SHRINKING
THE SHRINK
And
while the numbers vary, it is conservatively estimated that
on a yearly basis as many as 750,000 Canadians will consult
a psychiatrist. Of the many more with mental health problems,
30% are sufficiently stigmatized by the social implications
of requiring psychiatric treatment that they refuse to go; the
remainder opt for alternative therapies. As far as I know, none
of the above has sought the counsel of a philosopher, forcing
the conclusion that troubled Canadians are either immune to
philosophical problems or deem their problems not of a philosophical
nature.
In
light of the dark fact that the philosopher, to all intents
and purposes, has been banished from public life, how is it
that we, en masse, have come to view our mindaches
as miseries that should be submitted to the care of psychiatry
and not philosophy, and does this (mis)perception bear on the
increasing number of Canadians undergoing psychoanalysis?
The
discipline of philosophy is 2,500 years older than psychiatry,
and yet the latter, in a mere century, has come to be seen as
the exclusive arbiter of problems, many of which once belonged
to philosophy proper. How did philosophy fall into such disrepute
and desuetude, or, flipping the 24-carat gold coin, how do we
account for psychiatry’s swift ascendancy? Could it be
that when the latter was in its infancy, it had the presence
of mind to align itself with science, whose pedigree and methodology
promise answers and solutions to our seemingly intractable problems?
If I’m trying to get from one day to the next, how can
philosophy, which leisurely investigates the largest questions
of life with a deliberate emphasis on the asking and refinement
of the question, compete with psychiatry that offers in equal
parts comfort and cure? Small wonder that philosophy came to
be viewed as a waste of time and tender and fully deserving
of its peripheralization. But even Freud revolted at the fact
that a medical degree was a prerequisite for the study of psychiatry.
“As long as I live I shall balk at having psychoanalysis
swallowed by medicine.” He believed the study of the history
of civilization and sociology were the most effective preparatory
disciplines for psychiatry.
When,
in The Gay Science, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900) pronounced “God is dead”, he could have
just as easily noted the same for the once revered philosopher
kings. Nietzsche, whom Freud (1856-1939) declared "had
a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who
ever lived or was ever likely to live," begins On the
Genealogy of Morals with this observation: “We are
unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge -- and with good reason.
We have never sought ourselves -- how could it happen that we
should ever find ourselves?” He then goes on to cite a
law: “Each person is farthest from himself.”
With
more and more Canadians on their backs coughing up big bucks
on psychiatrists’ sofas, there is little evidence that
the farness that troubled Nietzsche has been brought nearer,
or that the mental health of the nation is on the improve. Canada’s
per capita consumption of pills has doubled during the past
two decades, with an ever-increasing percentage slotted for
the mind. And while there is general concern that patients are
becoming more and more reliant on the next generation of made-to-measure
serenity drugs, there’s a disproportionate lack of concern
that more and more psychiatrists are hooked on the prescription
path of least resistance for illnesses that, based on outcomes,
should be reclassified as analysis-resistant.
When
it comes to the practical negotiation of our unhappiness, psychiatry
and philosophy offer two diametrically opposed approaches. Nietzsche,
in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, prescribes: “The Superman
despises himself the most.” Which simply means if you
like yourself as you are, you’ll remain as you are, which
is the starting point for psychiatry that accepts you as you
are with the endgame of getting you to like yourself as you
are. So if you are depressed, let’s say, because you are
chronically weight-challenged and unable to attract a romantic
partner, the psychiatrist will endeavour to render you self-esteeming
by emphasizing your other good qualities: generosity, loyalty,
dependability, and then condition you to take control of your
life, meaning no longer allow yourself to be held hostage by
negative public perception. And at the end of the very expensive
day, thanks to the psychiatrist’s munificence and methods,
you will not have had to shed a single pound and the incurably
judgmental world will now observe you waddling down the street
all cheerios and smiles. Add to that the over supply of happy
pills on the market to facilitate that happy result, and somewhere
over the rainbow there’s a guy or girl and a box of low
cal chocolates waiting just for you.
