ALL ABOUT PSYCHE
When figures from the Enlightenment era thought about mental health, even those who were progressive or marginal, they reached for Latin, taking Rome as a Holy Land as though no theism was involved. Of course, this is because God is a figure of ultimate authority and dominance which is what they need, they think, to force people to shape up.
The pretense is that sanity is being addressed rationally and scientifically, but too many people can’t get up to speed about mental work, which is usually really emotional work. The basic cipher is always narrative, which is emotional. We use myth.
Psyche, (Greek: “Soul”) in classical mythology, princess of outstanding beauty who aroused Venus’ jealousy and Cupid’s love. … According to Apuleius, the jealous Venus commanded her son Cupid (the god of love) to inspire Psyche with love for the most despicable of men. (Beauty and the Beast.)
Other stories are attached to this one, both sad and explanatory, like finding out the reality of the ones we love, but we hear very little about the children who are the origin of the words for “voluptuous” or “hedonic.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(mythology)
In early times when people were “crazy” they might be dramatic and dangerous enough to be kept in chains in madhouses. Today their chains are drugs and we have battalions of caretakers in institutions to shepherd them through their days. We think of that as humane, though they might not think so. My experience has been that psych work can be exercises in conformity, for the benefit of the culture. One needs terminology to think about it.
PSYCHIATRISTS
“Doctors must be board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) in order to practice psychiatry. They also must be licensed as an MD or OD by the state in which they practice.”
ABPN: American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology https://www.abpn.com
Note that this board is a nonprofit (?) corporation founded in the Thirties, a time of enormous distress, rather like now. One must be an MD or OD because a psychiatrist is expected to identify problems from lesions, infection, inheritance — real organic damage — and to be able to prescribe meds that may be dangerous.
Some psychiatrists are certified to do brain surgery. It was not long ago that some troublesome patients, particularly women, were lobotomized — that is, a knife was inserted through their eye socket to cut off the most human part of the brain, the prefrontal lobe. The procedure was done to the sisters of both JFK and Tennessee Williams. This is now discredited. But there has been a return to electroconvulsive shock to break depression.
This specialty is been invaded and weakened by the idea that nurses or other assistants can act as doctors under a doctor’s supervision. Someone has said that it takes ten years of experience to create a real doctor, because it is as much a culture as a body of knowledge.
We disrespectfully call MD level psychiatrists “shrinks” because they so often deal with people whose main problem for other is that they are grandiose and need to be brought back down to size. This is also true of the “shrinks” themselves.
PSYCHOLOGISTS may be people who work in labs to create situations rather like Candid Camera that will surprise the brain into giving up clues to how it works. Much has been found about the two brain halves interact, about memory, and so on. This is all been both enhanced and challenged by the invention of the fMRI which actually maps thought while it happens. So far we can only put heads in the machine, so there is no evidence about gut reaction, etc. Psychologists think about groups as well as individuals and use a lot of statistics.
THERAPISTS (PSYCHOTHERAPY) present themselves as having worked out systems of understanding for helping people. They are much influenced by the cultures where they are devised, because what one culture considers normal might put another individual in mortal danger. The notion of homosexuality, which is a cluster of prejudices, has been particularly troublesome.
Those who practice in the humanities, teachers, artists, musicians and the like, often face interference with their creativity. For instance black and autochthonous people can be misinterpreted, distorted or over-romanticized.
ANALYSTS (PSYCHOANALYSTS) aspire to work out the inner structure of a specific person, using whatever resources they can access. This is the closest to being literary, in the way that an anthropologist may be literary in telling the story of a community.
CLINICAL PASTORAL CARE is combined test and learning system that puts people who want to be religious leaders into contexts of stress, like hospitals or prisons, where they are expected to use their religious systems to help people unselected by previous beliefs. Not every religious institution uses this service. Those who do not want to be challenged, generally avoid this system because it exposes them.
People working in any of these categories might be faced with problems like the one we have been witnessing in our politics, namely the mental deterioration of Trump due to a mix of organic deterioration, bad character and criminality. This article recommends a few dependable tests.
Determination of the president’s actual cognitive status would have required a full history by someone with training in mental health and a standardized battery of tests, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the California Verbal Learning Test, the Stroop Test, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and an amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) scan of the brain should have been considered, given the observable symptoms and his family history.
It may be that all things psychological have outgrown the story of Psyche. We now see humans as so intricate, changing, and influenced by circumstances that most of our ideas of how to interact with them are way out of date. It’s not quite fair to concentrate on Trump since from the beginning there was plenty of evidence the public had that he was mad as a hatter and a criminal. But he serves as a vivid example of our inadequacy when it comes to guarding against madmen.
The moral dimension seems to be missing, but psych departments have defined themselves from the context of anthropology/science, which is charged to avoid judgement assigned to religion. Religion is considered inappropriate for “psyche” matters. Some even think that religion is a form of psychological disability. Now we know that a “psyche” is not like a “soul” that floats over our heads like a cartoon thought balloon.
We know that an individual forms within a community with sanity developed by nurturing between gestation and kindergarten. We know that mental health can be public, formed by chemical infrastructure as basic as clean water and public safety. I mean, some of us know these things, but the general population of the planet does not. What is the new narrative? It may be the one about capturing a god who keeps morphing into a new form, now a snake, now a bear, now a flame.
