Is Our Society Mentally Ill?

Western society seems to be mass producing mentally troubled and ill people, and it has been since it became “modern”. Not too long after the advent of the Industrial Revolution society itself became a factory for neurotics and what back then were called neurasthenics, people who were broken down to a state of depression and dysfunctionality by the stress of working and living conditions in 19th century industrial cities.

Indeed, judging by the number of people in therapy today, by the billions of dollars of revenue that pharmaceutical companies make from drugs like Prozac, by all the schizophrenics living on the streets, and by the masses of people who are just vaguely unhappy, modern society is not very good for one’s mental health!

Sure, today materialistic medical science is promoting the idea that our mental states and psychiatric disorders are entirely organic, that they’re due to brain chemistry and defects. And materialistic biologists reductively chalk the brain and its chemistry up to genetics and evolution. But be that as it may, people do have life experiences and exist in a social environment that their genetically hardwired brains process. And what our brains are made to process can and does affect the processor. Our environment matters, it’s not irrelevant to our mental well-being.

Anyone who’s survived growing up in an abusive household knows quite well that your environment affects your emotional condition and mental development. Abuse and what it does to its victims is just an extreme example of the fact that how the world treats us can profoundly influence our psyches. And the citizens of modern, “developed”, urbanized, overpopulated, socially alienating, and denaturalized societies are certainly not being treated very well by the lifeworld they’ve been thrown into.

Our high-powered, high-pressure, dog-eat-dog socio-economic system is one big stressor, triggering and exacerbating nervous disorders and breakdowns, and all manner of psychological aberrations. Like a child who’s grown up in a dysfunctional home we know nothing else and take the unnatural stress and strain of our way of life for granted, we naively take it to be normal. But this doesn’t prevent the stress and strain from adversely impacting our consciousness, our personality, and our mental fitness, just as a wronged child’s ignorance of what life should be doesn’t protect it from the toll that abuse takes. Whether we appreciate it or not, to one degree of another we’re all suffering from the mass socio-psychological abuse of modernity.

The symptoms of our suffering can manifest as anxiety, depression, fatigue, phobias, or just an underlying dissatisfaction with our lives. And frequently our response is self-medication, hence society’s drug problem, which feeds into social ills such as gangs and drug-related crime. It’s all interconnected, and it all goes back to the unnaturalness and unhealthiness of our modern existence.

Of course we often prefer to judge individuals who are failing to thrive in our society, judge them as dysfunctional and/or socially maladjusted losers. We do so because our egos get a nice payoff from this, evaluating others as life-failures gives our petty egos an enjoyable rush of superiority. So we let our society off the hook and cruelly sink the hook into its soul-sick victims.

As if there should be no maladjusted individuals in a maladjusted society! As if an unbalanced mode of life isn’t going to produce plenty of unbalanced people. Ours is a crazy-making society but we stay in denial about this by keeping our focus on individuals and holding them totally accountable for their mental problems.

Nowhere is this tendency to wrongly and moralistically assign blame to the mentally ill more unfair and egregious than in the so-called criminal justice system, where seriously impaired people who fail to meet the law’s strict definition of “insanity” routinely get punished for acting out their mental illness. Society produces weird and deranged people and then keeps them in check by locking them up. Not too brilliant, but it keeps an incompetent society from imploding.

So, the way it works is profoundly unjust, it’s the body politic, body economic, and body sociologic itself that’s sick, but it’s we the people who bear the mental pain and anguish of living in an ailing system. And the powers that be in our society show no interest in rectifying this demented state of affairs. Of course they don’t, because they enjoy their economically and politically powerful and privileged status in society, it’s not in their pragmatic interest to try to socially engineer a better form of life for their fellow man.

If we’re ever going to create a saner and more livable system it’s going to take a from-the-bottom-up people’s movement, it’s not something we can realistically expect the folks at the top to do for us. What we need to do is simple, we need to create new gemeinschaft communities, in which people are really a part of each other’s lives, in which the spirit is “one for all, all for one”, rather than “Every man for himself”; as opposed to our current gesellschaft society in which most people have no sense of a connection with their neighbors, let alone the rest of society, in which cold, hard self-interest is the only motivation for being a productive member of one’s community.

