Only in America Could Misery Be Turned Into a Commodity

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted February 11, 2009.

Psychological practice and its institutions benefit greatly from this. After all, they are in the alienation business. It is entirely in the profession's best interests that it treats us as if our lives are lived in a vacuum, our loneliness and despair are entirely our own, as if there were no such thing as context, much less American society's corrosive and toxic environment in which so many of us live out our lives.

Put another way, it acknowledges our misery, then privatizes it, then administers lonely, alienated "treatment" for our emptiness in a private void, one among tens of millions of like emptinesses in similar voids that are in no way supposed to be societal. No matter that there are enough sufferers to constitute an entire society in themselves.

The result, whether or not by design, is to perpetuate the most venerable of American myths, that of the completely autonomous self. Which denies us the power and beauty, not to mention the healing and efficacy, of human unity.

In the big picture, much of the U.S. mental health industry, and its associated systems, perpetuate and even propagate mental sickness perhaps as much as it alleviates, through its paradigms.

In any case, for the most part, psychology as an institution has hardened into part of the national ideology, thanks to the catalyst of gobs of dough from the state. The American Psychological Association's initial refusal to condemn member participation in the Bush regime's torture told me all I needed to know about U.S. psych-officialdom.

This somehow reminds me of the old Soviet Union's psychiatric handling of dissidents. If you did not display state-defined norms, then you were deemed nuts and needed medication, behavior modification or institutionalization. It was deemed impossible that those very norms may have been driving your condition.

The similarities are there, particularly when you consider the massive growth of the U.S. prison industry and its reliance on pharmaceutical and behavior-modification control. The entire machinery of education, social work, psychology and medicine are meshed (though the practitioners would stoutly deny it) and help hold firm the class line in this country.

Many of them do so unknowingly, of course, and are dedicated to helping fellow beings through the methods they have been taught -- and are accredited through state-sanctioned institutions of course. But the overwhelming majority seem to draw their paychecks and health insurance happily enough.

Ever spend much time with the average mid-American social services psychologist? The kind who make recommendations in our juvenile courts, etc? On the whole, they're a sorry-assed bunch if ever there was one; bureaucrats wrapped in the smug piety of social work. Others are far more aware, but fearful of calling bullshit on the system that pays the mortgage and sends the kids to college.

Given the economic and societal breakdown now under way and accelerating toward completion, Obama or no Obama (what is this thing of ours, this national obsession with saviors, elected or otherwise?), it's bound to be interesting to see if they can indoctrinate, dope, counsel and lock up or medicate the dissidence, and perhaps outright resistance that will occur.

Whether the final American collapse takes four years or 40 years is anybody's guess. But it's gonna take a passel of behavioral-management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows.

However, I'm not ruling out the possibility that they just might help do that -- keep the lid on -- because they are state authorized and accredited to do so. The infrastructure of industrial-strength administration of psychology is there and has been ever since sheepskins were issued to "industrial psychologists." Nobody in the Western world seems to see the irony and conflict in that term.

But the fact is that even if 50 million Americans exploded tomorrow, they would have "snapped" alone, particulated and atomized in a very large and spread out country, and ultimately be administered treatment or institutionalized as "individuals." Of course, if they if they were more concentrated, which would put them in a situation to act in unison, then god help 'em, because they would then be a national-security problem -- the last thing you want to be in a security state.

See more stories tagged with: mental health, psychology, psychiatry

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his Web site.

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