How Mental Health Became A Weapon
When addressing someone, an expert or not, about about your ‘mental health’ or a ‘mental disorder’, is the choice of words used to describe yourself and others important?
If not, then there is nothing to conclude here and you can return to living among animals and things.
But if so, if the way a human actually adopts a vocabulary, speaks, and symbolizes a problem is crucial to not only a diagnosis, but a cure, then it would go a long way towards making a progress to understand where the phrase ‘mental health’ comes from. Its origins, how it functions, and what it stands for may surprise you.
Many think that the phrase ‘mental health’ simply denotes a state of ‘well-being’ and that the mental health field is simply composed of a psychologist, psychotherapist, or psychiatrist whose function is to try to help people by listening to their problems, diagnosing a disorder, and aiding them through either talk-therapy or the prescription of pills. If this is what you think, then this article will provide a clearer orientation.
This series of articles has been written for anyone who cares to know anything about mental health today beyond the received stereotypes and journalistic reporting. In Part III, we situate the historical origins of the term mental health in the U.S., while Part I and II situate the function and field of mental health with regard not simply to psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, but as an autonomous discipline arising from the battlefields of WWI & II and the weapons of warfare.
What Is Being Said and Done in the Name of Mental Health Today?
The separation of children from their parents in the current immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border could not have been implemented without mental health officials and agencies, more specifically, the HHS, the U.S. department of Health and Human Services. Oddly, the same agencies that were in charge of removing children from their families are now being called upon to treat the traumas of such forced separations.
What is this double-edged sword of the mental health field?
Or to get a glimpse of the natural slide from mental health to policing, take a quick look at a page on Medium of the Mental Health Cop, aka honorable inspector Michael Brown’s descriptive at:
Or check out another popular Medium page where the author offers advice on depression in the command to “fight” and go to “war” against it and its “evil twin” using analogies from Harry Potter and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War:
Or yet another author on Medium is going to tell us how to “Master” depression with Rule #1 “Know thy enemy”:
And should you think this manner of speaking about mental health as a “Mental Health Cop”, the “Art of War”, and “Know thy enemy”, is just a coincidence of language, consider that even Phd’s and Md’s speak this way when talking about the brain today. For instance, check out the Medium pages of a neuroscientist, M. Humpfries, who compares neuroscience to an “amoury” — a place for the storage of weapons — :
This brief survey of current events and articles on Medium, raises a question:
What is this language of policing and warfare when spoken in the name of mental health?
Let us now extend our survey beyond the weaponization of the brain and the self to show the implications not just in personal psychology but politics and ethics.
The Politics of Mental Health Care as Warfare
Here, then, we cannot forget that when addressing the rising problem of school shootings, the current U.S. president, Donald Trump, has avoided any legislative action on gun control since he, and a certain political conservatism, views the situation as merely a problem of mental health: there are “evil people” with guns who are out to get us and who can, in principle, be diagnosed as mentally ill and screened. Yet, despite the well-established mental health rationale for screening gun purchases and protecting the public from such mentally ill people, the rate of school shootings has grown yearly.
What are the benefits of a mental health system that can be weaponized and used as an alibi to permit not only legal criminality, but to bypass legislation with the rhetoric of a ‘fight’ against mental illness?
Such questions never cease to haunt the mental health field. In 2002 they came to the fore in a recommendation of the New Freedom Commission to screen the entire population of the United States for undetected mental illness. It was purported to be part of the then president George W. Bush’s commitment to eliminate inequalities for Americans with disabilities by providing state of the art mental health treatment. The plan was never implemented and criticized for not only being a return to a philosophy of eugenics, but the pseudo-science of the drug industry posing as the promotion of care for a population .
One year after the formation of the New Freedom Commission threatened the internal population of the United States, the U.S. military invaded Iraq killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and committing what the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called an “illegal war”. While Bush and his cohorts have been called “war criminals” by the press and diagnosed by armchair psychotherapists as exhibiting forms of mental illness, the Bush administration themselves used the rhetoric of mental health’s ‘fight against mental illness’ in the very descriptions of their ‘war on terror’. What was called Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) is the official name used by the U.S. government’s global war on terror between 2001 and 2014.