When our forbears chose to embrace the selfish ethos of capitalism they chose to take the wrong fork in the road of history, they chose the gesellschaft form of society, and the result today is a society full of unfulfilled and unwell people. We need to backtrack a bit and get back on the path to a more interdependent, solidaritous, mutually caring way of being together. We need to grow communities in which we keep each other strong, rather than competing and seeking to take advantage of each other’s weaknesses.

Let me make it clear though, what I mean by “backtracking” is not returning to a more primitive existence, rather what I mean is rediscovering pre-capitalist values, such as quality as opposed to quantity, fulfillment as opposed to profit, and spirituality as opposed to greed as a philosophy of life. And I do also mean getting back to nature to some extent, to a more natural lifestyle that our brains were evolved for. For example, so-called primitive people probably just worked twenty hours a week compared to forty-six and up for the citizens of modern societies. We moderns have taken on a workload that evolution quite simply did not design us for! We need to design communities in which the individual’s workload can be significantly reduced. This alone should be much easier on our brains and make us less prone to stress-related issues.

The reality of our lot is that our current system of society is set up to enormously benefit a small percentage of people at the top of its economic-political hierarchy, and to make life fairly comfortable but inwardly empty for a dwindling middle class, and of course barely tolerable for a much larger percentage of folks at the bottom of the heap. Such a reality should and would be unacceptable to most of us if we weren’t indoctrinated to resign ourselves to it, and to identify, against our own interests, with those at the pinnacle of all that capitalist prosperity that doesn’t exactly quite trickle down to the rest of us like manna.

And, alas, the unjust socio-economic reality that we learn to resign ourselves to does hurt us on the inside, it does negatively affect everything from our sense of self to our sense of reality, to our sense of joy. If we’re ever to have a mental health-enhancing, happiness-enhancing, and humanity-enhancing civilization we’re going to have to undertake to give our society a pretty darn extensive makeover. Extensive from the inside out, from our values and view of life to our economic system and status quo.

http://www.spiritualsolutionsnow.com

 

Unless you call this normal:

http://ahabit.com/normal

 

Veteran psychiatrist calls liberals mentally ill

Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by both Barack Obama and his Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton can only be understood as a psychological disorder.

"A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do," he says. "A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation's citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do."

"The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind," he says. "When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."

Source: Veteran psychiatrist calls liberals mentally ill http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=56494#ixzz1fLAFo3HE

 

It's a free country. You are free to choose your own lifestyle. We do not need a government or collective solution.

Go build yourself a teepee and live the simple life.

 

Everything I have read suggests yes, depression and anxiety related mental disorders are solely a product of modern industrial society and the isolation of individuals, and the breakdown of the extended familial and community support system. But what can you do when we are so entrenched in this lifestyle?

In my opinion, and based on what I have read there is only one way to fight these neurosis: surround yourself with people you love and respect and be charitable and supportive of them, eat right and exercise regularly and learn to relax and be happy that you have the opportunity to exist in the bizarre miracle called human existence.

 

I am sorry but you have not- and probably will not- have a suitable response to your OP apart from the grunt made from the grunts as you prod them with long poles for an illicited response from the masses.

The key is to be at peace with yourself and to attain that, you must live a righteous life- bereft of badness. Once free of bad intention, it is easy to live a simple life.

People used to live simple lives- then cities came. Cities masses all the goods and services into one place with the winners going for the highest bid amongst a mass of people. And as cities grew, so did a new thing: suburbs: people who live outside the city but work from the city and benefit from it- it's a horse cart's drive away.

America today is one giant suburb with outlying regions called rural places. And in the interests of the cities, it is their right to visit the suburbs and expect the red carpet treatment. Except for certain places, you're always there.

The key is to be here- to make yourself the center. And at your center is a certalized life; a balance of things that allows one to live a normal, healthy life. They could be shooting each other to death outside your window- the point is to be at peace with yourself- the rest will work itself out.

"Don't panic!"- D. Adams

 

I am sorry but you have not- and probably will not- have a suitable response to your OP apart from the grunt made from the grunts as you prod them with long poles for an illicited response from the masses.

The key is to be at peace with yourself and to attain that, you must live a righteous life- bereft of badness. Once free of bad intention, it is easy to live a simple life.

People used to live simple lives- then cities came. Cities masses all the goods and services into one place with the winners going for the highest bid amongst a mass of people. And as cities grew, so did a new thing: suburbs: people who live outside the city but work from the city and benefit from it- it's a horse cart's drive away.

America today is one giant suburb with outlying regions called rural places. And in the interests of the cities, it is their right to visit the suburbs and expect the red carpet treatment. Except for certain places, you're always there.

