Has American Society Gone Insane?

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet. Posted September 11, 2008.

America's mental health problems may be more than a matter of some
"unadjusted" individuals. The entire culture might well need
adjusting.

For many Americans who gain their information solely from television,
all critics of psychiatry are Scientologists, exemplified by Tom
Cruise spewing at Matt Lauer, "You don't know the history of
psychiatry. ... Matt, you're so glib." The mass media has been highly
successful in convincing Americans to associate criticism of
psychiatry with anti-drug zealots from the Church of Scientology, the
lucrative invention of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

However, Americans who gain their information outside of television
and beyond the mass media may be aware of a secular, progressive
tradition that is critical of how psychiatry has diverted us from
examining societal sources of our malaise. This secular, humanistic
concern was articulated, perhaps most famously, by the psychoanalyst
Erich Fromm (1900-1980).

In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote, "Yet many psychiatrists and
psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may
be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a
society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and
not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself."

Is American society a healthy one, and are those having difficulties
adjusting to it mentally ill? Or is American society an unhealthy one,
and are many Americans with emotional difficulties simply alienated
rather than ill? For Fromm, "An unhealthy society is one which creates
mutual hostility (and) distrust, which transforms man into an
instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a
sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an
automaton." Fromm viewed American society as an increasingly unhealthy
one, in which people routinely experience painful alienation that
fuels emotional and behavioral difficulties.

Unlike Tom Cruise, Fromm would not have been terribly upset that
actress Brooke Shields found happiness in antidepressants. No
genuinely humanistic critic of psychiatry believes that adults who
choose prescription psychotropic drugs should be mocked or shamed, or
prohibited from using them. Rather, humanist critics of establishment
psychiatry advocate for informed choice about all treatments.

The essential confrontation for Fromm is not about psychiatric drugs
per se (though he would be sad that so many Americans nowadays,
especially children, are prescribed psychotropic drugs in order to fit
into inhospitable environments). His essential confrontation was
directed at all mental health professionals -- including
non-prescribers such as psychologists, social workers and counselors
-- who merely assist their patients to adjust but neglect to validate
their patients' alienation from society.

Those comfortably atop societal hierarchies have difficulty
recognizing that many American institutions promote helplessness,
passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, alienation and dehumanization for
those not at the top. One-size-fits-all schools, the corporate
workplace, government bureaucracies and other giant, impersonal
institutions routinely promote manipulative relationships rather than
respectful ones, machine efficiency rather than human pride,
authoritarian hierarchies rather than participatory democracy,
disconnectedness rather than community, and helplessness rather than
empowerment.

In The Sane Society, Fromm warned, "Today the function of psychiatry,
psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the
manipulation of man. The specialists in this field tell you what the
'normal' person is, and, correspondingly, what is wrong with you; they
devise the methods to help you adjust, be happy, be normal."

In the "adjust and be happy" sense, there is commonality between
establishment mental health professionals and Scientologists. Neither
Dr. Phil nor Tom Cruise are exactly rebels against the economic status
quo; and their competing self-help programs, though different, are
similar in that they instruct people on how to adjust, be happy and be
normal within our economic system.

The source of the mutual hostility between psychiatry and the Church
of Scientology, as depicted by the mass media, centers around
psychotropic drug use; but my sense is that the root cause of their
feud is a fierce competition between them. Both establishment
psychiatry and Scientology are competing for the same people -- those
more comfortable with authority, dogma and insider jargon than with
critical thinking.

Both the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and psychiatry's DSM (the
official diagnostic manual in which mental illnesses are voted in and
out by elite psychiatrists) have much more to do with dogma than
science. Both Scientology and psychiatry embrace science fiction
technobabble that poses as scientific fact. In Scientology's
"auditing," the claim is that the Hubbard Electropsychometer (E-Meter)
can assess the reactive mind of the "preclear" by passing a small
amount of voltage through a pair of tin-plated tubes that look like
empty soup cans wired to the E-Meter and held by the preclear. But
psychiatry is no more scientifically relevant, as its trendy
chemical-imbalance theories of mental illness have shelf-lives of
about a decade, with establishment psychiatry most recently having
retreated from both its serotonin-deficiency theory of depression and
the excessive-dopamine theory of schizophrenia.

While Scientology can claim auditing adherents, and psychiatry can
claim even more antidepressant advocates, neither treatment has been
shown to be consistently superior to a placebo. And rather than
validating their treatments with legitimate science performed by
independent, financially unbiased scientists, both Scientology and
psychiatry rely on what amounts to a well-funded public relations
apparatus.

Scientology and establishment psychiatry have something else in
common. They are both orthodoxies that deal harshly with their
ex-insiders who have come to reject them. Currently, psychiatry is the
more prevailing orthodoxy, and, as George Orwell explained, the
mainstream press does not challenge a prevailing orthodoxy. Orwell
wrote, "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas
which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without
question. ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds
himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely
unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in
the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

It is my experience that psychiatry, Scientology and fundamentalist
religions are turnoffs for genuinely critical thinkers. Critical
thinkers are not so desperate to adjust and be happy that they ignore
adverse affects -- be they physical, psychological, spiritual or
societal. Critical thinkers listen to what others have to say while
considering their motives, especially financial ones; and they discern
how one's motivation may distort one's assumptions.

A critical thinker would certainly not merely accept without analysis
Fromm's and my conclusion that American society is insane in terms of
healthy human development. Perhaps a society should not be labeled
insane just because it is replete with schools that turn kids off to
reading, for-profit prisons that need increasingly more inmates for
economic growth, a mass media that is dishonest about threats to
national security, trumped-up wars that so indebt a society that it
cannot provide basic health care, a for-profit health care system that
exploits illness rather than promoting health, et cetera.

A critical thinker would most certainly point out that there have been
societies far less sane than the United States -- and Erich Fromm made
himself absolutely clear on this point. In the barbaric German society
that Fromm fled, disruptive children who couldn't fit into
one-size-fits-all schools were not forced to take Adderall and other
amphetamines, but instead their parents handed them over to
psychiatrists to be euthanized. Fromm, however, knew that just because
one could point to societies less sane than the United States, this
did not make the United States a sane, humanistic society.

Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of
Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy,
and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007).