A Crazy, Demented Way to Critique Psychiatry

Published May 2013 on the now-defunct Left Eye on Books website.  It expresses succinctly and well how I, as a psychiatric critic as well as a psychiatric survivor, regard the issues of mental health and frequently ineffective and counterproductive psychiatry--but also why I repudiate as well the totalizing rejectionism of psychiatry by certain of its seemingly left-wing critics--GF

 

While the violent, murderous mentally ill—Andrea Yates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Yates), Seung-hui Cho (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seung-Hui_Cho), Jared Lee Loughner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Lee_Loughner),

James Holmes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Eagan_Holmes),

Adam Lanza (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting), Jodi Arias [suspected of being bipolar] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Travis_Alexander) [To which we can now, sadly, add Elliott Rogers--GF]—have been much in the news as of late, completely overlooked is that the mentally ill are more likely to do violence to themselves than others, notably through suicide.   Further, in regard to the above psychiatry itself not only failed to protect society, it also failed to protect these persons from themselves.  This in itself is a telling indictment of the way psychiatry carries out its self-appointed task of helping those who are troubled, disturbed, dysfunctional, delusional, and dangerous to self and others.  Another side of “helping” psychiatry neither NAMI (http://www.nami.org/template.cfm?section=About_NAMI) nor the supporters of psychiatry, not to mention the psychiatric professionals themselves, talk about openly, except to make excuses.

But unconditional psychiatric opponent Seth Farber, Ph.D. (http://www.sethhfarber.com) will have none of this.  In his latest book, “The Spiritual Gift of Madness: the Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement,” (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781594774485-2) Farber, somewhat an anomaly in being a family therapist himself as well as a totalizing anti-psychiatric critic, sees mental illness as neither dysfunctional nor debilitating, much less a form of major suffering by those mentally ill themselves; but rather, as a direct gift from God, who supposedly uses mental illness to communicate and share his blessings with mere mortals.  Farber thinks this is especially true for those diagnosed “bipolar” or “schizophrenic”—following R.D. Laing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing), who saw schizophrenia in particular as a sane way of responding to the madness of society itself.  For Farber, those diagnosed mentally ill are directly communicating with the supernatural through their illnesses. 

 

In this way Farber’s book is similar to William James’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James)  classic of psychology, “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780486421643-9)  James, like Farber, a religious person who eschewed much of traditional religion, while not seeing madness as such in the mystics whose visions he favorably documented, and whose sometimes bizarre behavior he overlooked, thought that these mystical visions were the direct communicating of humans with Divine Godhead himself, and that God approached humans not objectively, but, as he put it, “subliminally.”  Of course, some of the behavior of these mystics and seers James approvingly noted were at least bizarre in themselves—for example, Quaker religion founder George Fox suddenly feeling he was “called by God” to take off his shoes and stockings in the middle of winter and go into a village he’d never ever been in before, walking the village streets barefoot and crying aloud for the people there to repent; or the Catholic monk Soso, whose extreme self-abnegation and even self-flagellation are easily seen as fanatic and masochistic.

Further, although Farber has a very favorable and enthusiastic view of the Mad Pride Movement, a significant current among strongly anti-psychiatric former mental patients (or “mental health consumers,” as they are often colloquially called, though many prefer the term “psychiatric survivors”), this enthusiasm is not always shared by Mad Pride advocates themselves. For example, MindFreedom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindFreedom_International), which hosts a major Mad Pride website that Farber touts, disagrees with Farber himself that there is spiritual value in the troubled visions and hallucinations of mental illness—a point that, while Farber mentions in this book, he makes light of, as this direct evaluation by anti-psychiatric “psychiatric survivors” themselves undermines his very thesis in “Spiritual Gift of Madness.”

Personally, I can attest as a “mental health consumer” or “psychiatric survivor” myself that the notion of Mad Pride is far from delusional or incorrect—although I did not suffer from the hallucinations, delusions and unreal flights of fancy that accompany being bipolar or schizophrenic, but, instead, from years of very disabling and debilitating chronic depression.  Like many a “mental health consumer,” I found in my own personal experience that psychiatric treatment was most unhelpful for me, though parts of it I did indeed benefit from; moreover, I found much in my psychiatric treatment that was harmful to me personally, as well as the psychiatric system itself being fundamentally classist.   For I was consigned by lack of insurance and funds to the Community Mental Health Center system, or to university clinics as a student, where much of the treatment offered was indeed assembly-line and mediocre, and where even psychiatrists, therapists and other professionals who really cared about their patients came up against brick walls of disillusionment and frustration by the institutionalized bureaucracies that are endemic to such systems—and where the bureaucrats and those who can accept the bureaucracy in good cheer are often merely uncaring timeservers concerned more with job security than with what is optimal for their charges. 