The key is to be here- to make yourself the center. And at your center is a certalized life; a balance of things that allows one to live a normal, healthy life. They could be shooting each other to death outside your window- the point is to be at peace with yourself- the rest will work itself out.

"Don't panic!"- D. Adams

 

I can only agree with jmpet - we live in a vastly different time than most of human history. While our ancestors harvested crops and lived in small villages, we currently have an industrialized society. It is very demanding and complicated, and honestly I can see how one would become overwhelmed and depressed.

I for one am not an expert on the subject, but I do know that the industrialized west has a much, much higher depression rate than the developing countries such as China and India. I know that Japan has the highest suicide rate for one thing.

See, first world countries have different health problems than third world countries. While people in America and Europe are dying of cancer and heart disease, people in Africa and China are dying of parasitic infections and starvation.

One final thing I have to add is that one thing I have noticed about ourselves is that we tend to dwell on the negatives, especially in America. We're always grumpy and stressed because we concentrate on it. It's partly the reason, I think, that we are the way we are. We are a superpower, a hegemony, but yet for some reason everyone is scared and pissed off all the time. We have a military larger than any single country in the world, are part of a massive military alliance (NATO), and have allies across the world, but yet everyone is wetting their pants over such little things in this country it's laughable. I still remember one time when Glenn Beck was about ready to crap his pants, ranting about how all the countries in revolt during the Arab Spring were going to join as one Islamist Caliphate and take over the West. He had guests on the show saying that there was no way that Saudi Arabia was going to resist pressure from the outside protestors, and that the price of oil was going to spike upon the fall of the Saudis (playing off of the high price of oil during the Libyan turmoil) and then the US was going to collapse. Of course, every current piece of news has to be skewed into a possible scenario for US economic and political collapse, in order to keep the uninformed viewer on the edge of his or her seat.

Anyway, what I was saying was that we are a hegemony because of this push to have more because life sucks otherwise. Yet, we are depressed because we are always dwelling on the bad. We can't see that we have one of the highest standards of living in the world (4th globally). We still think that our little problems are a lot of work. I know that there are plenty of people who would realize how extremely lucky we are in this country if they tried to live in a village in Niger for a week or two. I haven't done that but I know how hard they have it there and I'm forever grateful I was born here.

 

I believe you are correct.

As long as our society places more value on the acquisition of wealth instead of the promotion of human happiness, we will continue our disintegration. Even the Founding Fathers of the USA spoke of the 'pursuit of happiness'. Wealth has little to do with happiness.

The 'Us vs Them' mentality exemplified in a previous post is a symptom of that disintegration. Co-operation is the key to building a better society. Conflict can only ever be destructive. Neurosis blooms with conflict and isolation.

 

The mass media thrives on and promotes conflict and causes people to dwell on and be disturbed by the bad things around them. The advertising industry exists to promote dissatisfaction with what we have. Dissatisfied people don't have time to be grateful for what they have, they are too busy trying to acquire what they are told will make them happy.

 

90% of alcoholics come from alcoholic homes...

Do you inherit your parent's mental illness?
Tue, 10 May 2016 - In the battle to find what causes mental illness, scientists are increasingly looking at genetic factors. For James Longman - whose father killed himself after suffering from schizophrenia - it's a very personal question.

See also:

Five signs that you're being emotionally abused
Wed, 11 May 2016 - Hashtag starts conversation about mistreatment in relationships.

 

Old thread, but I have to agree.

Pretty soon, the only people left who can still function without going insane or being on meds will be those with an absurdly high tolerance for boredom, simple-mindedness, and pathological OCD. The obsessive hand-washers, who used to be crazy, are now taking over society. People think this era is ushering in creativity, but they are completely wrong. Only a tiny fraction of the population needs creativity, but the ability to thrive in highly structured, boring environments is a must. I also predict that people become more timid, and the drop in crime rates may actually be related to the bolder, less obedient types dying out over time.

Evolution happens very quickly during bottlenecks like this.

 

Good to wake up an old thread with valid perspective on an old problem that has gotten worse.

Americans are psychologically, spiritually corrupted and maladjusted because the PURPOSE of free speech is not only abridged, free speech is abused by commerce so widely that our DNA is confounded.

Our instincts have no where to go except crazy.

None of the natural expressions of mentally healthful sociological reactions are effective upon each other.

