On Mental Illness

While confined to the hospital, I was given a series of intelligence and psychological tests over a period of three days. At first I thought about just doing the tests in a perfunctory manner, but soon my inner drive to excel overcame me and I found myself fighting the deadening effects of the drugs just to do well. The results of the tests were a little unexpected given my condition, but I was even more surprised that I was told the results. First, my intelligence test showed that I had recovered at least most of my mental ability and I demonstrated a “superior intelligence”. The real surprise was in the results of the psychological tests. These tests showed that I was perfectly “normal” and the only idiosyncrasy I had was a tendency toward a paranoid personality. That is far from being a “paranoid schizophrenic” and given the fact that I had been subjected to seven years of mental torture and terrorism, I could only assume that one might exhibit some paranoid tendencies.

What amazed me was that I was told the results since the tests were far more analytical and semi quantitative compared to the subjective opinions of the psychiatrists. These results greatly conflicted with the psychiatrist’s mantra that I was mentally ill. It was almost as if there was an admission that my confinement was because I am a political prisoner. If that was the case, it was a major improvement for me.

In general, I found most patients in mental hospitals were there for substance abuse. Either they were “addicted” to alcohol or drugs. These people made up about seventy percent of the patients. Another twenty five percent were there because they had suffered abuse at work or at home or had some overwhelming social or economic problem. Those people were understandably depressed and a workable solution to their problem would have been much more beneficial than the ubiquitous drugs the psychiatrists handed out like candy. It seemed in all of the above cases, the patient’s problem ultimately stemmed from abuse which was either economic, physical or psychological. The abuse almost always was inflicted by a parent, a close relative, a spouse or a close authority figure(boss). As I reflected back to the other two times I had been confined, the same pattern emerged. I concluded the “mental illness” was more of a social disease than one with biological causes. Only about five percent of the patients seemed to have some genetically/biologically caused mental problem. When I explored this thesis with the hospital psychologists, I found most of them held a similar view. Mental hospitals appear to be the socially accepted place to put people who are no longer able to defend themselves from the barbaric results of pursuing the “American Dream”. The mental wards are a working class rehab center for those who can’t afford a fancy named facility.

"....the phenomenon of conscience is overwhelmingly powerful, persistent and prosocial. Unless under the spell of a psychotic delusion, extreme rage, inescapable deprevation, drugs, or a destructive authority figure, a person who is conscience-bound do not - in some cases cannot - kill, or rape in cold blood, TORTURE ANOTHER PERSON, steal someone's life savings, trick someone into a loveless relationship as sport, or willfully abandon his own child." But people who have no conscience, a psycho/sociopath, will and does.