The
philosopher, on the other hand, will make you stand in front
of a double size mirror until you succumb to unbearable disgust
and revulsion, all the while being made to understand that your
obesity is not only inadmissible in and of itself, but is a
crime against life, at which point, as a first effect of seeing
yourself in the truth of your XXX-Large life style, you will
perforce become so overwhelmed with self-loathing you won't
even have to go on a diet but will drop weight as a consequence
of what your understanding reveals as the proper course to follow
in paying due honour to the gift of life. As a textbook illustration
of substitution theory where a bad habit is replaced by a good
one, your hunger for food will be replaced by a philosophical
hunger that only self-examination can satisfy.
As
it concerns the many who have worked hard and have satisfied
all material wants but are inexplicably anxious or depressed,
the psychiatrist will spend months, if not years, trawling the
patient's forgotten childhood until a bona fide trauma or two
are dredged up from the depths, but will not raise the question
of what constitutes a meaningful life even though the sufferer
has invested his or her entire existence on the self-evidently
false presumption that satisfaction of material wants translates
into happiness. Among the many existential sicknesses of being
(absolute belief in materialism) the psychiatrist cannot shrink,
this is surely one them, and is proof that, pace the ancients,
the unexamined life is not worth living.
Regarding
the unhappy short male who is rejected because of his height,
no matter how artfully the psychiatrist delegitimizes the rejectoress
– her shameless, bankrupt values which should, in theory,
automatically disqualify her as potential mate – hocus
pocus focusing on the positive will never offset the facts and
effects of rejection. Nor will the patient be helped by hug
therapy or being made to relive the slap he received from his
mother when he peed his pants at the age of four. As philosopher
Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) says of the cripple, it is the price
he pays for being in the world: life isn’t fair and the
reasons for it count für nichts. The ugly person
or cripple when reading a book is neither ugly nor crippled,
but someone who is reading a book. Which is to say there is
no getting around the truism that we are all inescapably what
we do, which makes the number of hours we comparatively and
statistically dwell in being short, crippled or ugly a choice
for which we are responsible.
Since
the average hourly fee of the psychiatrist ranges from $75 to
$150/hour, the affluent disproportionately frequent psychiatrists:
in particular women who don’t have to work, who have never
had children or whose children are grown up, who are unable
to fill in their time, who resort to alcohol and drugs to get
them through the day, who suffer from chronic enervation and
are living proof of the existence of zombies. By the time they
bring themselves to a shrink, they are so shrunken in spirit
they have become unrecognizable to their friends and even family
members. And yet, from our earliest years, we are taught to
admire and emulate these financially liberated women without
ever questioning what it is that we are admiring that leave
so many of them prone to prolonged unhappiness (depression).
From the get-go, the philosopher will question the societal
goal (myth) that encourages and rewards its members whose stated
ambition it is to go from being socially useful to useless –
a sure prescription for despair that targets especially the
leisure class and retirees. Unlike sated beasts that are content
to merely exist, Man requires a purpose in life and all the
analysis of the mind’s deep won’t change that primordial
desideratum.
Since
it is in the productive interest of the nation to get the tens
of thousands of Canadians presently on their backs back onto
their feet, is it reasonable to expect Health Canada to productively
intervene, or would we be wiser to place our hopes on a spontaneous,
philosopher-led patients revolt? To expect the psychiatrist
-- who has neither the training nor expertise to treat patients
suffering from existential illnesses -- to possess the wherewithal
and professional dignity to recommend his patients to the care
of the philosopher is tantamount to expecting a dwarf to make
do with shoes of a giant, a sure formula for comedy if it weren’t
so tragic. Even more unrealistic is to expect Health Canada
to designate its most basic assumptions on what constitutes
a positive mental health outcome that which most deserves to
be called into question.
In
the indeterminate meantime but in the spirit of a new enlightenment
that is slouching towards Bethlehem, I urge all philosopher
kings in waiting to hang out their shingles and distribute their
business cards: their second coming is assured by the growing
number of misdiagnosed, mentally anguished Canadians who are
a mere one good read away from realizing that they deserve much
better than the costly,
habit-forming, ineffective combination of palaver and pills
routinely prescribed by the good psychiatrist.
That
psychiatry might be one of the most insinuating and illusory
(deceptive) drugs ever invented is a proposition that health-conscious
nations can choose to ignore -- or deplore.
