The happiness conspiracy

[Stowaway]

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/184603-The-happiness-conspiracy

There exists in western culture the concept of a purley material basis to human happiness. It is coupled with a diminished concept of the value and potential of the human being. Our society insists that money WILL buy happiness. As a last resort, there is a pill for your unhappiness.

Back Ass Crazy Mental Health System
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgnMrKTWCqo

What I’m going to do is say a phrase, and what I’d like you to do is write the first three things that pop into your mind. It’s very important that you [do] because it’s going to illustrate an important point...

OK, are you ready? ‘Mental Health’. What are the first three things that pop into your mind when I say “mental health”?

Let me guess [...]. Practitioners, psychiatrists, psychologists; or the treatments: antidepressants, electroshock therapy; or disorders: ADHD, depression, bipolar...

Now the point I want to make here is that these terms have nothing to do with mental health. They have to do with mental disorders, or the treatment thereof.

Let me read you this – this is from Abraham Maslow, a psychologist, and it says

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side. It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illness, his sins; but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction. We must find out what psychology might be if it were to free itself from the stultifying effects of limited, pessimistic, and stingy preoccupations with the human nature.

Psychology and the mental health field tend to concentrate on the negative. They emphasize the study of “disorders” and the treatment of them, as opposed to focussing on self improvement, on increasing intelligence, or on building character. So, as psychologists’ total emphasis on the negative aspect of the human psyche, Maslow got completely fed up, and he started doing something no one had thought to do. He started to study the most stable people he could find. Instead of studying the schizophrenic, he started to study the most creative, the most well-adjusted, and the happiest people he could find.

This is what Maslow said:

If we want to answer the question, ‘how tall can the human species grow’, then obviously it is well to pick out the ones who are already tallest, and study them. If we want to know how fast a human being can run, then it is no use to average out the speed of the populace. It is far better to collect Olympic gold medal winners and see how well they can do. If we want to know the possibilities for spiritual growth, value growth, or moral development in human beings, then I maintain that we can learn most by studying a moral, ethical, and saintly people.

Some of the people that Maslow studied were people that he knew; but some of the people that he studied were historical figures, like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and William James – to name a few. [...] He made a list of these qualities and characteristics that these special people had. [...] In essence, it’s a description of what mental health really is.

This book is called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and it’s published by the American Psychiatric Association. It’s about 950 pages long, and there are hundreds of mental disorders. Now, the freaky thing about it is that nowhere in this book is there a definition for mental health – there’s just disorders. Nowhere in this book is there a definition for ‘mental health’!

So, we call it a ‘mental health’ system. But the system isn’t designed to create mental health – it’s designed to treat disorders. So really, it’s a ‘mental disorder’ system.

After all, how many mentally healthy people do you actually see in the mental health system? It’s not full of people that are mentally healthy; it’s full of people that are labeled with ‘mental disorders’.

Have you ever heard of the term ‘wellness’? What’s the difference between the term ‘health’ as it’s used in healthcare, and the term ‘wellness’? Well, conventional medicine deals exclusively with disease – and they use the term ‘health care’. So alternative medicine professionals had to disassociate themselves with the disease care, and they invented the use of the term ‘wellness’. The conventional health care system in America exclusively deals with injuries and disease. It’s not a health care system – it’s a disease care system. And you don’t go to a doctor to become physically fit. You see one when you’re sick.

You see, If you want to become physically fit you see a nutritionist, or you see a fitness trainer. You don’t see a doctor.

Nowhere in psychiatry is it clearly defined what a mentally healthy person looks like. So this brings up a good point: how do you create a mentally healthy person if you don’t have a clear idea of what a mentally healthy person looks like?

Maybe you’re thinking that mental health is the absence of psychiatric symptoms. Well, that’s just not true because there is more to health than just the absence of disease.

