off. They also control treatment and, through the DSM, reimbursement. So they are the main players. I appreciate that desperate people want revolutions, but revolutions mix the cards and leave the main players at the table. What we need is to change the public’s beliefs. We can only do that by providing a coherent narrative. I have some ideas, and you have some ideas too. We are on the same side, except we disagree (it seems) on specifics. That is good. Perhaps I will learn from your experiences.
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For one thing, I don’t use the deliberately deceptive euphemisms of “meds” & “medications”. Drugs are drugs are drugs are drugs are drugs…..There is NO legitimate medical evidence that ANY psych drug actually “treats” any so-called “mental illness”. But I’m not an absolutist. Yes, sometimes, some people do seem to do better, for some length of time, on some drugs. Sometimes. Some people. Some drugs. Some – usually short – length of time. But the “standard of care” for psychiatry is “lifetime polypharmacy”. That’s NOT “healthcare”, that’s a DRUG RACKET. For money, power, and control.
Do you know about the “Flexner Report”, and “Rockefeller medicine”? That’s a college course worth of rabbit hole research in itself…. Breggin’s book “Toxic Psychiatry” is almost 35 years old now. That’s just a primer, really.
As for “revolution”, no, I’m no radical revolutionary. Simply a man who loves the truth. However inconvenient that may be….And I remain dismayed at the levels of ignorance, arrogance, deceit, greed, and human evil in the world etc.,….
MiA used to have a feature, where you could click on a commenter’s name, and read their comment history, but it seems to have been broken for a year or 2….I’ve got 100’s of comments here, and it contains much of my “psychiatry bio”. Feel free…
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This application does not allow me to reply to your specific comment, but I can here. Absolutely agree.”There is NO legitimate medical evidence that ANY psych drug actually “treats” any so-called “mental illness.” Even the new dementia drugs that clear the plaques and tangles are a sham. As pointed out, some people find some help from these drugs, but my argument (which I make in the book), so does alcohol and smoking, but I do not expect it to be my prescription.
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Yes, like everything I have seen Mario write, a beauty boundless and unique…humble, loving, curious and questioning….
But, Mario, mind and brains….psyche and soul…
Our thinking minds may struggle with all sorts of suppose problems, but our minds are surely just tiny drips in the oceans of our Consciousness, and that Consciousness/Awareness, itself, may be the very thing/nothing/empty, formless spaciousness into which our multi-verse is expanding, don’t you think – and that Peace truly IS possible on realizing this?
And, btw, I insist that “mental illness does not CAUSE anxiety: It IS anxiety.
And “clinical depression” does not cause feelings of hopelessness/despair; It IS hopelessness/despair.
MORE, PLEASE!
Thank you.
Tom.
“The sooner you fall behind, the longer you have to catch up:” “When you come to a fork in the road, take it;” “If this world were perfect, it wouldn’t be!”
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Absolutely, “mental illness does not CAUSE anxiety: It IS anxiety. And “clinical depression” does not cause feelings of hopelessness/despair; It IS hopelessness/despair. These are existential thoughts. Thank you for the excellent quote as well, I love this: “If this world were perfect, it wouldn’t be!”
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All credit to Yogi Berra for “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” and for “If this world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
Yogi may have grasped that his world/s, or our world/s/parallel universes/multiverse (“In my [elsewhere “our”] Father’s house are many mansions…) can only be so very much better than utopian as long as they remain endlessly perfectible – an understanding that John Steinbeck might not have rejected, given his 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
“The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit — for gallantry in defeat — for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck
We may all be on an endless road to nowhere*, but there may be no limits, at all, to the fun we can all create for one another along the way, whether or not we believe it to be endless…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYA_0R7Vw1s
So very, very glad and grateful to have met MIA and all herein along this road, thank you.
Much love.
Tom.
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbnBe-vXGQM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2aWjH7iNg8
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This is when I wish there was a LIKE button!
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“You cannot reason with bad spirits; they only react to violence, and hence we get the draconian treatment of madness of the Middle Ages.”
Interestingly, though, at least according to the canonical Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth, himself, though he preached driving out demons with faith/hope/love, and achieved many “miracles” of physical healing by doing just that, repeatedly succumbed to provocation and was disastrously drawn into at least some of the negativity/demons he encountered.
On these pages here, however, I believe we have witnessed yet another loving light remain steadfastly loving in the face of challenge and demonstrating the immense power of doing so.
If, as is suggested to me, at least, by John 14:12, we can learn from Jesus’s reported lapses and so do better than him when under great pressure and feeling like buking, rebuking or being downright rude to people, then we sure as Hell’s here on Earth don’t need any religion to do so – other than acknowledging Our Shared Consciousness/”the Divine” in each and every one of us?
Namaste!
And thank you – everyone.
Tom.
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