Mental Illness In A Time Of Madness

Part I

       Mental illness hits pretty close to home for me, for personal reasons and because I spent a good part of my professional life learning from, and with, people with mental illnesses and their families. I’ve sat with them as they’ve struggled with mental health agencies to find the right kind of care. I’ve felt some of their desperation as the state’s involuntary treatment system failed to see the same risk of harm they saw in their child. And I have to admit there were times when I was not as helpful as I should have been.

       With more mass shootings, mental illnesses are in the news again. In spite of the attention they receive after events like these, do the people talking about them know whom they’re talking about? Do any of us?

       Mental illnesses can be acute, that is, they can come and go never to reoccur with the same debilitating intensity, or they can be chronic, illnesses that must be managed over the course of a lifetime like diabetes (anyone who has to “manage” diabetes knows how easy this is to say but how difficult to do). We can diagnose (and over diagnose) a few of them in childhood, but, generally, most are precipitated by some combination of events in late adolescence or early adulthood. For some, we suspect genetic predispositions based on family history, and, as with most other serious health problems, there are likely epigenetic contributors – exposure to trauma or other adverse experiences, especially in early childhood – which predispose us to a mental illness later in life.

       Thought and mood disorders are central to mental illness. These alter the way we organize the world in our heads, the sense we make of things. We hear harmful voices, see things that aren’t there, and, quite easily, experience paranoia, delusions, or other symptoms. We feel hope, despair, rage. Then we do stuff.

       But is this just about individuals?

       If one person believed that killing children attending a school supported by those whom he thought were a danger to his way of life was justified, even required, by his faith, wouldn’t we think that he had a tragic thought disorder and was mentally ill? What if an entire community or culture held and acted on that same belief?  Would we understand that culture or community to be mentally ill? Or can a mental illness become so normalized within a population that it completely disappears (this, I believe, is what Hannah Arendt meant when she coined the title for her book on the trial of Adolph Eichman: The Banality of Evil).

       Were the good people who burned witches in Salem Massachusetts mentally ill? What about the people who brought their families to witness the lynchings of innocent African Americans?

       Were we mentally ill for listening to voices telling us that we had to kill 3 million Vietnamese in order to stop communism in Southeast Asia?

Was, and is, the concept of “mutually assured destruction” (the rationale for massive nuclear arsenals during the Cold 

War) the result of a thought disorder?

       Were the Hutus mentally ill when they slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 100 days in 1994? Were we when we undertook the enslavement of an estimated 19 million Africans?

Do we dismiss events like these as episodes in the lives of a primitive people - other people, other times, other places – 

historical anecdotes with nothing to teach us? Or are these acts evidence of a thought disorder on a mass scale, reoccurring throughout history, even to this day. And have thoughts like these become so widespread they cease to be considered disordered (again, the banality of evil)? These days, we may not show up with pitchforks and torches, but, instead, with sidearms and assault rifles. Should we understand this as a chronic mental illness endemic to our species?

       Is Google’s search engine, narrowing our exposure to information, feeding the very disorders in thinking observed in some mental illness? Can a post on social media be a triggering stimulus for a mass psychotic event in a community? After all, we all hear voices…

       Are our neighbors mentally ill for believing they need to arm themselves with assault weapons for the time when George Soros leads UN Peacekeepers up the road to take away their guns? Am I and my Facebook friends mentally ill for not believing that George is indeed on his way?

       Are we mentally ill for thinking that the best way to save our children and our schools is to give teachers guns? Is this version of mutually assured destruction the real meaning of today’s Second Amendment? If so, were the Founding Fathers clairvoyant enough to understand that this was the real reason they would need virtually unlimited access to deadly force?

       We like to think we know how a mentally ill individual might commit an act of violence without any trace of remorse. What if the above examples demonstrate how mental illness might drive an entire population to even greater acts of violence?

       And if there is any truth here, would any of us know we were committing a criminal act, let alone be able to stop ourselves?

Part II

On Seeing The Forest For The Virus

I have been thinking about writing this essay for a while. Just couldn’t figure out how to go about it. Until the other day. I 

should start it with a story, I decided, an old one, one many of you have probably heard, but here goes. But let me say this up front: I’m not much of a believer in God these days – any god. No offense...

A man lived in a house on a river bank. One day, he heard an emergency broadcast on the radio warning him of a one hundred year flood and those on the banks should immediately seek higher ground. “I’m a religious man,” the man said. “God will keep me safe.” So he did nothing.