An example is found in this forum.

I'm posting in threads with valid information that because of the facts of the information, we are going to go extinct. No one argues otherwise. Simultaneously I am presenting a solution which restores the purpose of free speech and secures our rights and freedom while obviously both are being compromised more with each day.

Here is the clincher.

As the beginning of the solution, to initiate its function, I propose we only need to make an agreement upon definition of constitutional intent.

And no one takes the opportunity to agree

Do you agree and accept that the framers of the founding documents intended for us to alter or abolish government destructive to our unalienable rights?

Do you agree and accept that the ultimate purpose of free speech is to enable the unity adequate to effectively alter or abolish?

And no one (any longer) tries to argue against the definitions of prime constitutional intent. Arguing against the obvious looks too bad.

Because of the dynamic corruptions imposed with media unconsciously through the surreptitious use of SEMIOTICS, peoples instincts have been invoked with a circularity that numbs them to awareness of needs while exploiting wants and desires that are not possible to truly and meaningfully fulfill.

That defines a DEAD END for our instincts. Such a state is not acceptable so mental issues develop.

 

Is our society mentally ill?

I don't know what else would account for someone like Trump being considered for the presidency

 

It is not a free society. If you build a teepee, it will be condemned for not having utilities. You will be arrested if you stay in it.

You are not free to live life how you want. When you have sex on a college campus, you must ask permission for every touch and get a yes answer or else it is sexual assault. Oh, most women won't report it, but a few will if you break up with them when they don't want to be broken up with.

You can't overturn the rule in courts because you don't "have standing". You first must be convicted before you may sue. By that time your credibility is gone, as is your money.

 

Considering how mentally ill people were treated in the past, they are very lucky to libe their mental illness in the present days.

 

Good analysis of the impacts upon the societies psychological states as a development spanning about 100 years. Good to see other descriptions of epigenetics.

The infiltration of the federal government got it all set up for what media and corporate consumerism did to peoples thinking, feeling and actions. And government refuses to engage even the first steps of helping the people recover.

Look to the courts and law enforcement inability to recognize, follow and uphold laws relating to developing effective mental health care.



The subpoenaed evidence would have proven something that could force psychology to oppose the church/state licensure authority. That would have been happening by 2000. But no, failure to appear is okay when pleadings are filed indicating homicides and suicides were caused by missing records subpoenaed. Evidence proving that other court records were absent. This declaration show the records were in possession of the county a year earlier.



The sheriffs dept lied in the letter at the direction of the county counsel.

How 'bout that ! Public law enforcement employees paid to violate laws then collude to lie about it! Evading compliance with health and safety code, drug and alcohol, effective mental health care. The entities both collectively obstructing justice, and judges are okay with it.

Here's a woman judge ignoring a huge mound of evidence showing a part time meth lab, hah, "fire in bed of pickup parked at curb," in a house where I rented a room. See the declarations of other tenants submitted to the court.

http://algoxy.com/law/ud.glenbrook/sbmethcook+court.html

Ever since the US military has been in Afghanistan heroin has gotten much more available and much cheaper. There is a history of this.
Remember the bodies of dead soldiers returning from Vietnam filled with bags of heroin?

Here's s letter from Santa Barbara counties top mental health professional showing a defacto approval of a potentially effective, new treatment. Actually old treatment, 1970's, shunned by church interests controlling gov.



A FOIA was ignored for that "written response". Filed with the clerk of the board after serving on supervisors, then disappeared, then re filed.



Then I try to get the paper to do a story about a federal law suit and history of law violation by Santa Barbara county related to the development of effective mental health.

http://algoxy.com/law/no_free_press/sbsecretsofmedia.html

17 reporters and editors fired, then gagged starting 2 weeks after dropping off a copy of the lawsuit to a reporter of the santa barbara newspress



The district court secretly revised 1885 local court rules providing justice to pro se civil rights suits about 6 months prior and the new judge our suit should have gotten didn't happen.

This is gov violating law Immorally, unethically and illegally evading development of effective mental health care that could help addicts stop themselves.

Your points are very well made.
The problem is far, far greater than is easy to portray because we are the only solution but we hav become so filled with hopelessness that simple agreements like these defining constitutional intent making "the people the rightful masters of the congress and the court" cannot be made and acted upon socially.

Do you agree and accept that the framers of the founding documents intended for us to alter or abolish government destructive to our unalienable rights?

