For the process of distantiation in general to be seen as part of a social world, keeping loosely defined inner-things at certain distances away from a 'self' is common practice for adherents to both dominant genders. The gaps in what one person acknowledges to be their own psyche's (literally: psychic) territory will, it seems, always be traversed by multifarious others.
In other words, some things a modern individual internalises for periods of time - long or short; other things a person outwardly rejects at every opportunity.
The energy transfers involved in this little model may well be documented in modern psychological circles; so too, there may be common currents that observers such as Joanna Moncrieff sees in the UK and US. In a video discussion of her 'Myth of the Chemical Cure: The Politics of Psychiatric Drug Treatment' one conclusion is that the inexorable rise in prison population and prescriptions for psychoactive medicines (measures taken against the various non-compliant individual) does, move hand in hand through debt-fuelled consumerism to make a clear pejorative statement that some people have inexcusable, internal problems.
The notion of a clear separation between internal and external in pure and unadulterated form may well serve some psychological purpose. In pre-modern history, smaller, sometimes face-to-face communities it is said, lived based on personal dependence on one another, often for their very survival. In modern times: one person's problem is squished through uneasy categorical and conceptual gymnastic exercise on the terrain of single-minded cognition until such time as the common body of the developed political nation-state sees that it must intervene.
To draw on recent historical examples of how something that starts inside people's heads can translate slowly but surely to reach many minds and become an external referent, might we listen to some music? An original folk song may or may not find many musicians to retell it's melody, perhaps overlaid with porous verbal utterances? One that plays in the background now is a professional US musician's re-telling of the possibly seventeenth century 'House of the Rising Sun'.
To move that to the foreground other people in several places have begun to compare their ideas of race, sex and mental health in terms of simple parallels in anti-discrimination. Moving carefully to say that open challenges to discrimination are in part legally protected in places such as the UK, might we know more of the links between these areas some day?
Representation in prisons, mental health units and so on, are not seen at a current uniforn rate, and the tortured tales that need telling must weave inner and outer tensions over the long and short time period, very intricately indeed.
Using fairly simple terms, highly negative external referents surrounding and enveloping any given individual could then become part of them as a socio-biological organism. Sartre's famous phrase that we are "condemned to be free" has raised sometimes gloomy arguments philosophically revolving around 'existence and essence', but is a useful phrase for me to briefly retell the age-old bemoanment of anomie and inner anger and to challenge these very sentiments at the same time from within.
By way of echo, the recently deceased political philosopher Marshall Berman drew illuminations which include the following from the end of the book 'All That is Solid Melts Into Air'.
"To be modern, ... is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows."
When modern trouble and anguish take so deep a root as to bring a modern citizen into contact with a psychiatrist, it could be said that the situation is incredibly serious, and potentially grave. Even Joanna Moncrieff, although painstakingly clear that psychoactive drugs do not provide magical cures to mis-perceived underlying chemical imbalances, does admit that there are 'some circumstances in which some drugs are useful'.
That concession is important, just as one would hope to find individual psychiatric practitioners on the front line willing to compromise with those whom they see before them. One size never fits all, neither in philosophy, medicine nor a clothing retail outlet.
Prominent American Allen Frances (of DSM IV fame), now wants to say the following:
"The evidence is compelling that we in the developed countries (especially the US) are overtesting for disease, overdiagnosing it, and overtreating. Wasteful medical care of milder or nonexistent problems does more harm than good to the individual patient, diverts scarce medical resources away from those who really need them, and is an unsustainable drain on the economy."
Thus, by way of statement alone, I must raise here the issue of the level to which it is beneficial to challenge dominant power structures? Just because the medical model of psychiatry dominates in practice despite what many of us believe to be very unstable theoretical underpinnings, this does not mean that everything psychiatry or psychatrists say (or do) is false or wrong.
To stand back from a potential melee may be all that we can achieve on this one- and just as a critique of psychiatry might help some to make their own minds up on their life journeys, a corresponding overstatement of clarity that all that has gone before and that goes on elsewhere is 'bad', may be just as unhelpful for any reasonable definition of the centre ground.
Like Marshall Berman, who saw in modernity something just as Marx did, which is entirely contradictory at its base, there may be some lives which by past standards slip through the measuring devices of how things were supposed to be. Now, the proportion of the generation referred to as 'NEET' in the UK (not in employment, education or training) when they reach maturity with no concern for work references or housing ladders, will be a fascinating if potentially explosive development to witness.
Whether internally or externally, perhaps the interplay of interpersonal constants and historical drive might find orchestrated voices are too rampant to ignore? And finally, when known shouts from within and strong sentiments trapped inside for years break free to rejoin the fast flow of united existence, terrors of the past befitting of recurrent exposition elsewhere, will need to be understood, in full.
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