In both cases, the New Freedom Commission and Operation Enduring Freedom, the banner of mental health is used to provide a scientific weapon of democracy and freedom.
But what is a democracy that must arm itself to the teeth to not only promote its idea of liberty, but the mental health of its people?
The weaponization of psychology during times of war and peace is not new. Already in 1919, at the very outset of the Mental Health Movement in the U.S., one of its chief advisors wrote:
The fact that applied psychology played such an important part in the mobilization and prosecution of the war, and came to be recognized as an indispensable instrument in the personnel work of the army, means that it will probably play an increasingly important role in times of peace.
Arnold Giselle, Professor of Child Hygiene, Phd., MD., Yale University, 1919
The Field and Function of Mental Healthcare as Warfare
Today, mental health has sought to justify its methods, not in reference to warfare, but in a more neutral way: as a field that is scientifically informed and humanistically aligned, yet distinct from medicine, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry. Its ambitions, however, go beyond focusing mental health on problems of mental illness and the care for those in need. Since it deals directly with the public at large, the field of mental health should be a model for other sectors where mentality is perceived as being less than healthy: the prison system, family court, the war on terror, immigration, poverty, foreign policy, and under-education, are just a few examples out of many.
As a place of considerably varied human experience, the field of mental health gains access to questions of morality and normative judgment. Its instrumental function of providing a place for a ‘science of man’ converges with its historical relation to the asylum, prison, and hospital. Ultimately, it has the task of monitoring society as a whole, while this policing function establishes its relation to judicial and punitive institutions. If its model were successful, mental health professionals would have good reason to feel appeased; their moral conscious would be satisfied by the application of a system of knowledge that not only serves and protects people, but also provides a powerful paradigm for understanding the world and society. So much so, the formation of a field of mental health could legitimately hope to be an exemplary model not only for any international and public institution but for the self.
Gathering all of the ills of society together in one place and ordering them according to the norms of science may seem like a common sense idea for helping people. No doubt, the reforms of U.S. mental institutes and the use of psychotropic drugs in the last century may have achieved a ‘softer’ and more humane treatment for the mentally ill and disenfranchised. Yet, with a second more critically aware reflection, the history also reveals a utopian scheme of society with direct links to the social experiment of eugenics, the concentration camp, and scientifically orchestrated massacres.
When any set of scientific practices is generalized onto society as a whole there is the danger that the mission of its experts, as well-intentioned as they may be, will have as much as to do with the hygienization of difference than any actual clinical research on ‘abnormality’. The function of mental health programs depend not only on moral indignation in the face of difference,but most often conservative forms of science where only the least form of difference is given any room in the city. In fact, in the current DSM code book used by the U.S. care-giver – psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, social workers, etc. – the word ‘mental illness’ is never used, while the phrase ‘mental disorder’ never refers to a negative field of ‘abnormality’, but a new positive field of hyper-normality: a place that is not so much counter or qualitatively different from the norms of biology and society, but their exaggerated outcome. That is to say, anyone today potentially has a ‘personality disorder’, there is no differentiation from the normal or the abnormal, only a quantitative difference, a difference of degree not kind.
Which leads to the key to the field of mental health: in a more naive age there used to be Insane Asylums and Mental Institutions where there was a qualitative difference between those inside and out. Today, there are only Mental Health Centers where any difference between those inside and out is only a difference of degree not kind. Said more bluntly, today if there are no Mental Un-Health Centers, it is because madness has entered into the streets and into our mores. If this is true, and it is the task of this series of articles to demonstrate it, then we must be careful when championing Mental Health as a place of care, in spite of all the good intentions and with a second more critically aware look, the field can be shown to function not only as a prophylactic preventing any real treatment or understanding of the insanity afflicting our modern day democracies, but an instrumentalization of psychology turning forms of difference into medical and judicial problems, not political and ethical ones.
Part II: Mental Health Care as Mental Warfare: Mental Healthfare = Mental Health + Warfare