Sure enough, here comes a wall of water flooding the entire first floor of his house. He gets himself up on the roof. The entire valley is under water, with many houses simply swept away.

Along comes a man in a row boat. “Hey buddy. Climb down and I’ll row you to safety.” The guy on the roof yells back, “Thanks, but I’m a religious man, and God will protect me!”

So the man rows away. The water keeps rising. Along comes a rescue helicopter. “Hey, buddy. Let me come down an get you and we’ll haul you to safety”. But our guy on the roof yells back, “No thanks. I’m a religious man, and God will protect me!” The chopper leaves.

The water continues to rise, until the man’s house is swept away and he drowns. He goes to heaven and stands before God Himself. “Why did you let this happen to me?” he asks. “I was a religious man. Why didn’t you save me?”

God is puzzled. “What are you doing here? I sent you an emergency news bulletin, a rowboat, and a helicopter. What more do you want from me?” End of story.

I don’t think this is a story about God. Nor is this essay.

These are both stories about paying attention. Here’s what I mean:

We’ve let our leaders take us to the edge of a nuclear holocaust and keep us there, telling us how absolutely necessary it is to have arsenals sufficient to end all life on the planet several times over. But, apparently, not enough of us believe that we have been touched directly enough by the prospect of a quick death by incineration or a slow one from radiation poisoning to actually bring it all to a halt.

We’ve let our leaders ignore or minimize the climate chaos unfolding around the planet. Apparently, not enough of us believe we have been touched directly enough by the prospect of the increasing desertification or flooding which in all likelihood will force millions of people (other people) from their homes unless we act with urgency to address the causes.

And now comes the virus, a lethal, global pandemic unraveling before our eyes with no apparent end in sight. But now, at last, and unfortunately, we are all being touched directly by the reality of life on this earth. How might so many of our species being so directly touched by this virus lead us to change our thinking about our survival as human beings?

I think these three catastrophes have at least two things in common:

1.   None of the three of them have absolutely any respect for borders, walls, flags, or any nation’s presumed exceptionalism, and

2.   We have, day by day, minute by minute, chosen to look away or, at best, nibble at the edges of each, pretending that the worst will never, can never happen to us (“We have the best (outsourced) health care system in the world” said the talking heads...).

Mark Twain supposedly said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was dynasties like the Hapsburgs who drew the lines on maps to make sure that their children and cousins had enough places to control, to enrich themselves with wealth and power at the expense of commoners. In the 20th and 21st centuries, it’s global corporations controlling our lives and our livelihoods (politicians, 401Ks, and pension funds), relentlessly enriching themselves on wealth and power of commoners (say hello to the new boss the same as the old boss…).

  Arms sales, fossil fuel extraction, pipelines, enemies here enemies there enemies everywhere, all manufactured to feed the corporate beast, the manipulation of our sense of honor and patriotism in order to justify it all, repeating over and over again that borders are real, that they are meaningful as something other than tools to generate fear of “the other”. Our military/industrial/political leadership shakes borders in our faces as if they were shaman’s rattles. The COVID 19 virus becomes the Chinese virus, lest we forget that the Chinese must always be our enemy. Without this continuous manufacture of enemies, how could we justify spending trillions on modernizing our nuclear arsenal, weaponizing space, insisting on the need to cut Social Security. And I’m not suggesting that this is just about our current leaders. This comes from way back in the history of fear, wealth, and power. We’re supposed to think of it as a gift.

Am I naïve? I know there is evil in the world (I’ve experienced it in my lifetime). But I also know that civilizations are constructed by men and woman. As such, they can, however slowly and painstakingly, be deconstructed by men and women interested in building different societies, societies of conscience, more just, more equitable, and far more honest about the nature of the global humanitarian and environmental realities of our time. Actually, I think I’m kind of a realist.

It took ten horrific plagues before the Egyptians finally came to their senses, including, you’ll recall, the loss of their firstborn. And they still sacrificed a generation of their youth in the Red Sea in a vain pursuit of the status quo. How many plagues will we require, and at what cost?

  You don’t need to be a believer to contemplate this (like I said, I’m not and I do). Think of it as a metaphor for how much suffering we will continue to impose on the world before we accept some sacrifice and agree to let go of those myths which no longer fit the world so we can, say, manufacture medicines, masks, and ventilators, not just for ourselves, but with and for people everywhere (if a virus can comprehend the unreality of borders, shouldn’t we, as smart as we think we are, be able to as well?). This won’t be our last pandemic. Isn’t this what you would rather be doing in the twenty first century?

