The Blue Monkey Review

As I grew older, though, the case didn’t seem so closed. First one family member and then another (in-laws, not related by blood thank God!) became distracted with personal conflicts, stress, trauma, and suddenly the mental health system became visible. The world as a whole also seemed ever more disposed to mental breakdown. In 1972 George McGovern had to drop his first choice for vice-presidential running mate, Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, because he had undergone treatment for depression. I think of that as the beginning. The seventies were such bad years generally (oil crises, inflation, Watergate, disco) that they must have hidden the rapid rise in signs of mental illness. Look around you today and you see it everywhere. Every year we have more drugs for mental illness. Anyone seeking pills to treat depression can choose from a long list of SSRIs, and the same variety of treatments exists for anxiety. Every major and minor mental distraction has its own crop of pharmaceuticals. A normal family can have different medications for every member, from Ritalin to Prozac. My elementary teachers only had to worry about getting us under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Today, teachers have to worry about whether everyone has taken his or her meds. But I wonder if our perception of the mental landscape around us reflects more than a healthy willingness to recognize mental disorders. Maybe we really are getting crazier.

Important critical analyses of the mental health system have questioned the epidemic of mental illness. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (1974) pointed out the shift in the way illness was defined to accommodate mental illness: “the identification of new psychiatric diseases [began] by creating a new criterion of what constitutes disease…”(13) Rather than physical damage, the suffering and incapacity of the patient became the mark of disease. Thus, a whole range of disabilities lined up for inclusion—hysteria, hypochondriasis, depression, schizophrenia, obsession and compulsion. More recently Kenneth Gergen has used social construction theory to attack the power of the psychiatric establishment and insurance agencies to control who becomes mentally ill. Issues of definition (both large social definitions and the more narrow definitions of the specialist) make a difference, a huge difference. One of the great triumphs at the very birth of psychiatry came when asylum directors like Philippe Pinel (in 1793 and 1795) ordered that mental patients be unchained.[See Edward Shorter, http://spiritdimension.com/psychology---counseling/001/edward-shorter-a-history-of-psychiatry---from-the-era-o.htm(Wiley, 1997)] One of the lowest points of psychiatry came during the early decades of the 20th century when prefrontal lobotomies became an accepted therapy for violent or unruly psychotic patients in long-term care. [Jack Pressman, Last Resort (Cambridge, 1998)] Homosexuality went from being a pathology to a lifestyle preference in the early 1970s from one edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to the next.

Even so, I’m inclined to accept that mental disease exists, that at least some forms of human mental suffering result from discreet disease entities, and that these are sometimes ameliorated by drug therapies or talking cures. Anyone suffering from depression will appreciate supportive counseling or Prozac or whatever works. Relatives of a manic-depressives generally want her to take her lithium. And if AA works for the family alcoholic, then let’s give him a lift to the meetings when he needs one.

Even beyond recognizing the value of the many therapies we enjoy in our post-modern world, we also need, at minimum, to wonder why we have so many people who need therapy. Thankfully, the trends making us a little disturbed are pretty easy to find. It should relieve us of some of the stigma (if any is left) of mental distress to know that not only are we in good and abundant company, but we have been pushed and also cajoled into our distress by forces far beyond our ken or control. Well, beyond our control, anyway. We are about to ken some of them.

Perhaps there is a steady level of chronic mental fatigue, a certain standard level of craziness. It seems clear that the general population of the United States has moved from one kind of pharmacy-dependent society to another. In the early 19th century Americans drank far more per capita than they do today, and they consumed much harder liquor than now. [W.J. Rohrbaugh, Alcoholic Republic (Oxford, 1981)] For most men, drinking began with breakfast and continued through the day until after work was done (whenever it got dark), freeing workingmen for some lively recreation at the local grocery store (a 19th century establishment that served liquor) or saloon. The salutary effects of this regimen was to remove the experience of depression, anxiety, mania, and clear consciousness from much of the general public. No one considered alcoholism a disease, exactly, but a growing number of evangelical converts and reformed topers damned liquor as a scourge and created movements to reform the culture of drink in the states.

Alcohol abuse and the dangers of violence that it brought to the home and the saloon declined in fits and starts in the United States. The most rapid decline, and the one with the longest-term impact was due to Prohibition. [John C. Burnham, http://search.barnesandnoble.com/textbooks/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2TUPRQO47B&isbn=081471224X&TXT=Y&itm=7NYU, 1993)] The loss of the sedative value of alcohol may have been somewhat offset by the religious revivals that continued through the early 19th century, the moral crusades of the era, the exigencies of Civil War (anyone suffering anxiety and depression would have been perfectly normal), and later the Great (economic) Depression.
But economic disaster, war, and religion can only go so far. By the end of the 19th century more and more people had to deal with the alienation of industrial production, and with the mindlessness, boredom, and loss of self of the white collar “professions.” As early as 1853 Herman Melville offered a chilling insight into clerical sweated labor in his portrait of “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Less than thirty years later George Beard claimed that neurasthenia (weakness of nerves) was a distinctively American malady due to the pressures of daily life. It was only distinctively American until the work was translated into French and German. The second industrial revolution evenhandedly broke bodies and minds. The year after(1927) Fritz Lang's Metropolis transformed a factory into the pagan god Moloch, devouring the bodies of factory workers, King Vidor’s, The Crowd had a camera seemingly fly into a skyscraper to show rank on rank of desks with their attendant wage slaves. We can natter all we want about the hegemonic culture of consumerism, but if you bend your life to mindless work six days a week, when you are on your own time you are going to want some of the finer things of life—records for the Victrola, the new Model A, a romantic vacation at Niagara Falls. Or, you are going to want therapy and drugs.

And, you will want to go to the movies. Concerned onlookers have claimed that almost everything fun will make you crazy, from reefer madness to ragtime. Movies offered a perfect vehicle for spreading nervous disease from an elite of neurasthenics and alienated workers to American society as a whole. Although the claims that 77 to 100 million American attended movies weekly during the 1920s (in a nation of 100 million), it is clear that most people went to movies, and often they went to more than one in a week. If movies could make you crazy, it was pathology for the masses.

A pair of recent essays in the collection edited by Mark Micale, The Mind of Modernism (Stanford, 2004) show that early moviemakers consciously imported hysteria, epilepsy, ticks, grimaces, and wildly weird behavior into film. Rae Beth Gordon, in “From Charcot to Charlot” (Charlot was the French nickname for Charlie Chaplin) shows that late 19th century cabaret adapted tics and grimaces and wild cavorting motions of the body from the asylum and from epileptic fits into popular entertainment. The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot gave famous public lectures with hysterical subjects that attracted a crowd of literary and intellectual rubberneckers as well as the medical fraternity for whom the lectures presumably took place. These lectures provided abundant material for figures in the literature of the time, and provided inspiration for stage performance. Both cabaret and stage flowed into early French cinema. Another influence, according to Tom Gunning in “In Your Face,” came out of the developments in late 19th photography where a desire to study the facial expression of the mentally afflicted intersected a fascination with grimaces and other facial tics. Early moving pictures needed interesting things to look at, and one of the most interesting thing to look at has consistently been the close-up of the human face.

Where does that leave us? We have had a century of looking closely into the faces of people feigning profound, often wild emotions. These are the emotions we know we need to keep under wraps if we want to live among ordinary, repressed people, the kind of people we want to be. But often these are close-ups of deeply disturbed people. If we really do understand them better, maybe that brings us closer to them.