You’re Not Crazy; You’re Just Human
Apparently, more than half of all Americans will experience mental illness at some point in their lives. More than a quarter have been mentally ill at least once over the past year. I haven’t read the Harvard study (funded 95% or so by NIMH) that made these claims, but I did get a chance on Friday to hear researcher Dr. Ronald Kessler talk about his team’s research on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. I posted a response on the Anthro-L listserv, and felt strongly enough about what I had to say that I decided to post the same response here. My apologies to Anthro-L readers — there’s nothing new, here.
Kessler began his interview by clarifying what the term ‘mental illness’ actually meant:
…I think it’s important to put this in context… to say that a person suffers from a mental illness doesn’t mean they’re psychotic; there are many people who have minor phobias, who for three or four weeks get depressed after they move from one town to another or break up with a relationship, perhaps they have some panic problems for a month or two after they get into a life-threatening automobile accident…
Now, I guess I figured, when I first heard about it, that the bulk of this 50% figure was composed of cases of long-term depression, ADHD, phobias, etc. — we don’t, for the most part, run around covered in faeces talking with pigeons — but it sounds to me now like it also includes the uncomfortable aspects of (stastically) normal human emotional life.
To be fair, Kessler compares these sorts of ‘illnesses’ to hang-nails, splinters, and the common cold. But I’m not sure that’s fair. Disease, after all, is socially (or sometimes personally) defined: There’s no common cause (bacteria, congenital condition, physically induced change in body functioning, viruses), and those typical causes often don’t lead to ‘disease’ (digestion-aiding bacteria; blue eyes; laser-corrective surgery… I know jack-all about viruses). So what makes these conditions diseases (in American culture) is the fact that they interfere with day-to-day functioning in a way we don’t like and don’t accept as normal.
To say that illness is a social concept isn’t to call every disease psycho- or sociosomatic, and it isn’t to trivialise AIDS, sickle-cell anemia, or breast cancer. Neither is it to deny the validity of a category we could call ‘mental illness’. It’s simply to say that we as culture-dwellers/-users have the ability to define those conditions we consider ’sick’ and those that we consider ‘healthy’. This is hugely politically meaningful (the most famous instance of the normalisation of disease probably being DSM IV’s exclusion of homosexualititis), and is so in this specific case as Kessler recommends a generic combination of talk therapy and medication for mental disease in general.
From my perspective, three or four weeks (or more) of post-break-up depression is absolutely normal and healthy — it’s not the sort of thing that requires medication. If we’re looking for a physical analogy, it’s more akin to being out of breath when one runs up a hill than to catching a case of the common cold.
The authority to define disease is an immense power. It’s been used, before, to dehumanise queer people. Now, it’s being used by Pharma to capitalise on stress and sorrow. This is nothing short of profiteering, and is perhaps something substantially more ominous.
The End.