So I do indeed have a form of Mad Pride, and am also anti-psychiatric, though not in Farber’s totalizing, rejectionist way; for which Farber consigns me to the camp of those who are “pro-psychiatry,” even though such a charge is as laughable as to regard the Greek far left group Syriza (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Radical_Left) as “pro-capitalist” just because it runs on an electoral platform that calls for major restructuring of the Greek and European capitalist systems.  But yes, I am “reformist” in that, unlike Farber, I believe in the radical restructuring of psychiatry as it presently is in order to make it a humane, truly scientifically-based system that restores human dignity to the disturbed, the dysfunctional, the troubled and the delusional, and can make them productive, happy and fulfilled human beings, something neither psychiatry at present nor the suffering of mental illness itself make possible.

In self-disclosure I must state that I do indeed know Seth Farber personally, although only through phone conversations and e-mails.  I first encountered him when I answered the contact info given at the end of his first book, which, overall, is quite good, albeit mixed, with substantive weaknesses as well as strengths—“Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels: The Revolt Against the Mental Health System.” (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780812692006-10)  Farber initially regarded me in a friendly way, as an ally of his in critiquing psychiatry.  I myself am a published author on mental health issues, with three papers of mine formerly posted on the website of the Boston, Massachusetts mental health consumer advocacy group the Transformation Center; these were dropped when the Center's website changed formats, but are still available for viewing at their original location, Frog Majik Music, http://frogmajikmusic.com. One of these, “Once a Nut, Always a Nut?” Farber himself called a “brilliant deconstruction” of the psychiatric system.  Farber even lists me in the “Acknowledgements” for “Spiritual Gift of Madness,” though he’s since broken off with me.   Principally because, as far as I can tell (Farber is obscure on why he actually came to consider me—mistakenly—as “pro-psychiatry”), I titled my essay on what it actually felt like to suffer major depressive episodes, “What It’s Like to Be Chronically Depressed,” as just that, for which Farber vehemently anathematized me for using the “psychiatric” term “chronically depressed.”  However, this essay was excerpted and published in a very astute and insightful book, Agnes B. Hatfield and Harriet P. Lefley’s “Surviving Mental Illness: Stress, Coping, and Adaptation,” (http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780898620221-1) which, quite remarkably, devotes sections II, III and IV to accounts from mental health consumers themselves on how they experienced mental illness and recovery.  Hatfield, in writing me to ask permission to quote from “What It’s Like to Be Chronically Depressed,” which had been previously published by the Indiana Department of Mental Health, called my “poignant essay,” as she called it “one of the best descriptions of depression I’ve read.”

 

But in praise of Farber, let me say that he is the author of five books to date, two of which, the aforementioned “Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels,” and the political “Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel,” (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781567513264-2) I found especially informative.  Same as in “Spiritual Gift of Madness,” these other two books demonstrates Farber’s special deftness in the art of interviewing—he is a very good interviewer indeed, though he does tend to ask presumptively leading questions, often to the irritation of those he’s interviewing, in order to get the answer he’s specifically looking for, whether those interviewed wish to say that or not.  Farber has six such interviews in “Spiritual Gift of Madness,” and they are the most interesting parts of the book, far more interesting, lively, and informative than Farber’s leaden, didactic prose in which he expresses his own viewpoint.  Indeed, the book outside the lively interviews is a stiff, terribly dogmatic and one-sided polemic in which Farber concedes nothing of value to any who disagree with his central thesis that the hallucinations and delusions of mental illness are anything but the Voice of God communicating with humanity.  His view on this is totalizing, Manichean and black-and-white, and he attributes nothing but malevolence and conspiracy to psychiatry itself, seeing evil when a more thoughtful and astute critic, such as Robert Whitaker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Whitaker_(author)) in “Anatomy of an Epidemic” (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780307452412-15) or Mark Vonnegut, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Vonnegut) in his own autobiographical account of mental illness, “The Eden Express,” (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781583225431-0) would see more correctly (as would I) malfeasance and self-serving “business as usual.”  Certainly, psychiatry as constituted today needs and deserves major criticism; however, in his totalizing rejection and ill-placed assertion of innate spirituality among those mentally ill, Seth Farber does only a disservice to such criticism with “Spiritual Gift of Madness.”