Do you agree and accept that the ultimate purpose of free speech is to enable the unity adequate to effectively alter or abolish?

Meaning we cannot see enough justice done to impel the changes it is our right to make.

The problem starts at the top, so discourse on fixing it needs to begin with authority GREATER than the top of government. That is us, the people. We need to understand then use our lawful and peaceful revolution.

 

LOL!

Not at all.

 

Do you agree and accept that the framers of the founding documents intended for us to alter or abolish government destructive to our unalienable rights?

Do you agree and accept that the ultimate purpose of free speech is to enable the unity adequate to effectively alter or abolish?

Are those the questions you are answering?

 

Pre-industrial life was horrible for most people. I would be amazed if modern Americans have more mental illness that is found in pre-industrial societies.

 

Are the questions at top those you are responding to with your post?

 

It was the OP.

 

Agreed, but as you say, this is a bottleneck. For all I know, Soylent Green may become reality, but I have a bit more faith in humanity. Change is indeed occurring at an accelerated rate, or at least appears to be, but historically, our lifetimes are but a tiny blip on the timeline. Indeed, the history of urban industrialization is a small fraction of civilization as a whole. I think we're still figuring it out. Democracy, individual liberty and economic libertarianism are relatively new phenomena. Our nation is in its infancy. The era of globalization has just been born. I think we will adapt, but it won't happen overnight.

 

I produced a video about living in the "highly structured" environments that we are going to need if we continue toxifying the vital elements. It was made as a "video response" for gulf oil videos.

Worse than boring life in order to have pure air.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7G_tICDWp-U

 

Was waiting for the hilariously bent punchline after all that wall o text windup. Certainly didn't disappoint.

1. In the US, all strata of our society have more than we have ever had at all levels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebmhTQN-4

(as many times as I and others have linked the above, it is always entirely ignored)

Yeah, our CHILDREN have more purchasing power than 80% of the world's countries have GDP. We have whole industries devoted to entertaining them that simply didn't exist in the recent past. Our "casual dining" didn't exist. Our shopping malls didn't exist. Other industries that depend on middle class wealth to exist simply didn't just a short few decades ago. So the premise of the wall o text OP is irredeemably stupid. We do not live in a society that is set up to "enormously benefit a small percentage of people at the top." We live in a society where I have 90% of the things that Bill Gates has, and have 0 need for the other 10%.

I mean really, how much better is a tech billionaire's smartphone than mine? Not much. How much better are the movies and television they watch than mine? Not much. How much better their internet and cars? Not much. How much better is the food and beverage they drink than mine? Not much. Yet the resentment lie narrative rears its head again in this OP despite being torn to shreds by FACTS in thread after thread here.

Frankly it's DISGUSTING that ANYONE of ANY STRATA in the US or many Western countries could possibly complain about "wealth inequality" or their material lot in life, the height of arrogance in lands where even the poor have so much compared to other parts of the world.

2. Turning to the other side of the coin, we are undoubtedly unhappy, but capitalism didn't "do that." Centralized control and dependence by a nannyish, feminist, effeminate, gynocentric gov-edu-union-contractor-grantee-MSM Complex did. I've seen stats that over 50% of US women are on some kind of antidepressants... and these aren't "the poor" either. Modern women in the US and elsewhere in the West are the most socially and legally spoiled creatures in the history of humanity, the beneficiaries of mountains of discriminatory social practices and principles, and inexplicably the most unhappy. Did capitalism do that? Nope, we haven't been anything resembling a "capitalist" country for decades, but rather at least 50% mixed. It's not just women that are miserable, that is just the most glaring example. As our culture becomes more and more effeminate, sentimental and hard-wired towards "feelz," we all become more miserable because we are wallowing in emotionality and feelings, economics has little to do with it. But yeah, sure, that misery simply must be due to the fact that I have a miracle machine in my home that costs $60 a month that made someone into a billionaire... that's gotta be it.

I have lots to say on this topic, but enough for now and have to head to the gym. Will be interesting to see if any causal or correlative facts linking depression and societal malaise to "capitalism" will emerge because they haven't yet. Yeah, LW gothy, feely SJW whingers, that's a CHALLENGE.

EDIT: EH sorry for getting on the necro chain, was busy and didn't look at the date. WHY do certain posters here feel it necessary to necro ancient threads instead of simply starting new ones. How do they even find them? By searching the forum for "capitalist misery?" LOL.