New Culture Library

"It's easy to blame Big Pharma and the DSM for creating trendy mental illnesses, but the real problem is psychiatry's blindness to culture."

"But about the larger picture, I'm mystified. Our racial bigotry has often been tied to the ignorance abetted by unfamiliarity, our homophobia to a failure to realize how many gay people we know and respect. Well, women are in the next cubicle, across the dinner table, on the other side of the bed. Almost every man has a mother he has known and probably cared about; most also have a wife, daughter, sister, aunt or niece as well. Our stubborn sexisms harms and holds back them, not strangers. Still it survives."

"Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computation and corporeal compassion. All of them require the human processing of the only animal who risks "getting it wrong" and whose dreams provide shelters and vaccines and words to crying strangers."

"Evidence suggests that emotional distress - and all major psychiatric disorders - are associated with a state of excessive inward attention. And inward attention that is excessive in its intensity or duration could easily become pathological or troublesome."

" for all that the conference was supposed to be about mental illnesses, it turned out to focus far more on *sane* family members and friends of the mentally ill, rather than on people with mental illnesses themselves. This tendency was  exemplified in the President's speech, when he stated:  "We all know somebody - a family member, a friend, a neighbor - who has struggled or will struggle with mental health issues at some point in their lives." Note the construction of the sentence: "We all know somebody - a family member, a friend, a neighbor - who has struggled with mental illness." The person with mental illness here is always someone else. They are always removed from ourselves. They are the people we help, the people we are sad for, the people we want to save. The people who are sick, the people who are hurting, the people with the problems - they are categorically not us. They are other. They are, moreover, specifically not the implied audience of the sentence. The implied audience is the people who "know somebody' with a mental illness. Obama probably wanted to evoke sympathy for people with mental illnesses. But in doing so, he reinforced the trope of the mentally ill as the "other" - as people who aren't worth speaking to, and about, directly. Despite the fact that one in five Americans suffer, or will suffer, from a mental illness, and thus make up a fairly sizeable portion of the audience."

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such "biofuels" as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that "science will find an answer." The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

"In the Buddhist tradition, there are four "divine states," four ways of being, described by the Buddha. The states are Loving-kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic joy - truly appreciating the joy of another - and equanimity, being at peace. The "divine states" are spiritual states - that is, they are "feeling" states, ways of being that involve the whole person in relation to the whole of reality - persons, creatures, and the earth. As in the meta sutra prayer, "let one cultivate an infinite good will toward the whole world." We begin to approach true maturity as we move toward these states, perhaps by engaging in some spiritual discipline or by having our natural inclinations nurtured by parents, teachers, mentors, or our religious community. If we aspire to what might be thought of as a ?spiritual? life, and if we want to be emotionally mature and healthy, we would want to be truly loving. We would want to be compassionate. We would want to be so content in our own living that we are able to truly share the joy of others. And we would want to be at peace, to experience acceptance in relation to life as it is. In the Buddhist teaching - and in many ways in the teaching of the Hebrew prophets, of Jesus of Nazareth and even of contemporary psychology - each of these spiritual, ideal states has a "Near Enemy." A "near enemy" to these spiritual, emotionally mature, and healthy states is a way of being that masquerades as that spiritual quality. It is an imitation of the spiritual state, but it is a way of being that actually separates us from our selves and others, rather than uniting us."

"The restrictions on women's lives that prevailed in the early 1960s today seem draconian; removing them was an obvious extension of basic rights to half the population. But there was fierce opposition to such reforms, and their success was never guaranteed. Someday we may come to see paid family leave, reduced work hours, and public child care as part of our natural suite of rights. And with them, gender equality may not be as far behind as it looks today."