Here’s an example: you have two people. You have a man who’s forty years old. He’s overweight and he smokes. And then you have an Olympic athlete who just won three gold medals. Now, neither one of them have symptoms of disease, and neither one of them is seeing a doctor. But it’s obvious that the athlete is much more healthy than the smoker who’s overweight. This applies to mental health as well. Just because someone is not experiencing psychiatric symptoms, it doesn’t mean they are at their optimum mental health.

Another way to look at this is you don’t go to a psychiatrist to become happy. You go to a psychiatrist if you need to treat a depression. There is a big difference between the absence of depression and achieving true happiness. After all, there are a lot of unhappy people in the world that don’t have clinical depression.

In essence, in America we don’t have a mental health system. We have a mental disorder system.

In my opinion, on of the reasons people don’t graduate out of the mental ‘health’ system and become cured is because -- in psychology and psychiatry – they don’t have a clear picture of what mental health even is.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

Here’s an example: you have two people.  You have a man who’s forty years old.  He’s overweight and he smokes.  And then you have an Olympic athlete who just won three gold medals.  Now, neither one of them have symptoms of disease, and neither one of them is seeing a doctor.  But it’s obvious that the athlete is much more healthy than the smoker who’s overweight.  This applies to mental health as well.  Just because someone is not experiencing psychiatric symptoms, it doesn’t mean they are at their optimum mental health.

I think this example ignores the rule of 3 - there is good, there is bad, and there is the context that decides which is which. The question is why someone is an olympic gold medal winner or an overweight smoker is very important. There are plenty of examples of olympic medalists who are simply pushing themselves for all the wrong reasons! Some of those are because being "the best" gives them a sense of self-worth and maybe it gives them validation from others that they feel they need, or maybe it allows them to respect themselves and feel like others will respect them for it. Maybe they get their sense of identity from it and are lost and confused without this identity, or just seeking thrills or competition, or maybe it's a way to run away from making real progress on developing themselves as a person by facing their issues and emotional and psychological conditioning, etc. The list of unhealthy reasons to be an olympic athlete is sky-high, just as there are many healthy reasons.

As for "overweight smokers" let me just say I've gotten way more valuable insight and benefit from people that would fall into that category than from any olympic athlete! And they just HAD to take a jab at smoking and make people feel guilty about it, huh? Make people feel like smoking or being overweight = having mental problems. Psh, shows how much the author knows! Anyway, isn't it funny how when an athlete is found to be using steroids, or having serious drug or family problems (like abuse, etc), or other such things, we always hear people complain that this is very bad for all those children who had the person as their role model, someone they looked up to. Well I think the problem isn't with the athlete and that we should "hide" and not publicize their issues because it makes kids lose their role models, but the problem is why we're teaching kids to create role models based on stupid superificial criterea that don't consider the "why" behind the activity? Same thing for movie stars or music stars - many of them are hopelessly messed up human beings, yet they are idolized as if they have "achieved" something in life... and what might that be? "Success"? Success at what? Success at failing in a spectacular way? Success is such a stupid thing, it's another one of those concepts always used as if it makes any sense out of context (ignoring law of 3). I can succeed at being an idiot, but hey at least I can call myself successful and retire early!

Gurdjieff talks about how you can't make progress in the work unless you first reach the level of the Obyvatel, and I think this ties into the point this article is trying to make that lacking disease doesn't make you "healthy". But I'd say it's still necessary to focus on the dis-ease and address it so that you're able to actually do things for the right (healthy) reasons instead of for mechanical, self-destructive and self-serving reasons. But if our psychology industry started trying to answer the question of what to do from that point on they would basically have to turn to all the things this forum is about, a big esoteric school of self-development and learning how to truly be "the best that we can be" and not in a superficial way for all the wrong reasons like the army commercial.

 

[OzRich]

Thank you Sao for your comment.
Stowaway's youtube video is from Psychetruth website _http://www.youtube.com/user/psychetruth?blend=1&ob=4 of which I was a bit of a fan for a while. What you said made me think and I will look at it more critically now – perhaps why I was a fan...?