By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.”

-Thomas Szasz

In the beginning, there were shamans; wild eyed wiseman communing with the ancestors, drawing down the moon, and swapping genders like loin cloths. They were strange and mystical creatures born with a downright uncanny connection to forces beyond the veil of the seen world and every village had one.

Then progress began and spiritual diversity got in the way of profit. Villages became cities, tribes became governments, and individuals became citizens. A handful of shamans were rebranded as prophets and messiahs, but they ultimately proved to be too unruly to be governed while they were still alive. So, a few dead messiahs were chosen and churches were built around their carefully edited texts while the rest of the shamanic class were simply deemed heretics and slaughtered.

As progress continued and the cities became states and the states became empires, even religion became inconvenient as anything but an anesthetic relic. The heretics were deemed lunatics and asylums were built, first to simply contain them and then to “treat” them. A new religion was established around such treatments. A secular temple preaching chemical subjugation and societal assimilation as its dogma. They called this church Psychiatry, the Clinic was its God, and its Devil was a mysterious affliction known as Mental Illness.

This is the history of people like me, the history of madness, and it is a history that the various organizations behind Mental Health Awareness Month would really prefer you weren’t made aware of. That’s because mental illness, at least as they define it, is a myth, and these same organizations are a part of a multibillion-dollar industry built to perpetuate this myth for prestige and profit.

Thankfully, a handful of disgruntled psychiatrists and academics broke away from this cult by making the radical decision to actually listen to their patients and blew the whistle on the entire madness industrial complex during the countercultural heyday of the 1960s.

Chief among these whistleblowing therapeutic renegades was a psychiatrist and professor by the name of Thomas Szasz who continues to shake the establishment to its faulty foundations from the grave with his groundbreaking 1961 bestseller, “The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct”

In this carefully researched manifesto, the good doctor largely exposes mental illness as a social construct designed to control those of us driven by unconscious forces to violate the social norms of conventional society. As Szasz shows, this conspiracy to domesticate civilization’s neurological malcontents is achieved by declaring our numerous eccentricities to be medical ailments treatable by a variety of forms of therapeutic coercion, from the simple quick fix of pharmaceutical intervention to our involuntary internment at glorified prison camps deemed inpatient facilities.

Szasz didn’t reject psychotherapy entirely, however. In fact, he encouraged its widespread use as a means for consenting adults to seek outside guidance in order to “learn more about themselves, others and life.” In other words, Dr. Szasz advocated that therapists behave more like shamans than priests while deriding any notion of mental health being pathologized as a corrupt junk science that deprives the individual of autonomy and basic human dignity.

As someone who has spent a good portion of my life at the mercy of bad shrinks and overly simplistic diagnoses, I can vouch for the good shaman, Thomas Szazs, but that doesn’t mean that I am well. Quite the contrary. I am indeed a deeply disturbed individual, but the source of my disturbance is not medical, it is societal.

I suffer every day from the trauma inflicted upon me from a young age by the systems that toxic constructs like mental illness built. I am a survivor of multiple forms of child abuse only made possible by institutional powers that left me defenseless and at the mercy of the sexual predators who have managed to carve out their own class amidst the midlevel echelons of bourgeoise society: priests, teachers, politicians, cops, doctors and indeed therapists; institutional authoritarians who prey upon the classes constructed beneath them quite simply because the system tells them they can. They’re allowed.

This kind of abuse is rampant and takes many forms beyond simple sexual predation. It takes the form of racial profiling and police brutality. It takes the form of coercive compulsory schooling and downright systemic bullying. It takes the form of rigid gender norms and heteronormative grooming. It takes the form of post-colonial subjugation and cultural erasure. It takes the form of industrial warfare and a 24/7 news cycle.

We live in a very deeply unwell society and the signs that surround us have grown downright dystopian, but our society is not sick, at least not in the medical sense of the word. Our society is traumatized and we are a society traumatized by Western Civilization itself. A civilization built on genocide, slavery, and apocalyptic Abrahamic cultural supremacy. A civilization that raises its young before the unblinking eyes of Silicon Valley’s smartphone panopticon and then diagnosis them with brain diseases when they grow up to be broken and “unproductive” adults.

And far from fixing the problem, the construct of mental illness only serves to acerbate it further, by treating trauma with trauma and then further marginalizing the results.

Studies collected by PubMed indicate that up to 66% of people experiencing their first episode of diagnosed psychosis develop PTSD from the inpatient treatment they are summarily subjected to. Treatment experiences which often include such totally legal indignities as forced medication, mandatory isolation, and physical restraint. Under such civilized circumstances it is really little wonder that 99% of incarcerated men report having experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetime with an additional 87-97% experiencing further trauma while incarcerated.

And incarceration is really what all of this comes down to. We are all incarcerated in ways both big and colossal every single day; in schools, in churches, in hospitals, in wage slavery, under constant surveillance, in the fog of forever wars, beneath the state. In a civilization defined by global homogeny and ceaseless growth.

We have become a post-traumatic society, and no pill is strong enough to cure our living affliction. We must end the abuse of progress, unplug ourselves from the global technofascist hivemind and return to an ecosystem built around community, mutual aid, local diversity, and environmental intimacy.

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