Winnipeg 14° C , Partly cloudy

Mental illness is rampant. Most institutions that try to gauge such things seem to agree approximately one in five people suffers from mental illness, at least in the developed western world.

Read this article for free:

Already have an account? Log in here »

To continue reading, please subscribe with this special offer:

*Pay $1.50 for the first 22 weeks of your subscription. After 22 weeks, price increases to the regular rate of $19.00 per month. GST will be added to each payment. Subscription can be cancelled after the first 22 weeks.

Mental illness is rampant. Most institutions that try to gauge such things seem to agree approximately one in five people suffers from mental illness, at least in the developed western world.

But in many cases, “mental illness” is an umbrella term that carries, at best, a slippery physiological understanding. Sometimes it’s little more than a medical-sounding label we affix to people with personalities that make them introverted, overactive or otherwise not easily moulded into a productive cog of the capitalist machine.

I think it is reasonable to contend that some of the conditions we treat as illness are actually a perfectly reasonable reaction to the world we live in. Anybody who doesn’t have enough anxiety to suffer from an existential crisis now and then is just not paying close enough attention to the state of the world.

So why is it we insist on treating mental illness on an individual level rather than in a broader social context?

Because it isn’t just the mostly functional conditions, such as anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, to which these socially dependent dynamics can be applied. We must also wonder if neurological divergences, including autism or schizophrenia, should be considered “diseases,” or if we simply dismiss them as such because they do not have a complementary role in the dominant social paradigm.

We know, historically, that certain societies have had different attitudes toward what would be considered mental illnesses today. In ancient Greece, people were often considered to be “touched by god” for their cognitive capacities that differed from those of their neurotypical neighbours. They offered unique perspectives, and were revered.

And this was not an uncommon attitude among societies, spanning around the globe and across the centuries. Even contemporarily, we happily celebrate mentally ill people when they can do things such as solving puzzles or performing math with seemingly computer-like capabilities.

And therein lies the rub: we incorporate mentally ill people as long as their capacities are exploitable. The more we learn about “mental illness,” the more widespread we discover it is, and perhaps what we are really learning is how narrow our modern social parameters are for people to fit into.

These conditions are not so much a disease as they are an inconvenience to our modern power structures. Without meaning to downplay how beneficial medication has been to so many people, perhaps instead of only medicating ourselves into people who can thrive in a narrow social paradigm, we should also consider striving to widen our culture to better incorporate neurodivergent perspectives.

Take, for example, how children seem to make fantastic philosophers. We value our children’s wide-eyed naivety and marvel at the way they ask insightful questions that seem to subvert society’s conventions, offering worthwhile perspectives that our engrained adult sensibilities overlook.

Yet when a person has a mental illness, we are ready to dismiss them as having “the intellectual capacity of a child” and stick them on a loading dock somewhere so they can contribute to the capitalist process, exploiting their body and ignoring their mind.

This is the problem: when everything boils down to first-quarter profits and endless growth, we no longer concern ourselves with deviating perspectives — perspectives the neurologically divergent among us might be able to provide in abundance if we were not so quick to dismiss them as “sick.”

Even for a condition our culture stigmatizes as dangerous, such as schizophrenia, there is research conducted by Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann that found that people who hear hallucinatory voices can have different relationships with those voices, based on the culture in which they live.

Subjects in the United States heard voices that were harsh and threatening, whereas in India and Africa the voices were more benign and playful.

Luhrmann posits this is because Europeans and Americans are atomized, motivated by an individualist sense of self-identity, whereas the Indians and Africans are more community-minded, and treat the voices as another weaving in the fabric of their spirituality.

In any case, the dynamics of these “diseases” are so culturally dependent it seems clear we should think long and hard about how we pathologize them. Perhaps the perceived threat from some mental illnesses can largely be mitigated by how our culture interacts with them.

It is a common perception among people that we are not living in a psychologically healthy society. Perhaps part of addressing that comes with a fundamental re-examination of exactly what “healthy” means.

Alex Passey is the Winnipeg-based author of the sci-fi introspective Mirror’s Edge.