asks Bruce E. Levine at Alternet.

For many Americans who gain their information solely from television, all critics of psychiatry are Scientologists, exemplified by Tom Cruise spewing at Matt Lauer, “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. … Matt, you’re so glib.” The mass media has been highly successful in convincing Americans to associate criticism of psychiatry with anti-drug zealots from the Church of Scientology, the lucrative invention of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

However, Americans who gain their information outside of television and beyond the mass media may be aware of a secular, progressive tradition that is critical of how psychiatry has diverted us from examining societal sources of our malaise. This secular, humanistic concern was articulated, perhaps most famously, by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980).

In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote, “Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of ‘unadjusted’ individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.”

Is American society a healthy one, and are those having difficulties adjusting to it mentally ill? Or is American society an unhealthy one, and are many Americans with emotional difficulties simply alienated rather than ill? For Fromm, “An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility (and) distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton.” Fromm viewed American society as an increasingly unhealthy one, in which people routinely experience painful alienation that fuels emotional and behavioral difficulties.

We’ve covered articles that suggest that we are led by psychopaths, and surely this is just an extension of that idea. Our economics and politics rewards behaviour that should be regarded as sociopathic with wealth and power, putting the psychopaths in charge, who then in turn pass laws to further reward sociopathic behaviour, greed, selfishness, possessiveness etc.

Those of us who find it hard to survive in this dog-eat-dog worls are labelled as ‘depressed’, mentally ill, wimps, etc We should really step back and see it like it is. We are ruled by wealthy people without consciences. The system is sick, and what we need is caring local communities of people helping and supporting each other. To ‘fail’ or struggle to cope with this society is not a sign of mental illness, but a sign of our humanity. The wrong people are receiving treatment?

A critical thinker would certainly not merely accept without analysis Fromm’s and my conclusion that American society is insane in terms of healthy human development. Perhaps a society should not be labeled insane just because it is replete with schools that turn kids off to reading, for-profit prisons that need increasingly more inmates for economic growth, a mass media that is dishonest about threats to national security, trumped-up wars that so indebt a society that it cannot provide basic health care, a for-profit health care system that exploits illness rather than promoting health, et cetera.

A critical thinker would most certainly point out that there have been societies far less sane than the United States — and Erich Fromm made himself absolutely clear on this point. In the barbaric German society that Fromm fled, disruptive children who couldn’t fit into one-size-fits-all schools were not forced to take Adderall and other amphetamines, but instead their parents handed them over to psychiatrists to be euthanized. Fromm, however, knew that just because one could point to societies less sane than the United States, this did not make the United States a sane, humanistic society.

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