Louis Menand has an interesting discussion about psychiatry in the March 1, 2010 New Yorker. At issue is the changing definitions of various mental problems and the lack of clear answers about how to treat them.
He begins with an all-too-common case: you lose your job and you're depressed. At what point does your sadness, inaction, repressed or vented rage and general unhappiness pass beyond what is normal to what should be treated chemically or therapy or both?
Do any of the treatments proposed actually work? If they do, should they be used since some things--like anger over an economic and political system that allow people's lives to be ruined--might be best handled by a whole lot of people, righteously angry and bent on demanding constructive change?
Menand has no ready answers, but the questions are important ones. The only thing that I think is clear is that anger over real problems, like unemployment, should not be channeled into blind reaction, as seems to be the case with the Tea Party Movment and their ilk.
Where's the Left in all this? Not shouting loudly enough for sure.
Cartoon from The New Yorker cartoon bank.
2 comments:
I wonder if filmmaker Marcel Simard's suicide can be a tragic catalyst for change on this.
So many of us are affected by the same problems - obviously there is always a dimension of personal fragility and distress, but the cuts to arts funding (and to the funding of NGOs and human-rights groups) are affecting a lot of us.
Will people always react too late?
I've been reading an interestng historical novel for one of my book groups: Madame Socrate by Georges Messadié, and in it there are some great exchanges about the arts, politics and wealth that could be lifted and put into a present-day book. For example, one character goes on and on about the "waste" of money on theatres and monuments. What good will the Parthenon be when the enemy is inside our gates, he asks.
I can't remember who the enemy was, and that probably says volumes about what counts.
Keep the faith.
M
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