I mean, who’s insane here?

Some of the Tanks Storing Radioactive Material at the Site of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant in Japan

Part III

I came to this country when I was young.

       I bought forty acres up Alder Creek. Dirt, trees, air, water, black bear, rattlesnakes (lots of rattlesnakes), mosquitos (lots of mosquitos). It was mine. I hand dug a well, forty feet into a gravel layer bearing the Alder aquifer the size of a river.

       Five miles up valley, men had mined for silver, gold, and copper. They built ponds. The ponds leeched lead and cadmium in a steady seep through makeshift dams into the porous ground, seeking the river of water percolating through it. The country is so vast, the owners reckoned. It won’t matter.

       Decades later, I tested the water and found the lead and cadmium at my place. Had you been one of the farms or families down the drainage from me, you would have found it at your place.

       I needed a corral. I dug a hole for a fifty five gallon drum and filled the drum with used crank case oil. I stripped the bark off lodgepole and jack pine poles and soaked them in the barrel. Then I set them in the ground, dripping with oil, maybe ten feet above the gravel carrying the river of water. If I had thought about it, like the owners of the mine, I would have reckoned as they did: the aquifer is so vast. How could it possibly matter. Besides, the minerals were theirs and the land was mine. Needless to say, back then, it never crossed my mind…

       The oil seeped into the ground, into the gravel bearing the water and its load of lead and cadmium, carrying it downstream, through your farm and family to the Methow River, then into the Columbia River, and, finally, into the Pacific Ocean.

       But there is no ‘finally’, no place in the geography of the planet where something stops moving, least of all in the oceans. In the North Pacific alone, there is the great clockwise gyre of four currents: the North Pacific, The California, the North Equatorial, and the Kuroshio, each absorbing and transporting the lead, cadmium and used crankcase oil in its turn.

       The Kuroshio will carry millions of gallons of wastewater discharged from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant catastrophe through the Kamchatca current off the coast of Alaska and into the easterly drift of the North Pacific Current.* This wastewater will be contaminated with radioactive tritium.** Tritium has a half life of 12.5 years.*** It doesn’t go away quickly. A chinook salmon lives anywhere from one to eight years, most of that time in the open ocean traveling thousands of miles through and along these same great North Pacific currents before returning to us. What goes around comes around.

       The owners of Alder Mine needed silver; they built an earthen dam to hold their contaminated water. The dam failed. Lead and cadmium are their gift .

       I needed a corral; I poured used crankcase oil in a hole ten feet above the gravel bearing an underground river. This is my gift.

       Tokyo needed electricity. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) built a nuclear power plant on the edge of the Kuroshio current which was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Radioactive tritium, perhaps with some amounts of cesium, is TEPCO’s gift.

       After all, we reckon, the country, the aquifer, the ocean are so vast. How could any of it matter?

       Everything moves: the fish and game we eat, the water we and our animals drink, the air we and our animals breath. All of it comes from somewhere else, bearing the gifts of those who have touched it before us, and taking on the gifts we ourselves contribute, each of us justifying it with the twin mythologies of sovereignty and ownership and an unwillingness to do the math.

       We have ventured far beyond the entrances to our caves. We have not fallen off the edge of a flat earth into the mouth of a dragon. Our earth, alas, does not rest on the back of a giant turtle. We have learned that we are not the center of the solar system. We understand that species do not exist independently but are bound together in an actual web of life. And we have seen our planet from the moon, a blue sanctuary suspended in an airless space, surely more sacred than any church, mosque, or temple. 

If we were truly sane, we would finally agree to keep  the planet clean, don’t you think?

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* More than one million tons of contaminated water is held in almost 1,000 tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi site, but the utility has warned that it will run out of tank space by the summer of 2022. FYI: One million tons of water equals 269 million gallons.

** Radioactive cesium and iodine carry the greatest health risks by far and their release by Fukushima has been reduced since the accident in 2011. Radioactive tritium poses a significant health risk when ingested with food or water.

*** The half life of a radioactive element is the time it takes for the element to spend half its radiation. Cesium’s half life is about 30 years and the half life of plutonium 239, a fuel often used in nuclear reactors, is 24,000 years. No big deal, right?

See https://spectrum.ieee.org/hanford-has-a-radioactive-capsule-problem for an elaboration of the radioactive material still stored under dangerous circumstances at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State (about 50 miles from the Columbia River).