Misunderstanding and misapplication of Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic concepts has been a bane on our society. The concept of a dynamic unconscious has been inflated into a general responsibility-avoidance system, when in reality the entire function of a Psychoanalytic therapy is designed to increase one's autonomy and responsibility for one's own actions. Collectivist ideologues have been especially inventive; they have used Psychoanalytic concepts to support a political ideology that assigns all responsibility to a few designated villains while relieving the victims (who are legion) of all responsibility for their own behavior or position in life.
This morning Marc Steyn Linked to a report in The Guardian, purporting to show that
Inequality is bad for your health
A new international report reveals that mental health problems are far worse in 'rich' nations, such as the UK, that are socially unequal - and that individual treatment is not the solution. Mary O'Hara reports
It has been acknowledged for some time that poverty can be a trigger for poor mental health, but a new study published today by the World Health Organisation (WHO) argues that it is inequality that has the most profound and far-reaching consequences for individuals and wider society. The study, which draws on research from throughout Europe, concludes that mental health difficulties are most pronounced in countries such as Britain, which, although rich, have high levels of income and social inequality.
I decided to look at the actual report, and it is far worse than Mary O'Hara approvingly reports. It is only available as a pdf and it is long, but it reads like a sophisticated communist fever dream. I try to avoid intemperate language in my writing but this report is so ideologically slanted and so misguided that it must be addressed. This report does nothing less than offer a WHO internationally sanctioned argument for tyranny and enforced equality (except for those who would presumably be the vanguard of the new world order or equality and happiness.)
The study, Mental health, resilience and inequalities, by Dr Lynne Friedli, was supported by the following:
(p. 4) NIMHE
The National Institute for Mental Health in England (NIMHE) is the national delivery support agency for mental health policy in England. NIMHE supports the production and dissemination of this report as it presents a powerful and compelling case underlining the need to improve and expand policies and programmes at European, national and local levels that improve the mental health and mental wellbeing of our populations. Without this approach we will not achieve the benefits that good mental health brings to our countries economic, social and cultural life.
Child Poverty Action Group
Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) is a leading charity campaigning for the abolition of child poverty in the UK and for a better deal for low-income families and children. CPAG supports this report because it demonstrates so clearly the damage that inequality does to mental health. This analysis highlights the ‘social recession’ of families being left behind and the harm this causes and it clearly demonstrates that tackling child poverty and boosting fairness must be the watch word of societies which seek to promote good mental health.
Faculty of Public Health
The Faculty of Public Health is the standard setting body for specialists in public health in the UK. We support this report because we believe that it says all the right things about empowerment and the promotion of wellbeing. It usefully complements the recent report from the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health and helps to fill many of the gaps between mental health and inequalities, including the crucial links between negative health behaviours and poor physical health. We very much welcome its emphasis on promoting wellbeing - the focus on developing resilient individuals, communities and environments being particularly timely during the current global economic crisis.
While I do not know these groups, their bias is clear. For example, the CPAG effectively admits that it is looking for evidence to support its contention that inequality damages mental health; I suspect that studies which do not support this conclusion have somehow been missed by the authors. However, the greater problem is not the bias of those who supported the study but the "through the looking glass" distortions of psychological understanding that it exhibits.
(pps. 5-6) ... levels of mental distress among communities need to be understood less in terms of individual pathology and more as a response to relative deprivation and social injustice, which erode the emotional, spiritual and intellectual resources essential to psychological wellbeing.While psycho-social stress is not the only route through which disadvantage affects outcomes, it does appear to be pivotal. Firstly, psychobiological studies provide growing evidence of how chronic low level stress ‘gets under the skin’ through the neuro-endocrine, cardiovascular and immune systems, influencing hormone release e.g. cortisol, cholesterol levels, blood pressure and inflammation e.g. C-reactive proteins. Secondly, both health-damaging behaviours and violence, for example, may be survival strategies in the face of multiple problems, anger and despair related to occupational insecurity, poverty, debt, poor housing, exclusion and other indicators of low status. These problems impact on intimate relationships, the care of children and care of the self. In the United Kingdom, the 20% - 25% of people who are obese or continue to smoke are concentrated among the 26% of the population living in poverty, measured in terms of low income and multiple deprivation of necessities. This is also the population with the highest prevalence of anxiety and depression.
A greater understanding of inequalities is also crucial to recognizing the limits of what promoting positive mental health can achieve. Positive mental health does confer considerable protection and advantage, but it does so predominantly among those with equal levels of resources. In other words, among poor children, those with higher levels of emotional wellbeing have better educational outcomes than their equally poor peers. However, richer children generally do better still, regardless of emotional or cognitive capability. Among well off students, high positive affect is associated with improved employment outcomes, but among poorer students, parental income is a more significant
determinant. Emerging evidence suggests that the same pattern may be true for resilient localities: high levels of social capital may help to explain why one poor neighbourhood has lower mortality than other equally deprived areas, but these poorer, resilient communities still tend to have higher mortality than affluent areas.
There is superficial plausibility to this argument. It is true that the lower socioeconomic groups tend to have higher levels of psychopathology. However, this is the outcome of an extremely complicated set of poorly understood interactions between individual genetic and constitutional endowments, character strengths and weaknesses, and the social milieu in which the individual lives. It is reductionistic int he extreme to attribute the lion's share of causation of mental health disorder to social inequality. This is errant nonsense on the level of Trofim Lysenko, who destroyed Soviet biology for two decades through his rejection of Mendel and insistence that environmentally acquired characteristics could be inherited. Such ideas, that the environment shapes the individual more than their inherited endowment, is the core of collectivist and statist ideologies that led to some of the worst horrors of the last century.
As to the specific argument, that perceiving inequality leads to stress and the concomitants of stress, even if true this hardly supports elevating equality over opportunity as a social goal. It is true that when all are equally poor, envy and resentment are limited. Yet even among those who inhabit societies where their is widespread equality of deprivation, the smallest disparities can become cause for the destabilizing effects of envy and resentment.
[For an excellent exploration of just such a situation, consider renting The Gods Must Be Crazy. It is wonderfully funny and tells its story without preaching.]
I would offer a different hypothesis for the correlation between inequality, stress, and mental distress:
A wealthy society with a modern health care system will have a tendency to raise children who have elevated levels of narcissism. If that society also privileges self esteem over accomplishment in its pedagogy it will develop into a society that will have an over-representation of enhanced narcissistic pathology among its constituent population. Narcissistic pathology increases the sensitivity of self-esteem on the environment and in situations of so visible disparities in accomplishments and material wealth will engender resentment and envy within its members. Resentment and envy are toxic emotional states that lead to anger which has corrosive effects on the person when it becomes chronic. Addressing those aspects of the social milieu that tends to encourage and enhance such narcissistic pathology would be an alternative to enforcing an equality of deprivation upon all.
I would submit that my hypothesis explains the data better than the author. The author's insistence on a uni-dimensional approach to mental health is grossly inaccurate, destroys the agency of the individual, and lays the conceptual groundwork for enforced equality, a traditional prescription for tyranny. Such use of mental health concepts, which were developed expressly as a way to enhance the autonomy of the individual, is nothing less than a perversion of one of man's greatest accomplishments.
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