And furthermore, will the secession from the world which is built-in exclusion, internalized and self-validated aggression, be the extreme sign of madness or the last remnant of mental health, a defense to the bitter end and against all evidence? (We should ask ourselves about this strange fate: that is, whether it is fate that we have to spend time defending ourselves against “competition”).
But the real question remains whether it makes any sense to ask what mental health or illness is within a social organization that decides what one is and what the other is. The almost total social control means that, from the family to the health or social system, the “taking charge” of the presumed mental disorder, the judgment on the lack of mental health of an individual, are generally precocious and lightning-fast. It could be sanity to be free from competition, from the need to produce more and better, from the risk of exclusion due to inadequacy with respect to the laws of the market (which may include knowing how to fish, hunt, knowing literature and theatre, being smiling and witty , knowing how to sing and dance, being full of initiatives and fantasies, casual and sommelier, upright and up-to-date, computerized and muscular and in any case producers of any fashionable commodity). Mental health could be the infinite fun of finally recognizing that we are all different and not therefore unequal (I don’t want to go looking in the library if the same root of “diversity” and “fun” has a reason to exist, I just think about it and I like it ).
What actually establishes this deadly equivalence between mental health and approval, if not our fear of getting lost in the non-recognition of my counterparts? Even literature, art, food, poetry, theater are by now pure consumer products, objects of futile conversation around the quality of beauty creams and stocks of designer stuff. Own thinking no longer exists as recognizable, an object of irony at best, the transformation of the world now being an empty concept of men and ideas. If the only shared project is development (and consumption), there will be an indicator of mental health or at best in the little house in Tuscany where the garden and the sweet pea are grown, never where the effort of living realizes his risk and his finitude, he discovers man in his infinite misery and, however, assumes the burden.
The blatant obviousness of what I’m saying is singularly unacknowledged in 90% of the practices of mental health manufacturing professionals, the “psy” sciences are located elsewhere and organize thoughts, models, practices and concepts of a completely different nature, superimposing author on author, in a long monologue without end, a powerful soliloquy because it constitutes corporations of power-knowledge, goods that accumulate and capital that reproduces itself, unverified, free, mostly self-referential, intangible for crusading consensus. Psychiatry was (and still is in various places) a sort of instrument of terror intended as zeroing and attribution of an unbearable identity.