Society and Schizophrenia

Editorial

The Artificial Man:

by Thomas Mitchell Blaise Shepherd

Note: The author is an alumnus of the School of Philosophy and Letters of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and of the School of Arts & Science and the Graduate College of the University of Oklahoma-Norman. He has served as an advisory board member for mental health agencies in Los Angeles County and is the president of the Tom Blaise Shepherd Existential Society of America. He is the founder-chancellor of the Shepherd-Montessori Institute.

Existential psychology is an outgrowth of existential philosophy. The emphasis is on problems in living authentically in the inauthentic modern world. The existential view is that population growth, industrialization and ruthless competition have resulted in a breakdown of the family. The goals of the corporation and the CEOs who run them are thus superimposed on the individual. The individual is coerced to conform to an artificial prototype and thus become an automaton.. As a result, men and women are denied an identity as an individual. They become alienated from their true selves, in a sort of metaphorical death.

Those who fail to conform to the prototype are commonly labeled “mentally ill” by state psychiatrists, when in fact they are probably saner than the psychiatrists.

The British psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who defined himself as a social phenomenologist, viewed the modern-day mind as a divided entity, an expressed false self, beneath which lies a true, unexpressed inner self. He attributes the division or split to double-bind social communication. The family in particular, by surrounding us with “double messages” or “contradictory messages” requires us to stifle our feelings and pursue meaningless goals.

For instance, on one hand, the male child is taught to be sensitive and considerate to the needs of others. On the other hand, he is taught to suppress his sensitive side, lest he be considered unmanly. Thus, by the time we reach adulthood, we are cut off from our true selves. Although appearing to be relatively normal to one another, we are actually deeply impaired, half-crazed creatures more or less adjusted to a mad, mad world.

What society defines as a “real man” is not a real man at all, but a half man, an artificial man. Any man who fails to conform to this artificial concept of a “real man” pays the penalty: humiliation and rejection, not only by his male peers, but also by those females who reinforce the false concept of “a real man” and a “real woman.”

The schizophrenic individual has failed to achieve an optimum balance between his so-called “feminine” and his so-called “masculine” side, and has resultantly experienced severe rejection and humiliation by his parents and his peers. Although he typically views himself as person of no value, he may nevertheless attempt to compensate in various ways in order to cope with his low self-esteem.

Although there is believed to be a suppressed “masculine” side, as well as a suppressed so-called “feminine” side to every man and woman, scientists like Simon Levay of the Salk Institute have seemingly spent an inordinate amount of time undertaking scientific experiments in order to attempt to prove the existence of a genetic cause rather than a cultural cause of this dichotomy.

Are women really from Venus, and are men really from Mars?

While men are likely to be struggling with a suppressed side of themselves that might be called feminine, Peter R. Breggin, M.D. observes, women may be struggling with what they identify as their suppressed masculinity, especially their assertiveness. It’s no accident that men and women have suppressed aspects of themselves that are thought to belong to the other gender.

Our society promotes an extreme polarity between the sexes. Instead of a whole people, too often we are halves, people wrenched away from ourselves by the sexual stereotypes. This cleavage is part of why so many people have severe emotional conflicts.

Breggin further observes that children of both sexes quickly learn how early in life the polarization begins. Despite the efforts of parents, the culture generally succeeds in enforcing the split within the first few years of life. It remains rare for people to find an optimal balance or wholeness.

Those men who adopt a more “feminine” or “genteel” identity are typically scorned by other men, as well as by women, as being “weak” or “effeminate” or “gay.” However, those women who adopt a more “masculine” identity are typically more acceptable in our modern-day military-industrial society, a society that increasingly values competition, insensitivity and aggression. The result is endless wars between nations and perpetual violence among men and women, who are encouraged to hate and compete rather than to love and cooperate.

Schizophrenia, according to Laing, is not so much a disorder as a special strategy that an individual devises in order to cope with an intolerable situation. Certain people, when faced with extraordinary interpersonal and environmental stresses find themselves unable to maintain the false self, the mask that society requires of them. Hence, they retreat from the external world [so-called “reality”] into their own inner worlds.

Although this retreat is what mainstream psychiatry commonly calls “schizophrenia,” Laing and other existentialists view their retreat as a frantic attempt to not only escape the false world around them, but to simultaneously relocate their real selves, and thus heal the split between their so-called “feminine” side and their so-called “masculine” side, in order to become whole. Thus, schizophrenia is viewed by Laing, not as insanity, but as hypersanity.

Both Laing and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, M.D. seemingly share the “anti-psychiatry” viewpoint that insanity, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, are simply labels fabricated by society and mainstream psychiatry to justify the exploitation of those persons so labeled. Mainstream psychiatrists are thus little more than society’s police officers, enforcing compliance with social norms and incarcerating people in locked psychiatric wards merely for failing to conform to those norms. Psychiatry’s preoccupation with finding out what sort of “disease” such people have, is thus viewed as not only entirely unjustified, but as a fraud.

The psychiatric labeling process serves two purposes: (1) It allows psychiatrists to exert control over people; and (2) It so stigmatizes those individuals thus labeled that their chances of ever living a normal life are resultantly destroyed. The labeling process becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the more dangerous aspects of modern-day psychiatry is the hypothesis [an unproved assumption] that “mental illness” is the result of an underlying genetically determined “chemical imbalance” that can only be restored to “normal” with psychotropic prescription drugs or with synthetic hormones.

The fact is that the psychotropic drugs do not improve the functioning of the nervous system, nor do the synthetic hormones. They not only destroy the nervous system; they also reduce testosterone levels, they reduce the body’s ability to fight off bacterial infections, and they destroy the body’s ability to function normally in other ways. In fact, research indicates that pharmaceuticals traditionally used to treat schizophrenia, including LSD, neuroleptics, and anti-depressants, as well as amphetamine, dramatically induce textbook-described symptoms of schizophrenia (delusions, hallucinations, mood swings and apathy). In other words, psychiatric drugs do not cure schizophrenia. They are a tool for enabling the psychiatrist to exploit his patients by rendering them permanently dysfunctional.

Scientists are in virtual agreement that the hormones and neurotransmitters of the brain coordinate or affect human behavior. However, the building blocks of neurotransmitters are not laboratory-developed drugs, but vitamins, minerals and the amino acids found in food. Thus, recommending habits of sound nutrition rather than psychotropic or neuroleptic drug treatment would seemingly be a more responsible prescription. Tell that to a modern-day psychiatrist and he will most likely reassure you that you are crazy!

For a mainstream psychiatrist to admit to the world that psychotropic drugs are harmful rather than helpful would be to commit virtual suicide. It becomes a Catch-22 situation for the patient, the tragic victim.

Suggested further reading:

Blaming the Brain: The Truth about Drugs and Mental Health by Eliot Valenstein, Ph.D.

Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society’s Unwanted by Thomas Szasz, M.D.

Doctor Yourself: Natural Healing That Works by Andrew Saul, Ph.D.

Interpretation of Schizophrenia by Silvano Arieti, M. D.

Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill by Robert Whitaker.

The Divided Self by R. D. Laing ***** highly recommended

The Myth of Psychotherapy by Thomas Szasz, M.D.

The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing ****** highly recommended

The Testosterone Syndrome by Eugene Shippen, M.D. and William Fryer.

Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry” by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.

Understanding and Helping the Schizophrenic by Silvano Arieti, M. D. (winner of the National Book Award for Science)

Amazon.com/books

The Shepherd-Widmark Center for Sane Living