Introducing Mental Healthfare = Mental Health + Warfare
Part I introduced the field and function of Mental Health. Here in Part II, I introduce a new concept — Mental Healthfare — to investigate the field and function within a criminological analysis. Part III, will situate the birth of Mental Health in the U.S. within a historical perspective.
Mental healthfare is a weaponized science: it is the instrumentalization of psychology, sociology, and neuro-biology onto a population such that what were formerly called ‘human sciences’ now become inhuman weapons deployed in the manipulation, control, and domestication of the public. As powerful as the humanistic and scientific values of care, prevention, and illness may be as incentives, especially to the mental health practitioners of our liberal democracies, conceiving of the function of mental health in terms of warfare has its advantages.
Recognizing that mental health can be wielded like a weapon is something that a criminal or someone in the military can relate to. It facilitates accounting for mental health, not just in its ‘intended applications’ but in its systematic abuse and misuse. To equate mental health care to the ‘tender-heart’ of psychology-psychiatry-psychotherapy is something that everyone understands: “it is about taking care of those in need and who have experienced trauma, have mental problems, or who are mentally ill”, while leaving unexamined its rhetoric of paranoia and warfare: “the fight against mental illness and those crazies who are out to hurt us and take away our freedoms”.
Should anyone doubt the function that mental healthfare plays in creating a weapon of war and legalizing acts of criminality, let them respond to the following question:
What was the most serious political scandal and military setback for the U.S. in its post 9/11 war on terrorism?
Most experts would agree that it was the abuse of detainees in the prisons at Abu Ghraib, Iraq. This disaster of policy and the U.S. military involved neither the force of arms nor the mere breakdown of laws and regulations, but the charge of war crimes and torture centered on civilized no touch techniques developed by psychologists and other mental health experts.
It is well known that from the start of the Cold War to the early nineteen-sixties, billions of dollars were spent by the C.I.A. to develop psychological weapons of interrogation in the use of psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, psychosurgery, and electroshock. What is less well-known is that the more modern no touch methods of sensory deprivation (wearing hoods), self-inflicted pain (being made to hold one’s arms up for extended periods), and humiliation (being made to crawl naked on others), have not simply evolved to become a weapon of contemporary war, but to situate a wider system of wartime operations during times of peace. Alfred W. McCoy writes in his seminal book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror [ ]:
To test then propagate its distinctive form of torture, the C.I.A. operated covertly within its own society, penetrating, and compromising key American institutions — universities, hospitals, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the armed forces.
Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture (2006)
It is important to recognize that there is no need to speak of mental healthfare as a ‘conspiracy’. Nor is there a need for a hypothesis of a ‘deep state’ working behind the scenes. On the contrary, the covert operations of the CIA are just one example among many; they are not the cause, but exemplary of a system of mental healthfare that has entered into modern society and its mores. Far from being a ‘conspiracy’ or ‘deep’, our brief survey in Part I has shown mental healthfare remains at the surface and is taken for granted in the everyday language by which people speak of themselves and others today as ‘empowered’, ‘in control’, and in a ‘fight’ against mental illness. Our next series of articles will give the clinical reasons for such seemingly benign linguistic expressions in the identification of a social psychosis.
Not Anti-Psychiatry and Anti-Mental Health
N o doubt, critically aware authors, like Foucault, Szasz, and Laing, have carried out historical investigations into a violence and criminality implied by the mental health field, the asylum, and psychiatry. But such anti-mental health and anti-psychiatry positions still remain within a humanist perspective in so far as they treat criminality, madness, and violence as a societal problem that comes from without as ‘un-reasonable’, and not modes of reason within science itself. For example,today many would consider the following question completely reasonable and sane:
What does it take to market the business of mental health as the science of mental disorders and the prescription of pills?
Though a critical investigation into some of our most cherished beliefs and market-place knowledge may meet resistance, it is a first step into recognizing what is being avoided in the common ‘happy’ analysis of not only mental health but the relation between science and society. The situation is similar to the shock caused in the scientific community when the “father” of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, made his private brooding on science public:
“We have made a most terrible thing, a most terrible weapon that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world … a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing … we have raised the question of whether science is good for man …”
Robert Oppenheimer, Address to the American Philosophical Society
Here, then, in this series of articles I will begin with a criminological analysis of mental health. It differs from the previous humanistic and philosophical anti-psychiatric investigations in the sense that it considers the causality of crime and madness not only within reason itself, but at the limit, something scientific and normal. When a mental health professional can use a discredited DSM codebook to treat someone for a mental disorder s/he does not have, and when a science and industry is set up to do business around this mis-recognition, then we might as well call it what it is: a social psychosis on the verge of criminality ¹.
Just as today the real problem of psychosis is no longer the romantic image of the wild-eyed madman in an asylum who is ‘out of their mind’, but forms of everyday oblivion (treating people for what they do not have, not treating people for what they do, etc.), the real problem of criminality is not simply the delinquent wrongdoer behind bars, but the problem of a more ordinary criminality — a person who may never have committed a crime, but who is treated as if s/he has anyway. Or conversely, the real problem is when someone has committed a definite crime, but appears today not only ordinary, but un-sanctionable according to criminal or civil law.
With a tighter analysis of the problem, it becomes evident that neither criminality nor madness merely exists behind bars and in asylums today — nor are they screenable according to the scientific criteria of the last century. On the contrary, madness and criminality have entered into the mores of society itself. The question is whether the categories of our current mental health system are anything more than a prophylactic made to avoid the problem.
At least this is what this series of articles aim to show: approaching crime and madness within an outdated humanistic paradigm of psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, — as deviation from the norm — may provide the card of the ‘tender-heart’, but ultimately produces not only an incoherent mental health policy, but at the limit operationalizes into a mental healthfare that participates in the very ills it claims to treat.
[1] For a clarification on the differentiation between psychosis and madness, see: Part II: Who Is Afraid of Mathematics? The Psychotic Dimension of Education
(Part III: The Birth of Mental Health: When Mental Health Is Weaponized)
