Playing the "Mental Health" Card

It had to happen, sooner or later; it was not a matter of “if” but of “when”. And sure enough, the Democrats/liberals/Obamaites have dragged out the hoariest of hoary accusations with which to devalue and disrespect the ObamaCare protesters – that they are not only “un-American” but also mentally ill. Now this accusation has a long, dismal history in this country, and to understand it you have to go back to the origins of the concept of “mental illness”. This was basically a long-delayed Enlightenment, i.e. Protestant, concept that was brought to fruition by the so-called Progressives. The notion was that “madness”, or “insanity” were no longer to be thought of as evil, or curses, or demonic possession, but as a variety of “illness”, not unlike chicken pox. And, given the materialist approach of the Progressives, it only made sense that, as with physical ailments, all that was wanted was proper diagnosis followed by treatment by the – at that time – newly-discovered wonders of modern medicine – you know, things like prefrontal lobotomy, insulin shock, electroshock... that sort of thing. Stuff that, if we'd used it on the Taliban, we'd all be in jail somewhere in the EU. But – I should hasten to add – this point of view was not uniquely American, since it had, as one of its philosophical/psychological bases, the medical model of neurosis and psychosis pushed by Freud, among many others. And it was, after all, humane – i.e. way more humane and enlightened than chaining people to beds, or confining them in rubber rooms and strait jackets – although all of those practices did, after all, continue right up to the era of tranquilizers.

But while all of these things were going on, there was another interesting trend, found principally in places like the Soviet Union, where political dissidents were not simply rounded up and jailed, but accused of being “mentally ill”, and a danger to themselves and others – which, of course, justified their incarceration without benefit of trial. So the concept of mental illness became a tool of totalitarianism – particularly of the liberal, communist, “socialist” stripe. Under “fascism” and Nazism, no one really cared how you “felt” about the things the government did, as long as you shut up about it. Not true in the “people's paradise” -- there, any dissent was treated as a flawed grasp of reality – a failure to recognize and submit to the manifest truths of Marxist-Leninist theory – and was thus subject to severe sanctions... which were, of course, called “treatment”. Thus, the mental hospitals and sanatoriums of the Soviet Union gradually filled up with people who were perfectly sane, but who had one or more issues with the government. And who knows, this may have prevented those who really were insane from getting proper treatment – and if so, so much the worse.

And then there is the whole controversy surrounding the very idea of “mental health” -- is it nothing but a social construct? Some writers, like R. D. Laing, contended that very thing. And in fact, there is no known “mental illness” which, in some culture somewhere on earth, is not revered and celebrated as signifying insight into a world of higher reality. And the usual operational definition which the mental health establishment has been reduced to amounts to this: “Mental illness” is any mental state that leads to anti-social, disruptive behavior. By which criterion, the critics of the “town hall protesters” and the “tea partiers” are absolutely right! The pushback that Obama & Co. are getting from the middle class, and the more conscious members of the lower class, is, if nothing else, certainly disruptive and – in their view – anti-social, which is another way of saying anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-collectivist. So they are right to call these people crazy and deranged – and to wish out loud that there was just some way of shutting them up, or, failing that, rounding them up. And I'm sure that “contingency plans” are being hatched at this very moment to accomplish this. It is, in a way, a measure of the level our national collectivism has reached that the counter-protesters are already talking in these terms, and making implied threats. And this is when the bill in question is still being debated in Congress! Imagine what's going to happen once it's passed, and implemented! We think we have a problem now, with overstuffed jails – wait until all the ObamaCare naysayers are loaded into vans and trucked off to the nearest funny farm. Now that's a budget item I'll bet no one anticipated.