Insanity and Justice

Insanity and Justice

By John Taylor; 2006 November 13

In Which I Sink Into Mental Illness

The latest two "Introducing" books in my favorite illustrated non-fiction series published by Icon Books that I got my hands on are "Introducing Psychology," and "Introducing Psychiatry." They got me thinking about things mental. Then I listened to a CBC radio documentary last week that discussed a new trend in treating depressive disorders called "mood hygiene." It seems that investigators traced the long term effectiveness of all of the drugs used in treating mental illnesses. Discouragingly, they found that although medications are effective for a few months or years, the long-term effects are limited and temporary. Most patients are not protected from traumatic episodes down the line. Very few of the drugs so far discovered can be called a cure. As a result, many shrinks are starting to talk about supplementing drug therapy with lifestyle controls. Manics are being advised to avoid stimulating situations, depressives to seek out social activities that will tend to reverse their fall into extreme sadness. The radio program interviewed the members of a Vancouver musical group most of whose members are recovering from depressive mental illness.

The experts interviewed agreed that prevention is the best cure, and that if doctors were able to actively intervene with lifestyle adjustments as well as drugs within six months of the onset of symptoms, the worst mental illnesses might be avoided. They call this "mood hygiene," which is similar to the physical hygiene, cleaning, safely getting rid of sewage and waste, that broke that back of the epidemics that used to rack the population until the 20th Century. The same thing may be done with mental epidemics, and depression easily qualifies as an epidemic. It is now known that if a depression continues past six months the brain's neurons dig out a deep channel that is very easy to fall into and hard to get out of. One psychiatrist compared it to a rut in the road. Any wheel that steers near it is caught up and must follow that path whether it wants to or not. After that all known forms of therapy are expensive, labor intensive, and have limited results.

This made me realize that here too is an argument for the flexible form of modular housing that I am now calling Instauration Architecture. I had thought of IA in terms of curing obesity, but it might work just as well for preventing and curing mental illnesses. As soon as a person felt a twinge of depression their living unit would automatically be moved into a sunnier location, their exercise time would be increased; they would be warned, taught and given real incentives to increase their social contacts, and so on through all known contributors to unhappiness. All would be addressed at once, early on, before the big problems start to snowball.

Actually, maybe it would happen even before a person felt the twinge of sadness. The fact is that although drugs have been shown to be of limited long term effectiveness, in the past fifteen years brain scanning technology has undergone a revolution. Magnetic and other high tech detectors can actually look inside a living brain and watch it react real-time to stimuli. They can measure the results in every region of the brain from all types of interactions, good and bad. The mental damage caused by an abusive person on all around him is measured in excruciating detail. The little article I included last time about the mental benefits over as little as two weeks from playing table tennis (a combined mental and physical workout), is one example of what can be detected now. Similar benefits are being found from playing chess and even my least favorite activity, playing cards.

Therefore, with earlier detection of mental processes it may be that searching for new medications for mental illnesses will come to be seen as unnecessary. A sufficiently responsive environment might mean that the mental illnesses that are so common today (and I mean really common, something like four out of five people are hit by a mental illness sometime in their life) would never be allowed to happen. In the life I read lately of Dr. William Osler the biographer noted that Osler in the late 19 hundreds came across many grossly morbid medical conditions -- such as basketball-sized stomach cysts -- that are unknown today. No doctor, no matter how extensive his experience, would find them. This is simply because diseases are understood, detected and cured long before such freakish growths can take hold. The same thing will no doubt happen sooner or later with mental conditions such as schizophrenia, manic depression and paranoia. Psychiatrists today are closer to pharmacists than doctors, but in the future they will be more like computer programmers planning out people's locations and lifestyles in rapidly shifting apartment complexes.

In Which I Soar Up to Justice

We have been looking in detail at "Tabernacle of Unity," paragraphs 2.33 to 2.38, where Baha'u'llah addresses Manikchi Sahib's question about religious tolerance. Baha'u'llah cites for Manikchi a second passage revealed earlier on in His Mission:

"The people of Baha should soar high above the peoples of the world. In matters of religion every form of fanaticism, hatred, dissension and strife is strictly forbidden." (Tabernacle 2.35)

Soaring high means avoiding denial of God, avoiding problems before they can drag us down, just like the wise doctor who treats disease before it can grow. A person who squabbles has no choice but to regard his opponents as bad and contemptible. To do that is to deny the goodness of the One Who created those people. So just avoid it. Baha'u'llah then proceeds to cite another brief, memorable quote that explains how practicing "preventive faith" can avoid the problems of denial before they recrudesce.

"We have called you into being to show forth love and fidelity, not animosity and hatred." (Tabernacle 2.36)

So, to engage in religious disputes is not only to sow the tares of war, it is to deny and insult the very reason that God created us. Insanity is one effect of denial of our reason for being. Mental illness, the detection devices are starting to demonstrate, starts in small mental abuses and apparently innocuous forms of neglect. We neglect the love for which our brains are built to radiate. We neglect the needs of body and emotions. We lash back and abuse and betray in little ways, like what Jesus talked about, the lust in your eye that is the same as committing adultery. That is betrayal of what Baha'u'llah calls above the "fidelity" for which were created. Yet pandering by diffusing lust-inducing images is now regarded as a legitimate advertising ploy by respectable businesses. Abuses like hating our neighbor, arguing with our neighbor, even when disagreement is implied but not expressed, the damage comes when striving is regarded as a basic expression of human nature. And it is all made concrete when violence in word and deed dig ruts in our mental wheels. Soon nobody can get out of them, our whole language and vocabulary becomes a weapon. And the biggest rut is war and the rumors of war, when millions of young lives are fed into a thrasher for no good reason, when a whole society is paralyzed by fear of terrorist attack.

The next offering cited in Tabernacle as a cure for fanaticism is the eponymous one from which the title of the book is derived. Here, no doubt, is where Shoghi Effendi derived his justification for calling the oneness of humanity the "pivotal" Baha'i principle. Here it is:

"The path to freedom hath been outstretched; hasten ye there-unto. The wellspring of wisdom is overflowing; quaff ye therefrom. Say: O well-beloved ones! The tabernacle of unity hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch." (2.37)

It would be impossible to plumb these depths but I can briefly note a few salient points. The oneness of humanity is the path to freedom -- no more ruts catching our wheels and leading us willy-nilly down into hell and insanity. Oneness is a well of wisdom, we need but drink. Oneness allows us to see others not as strangers or others but as aspects of ourselves, as brothers and sisters. All three of these, free agency, wisdom and vision, are preconditions for justice. That is what the next passage is all about, and we will deal with that next time.