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David Smail's Power, Responsibility and Freedom: an internet publication - Responsibility (at Archive.org)
There's a good quantity of his writings online (he's also written some books that I haven't read). Smail definitively places the blame for most mental illness on society. He goes further, even, in the rest of the abovementioned internet publication (series of essays?), in a way that reminds me of a lot of postmodern analysis that I've read (although he doesn't identify as a postmodernist), in his efforts to show how much of our lives is socially determined and the huge extent to which this fact is obscured by language and institutions, including, he contends, most of the content of psychotherapy.
The above quote's "interiorization" is driving at the same type of idea I mentioned in my post on 'plastic free' living, that an overemphasis on subjectivity in mental health treatment (or on individual actions such as choosing what to purchase) is serving primarily to shift the blame, or responsibility, from societal structures (which cause mental illness along with all the other suffering as a result of the exploitation of the many for the material benefit of the few - and which, in the plastic example, allow megacorporations to pollute and to produce and use plastic at tremendous rates which account for the vast majority of plastic usage) to individual people. ( Read more... )
At first, in the early 1960s (in Britain), the dominant philosophy in both psychiatric and psychological spheres was crudely mechanistic and 'objective' in the sense beloved of behaviourists. 'Mental illnesses' were illnesses like any other, imposed on the hapless victim through events beyond his or her control and largely devoid of meaning as far as his or her personal life was concerned;
or else they were the result of 'maladaptive' habits acquired through more or less accidental processes of conditioning. [...] When, therefore, theoretical innovators arrived on the scene such as R.D. Laing in psychiatry and Carl Rogers and George Kelly in clinical psychology, their introduction into the picture of notions like meaning, subjectivity and responsibility (often borrowed from European phenomenology and existentialism) brought fresh, new perspectives which many of us seized on with relief and enthusiasm. The 'organism' that had been the object of the clinical gaze became a human being whose troubles were to be understood as the product of a particular life.
[...]
For what seems to me to have happened over the years is that a mechanistic and objectivist approach to people's distress that, while it didn't overtly blame them, dehumanized them, has been replaced by a 'humanist' and 'postmodernist' one that interiorizes the phenomena of distress and - often explicitly and nearly always tacitly - holds people responsible for them. Even though the pendulum seems to have swung from an almost entirely exterior approach to an almost entirely interior one, the problem of responsibilty has not been solved: formerly we had people for whose condition nobody was responsible while now we have people whose condition is largely if not solely their own responsibility. The reason for this is to be found in what these two extreme positions have in common: a studied avoidance of the social dimension.
It is true that, as the pendulum began to swing (for example with Laing's work), the social power-structure did indeed become visible for a moment, even to the extent of spawning 'radical psychology' movements. However, as far as the mainstream is concerned, the possibility that emotional distress is the upshot of the way we organize our society has never been seriously entertained and at the present time is if anything further than ever from any kind of official recognition. The imputation of responsibility is absolutely central to this state of affairs.
There's a good quantity of his writings online (he's also written some books that I haven't read). Smail definitively places the blame for most mental illness on society. He goes further, even, in the rest of the abovementioned internet publication (series of essays?), in a way that reminds me of a lot of postmodern analysis that I've read (although he doesn't identify as a postmodernist), in his efforts to show how much of our lives is socially determined and the huge extent to which this fact is obscured by language and institutions, including, he contends, most of the content of psychotherapy.
The above quote's "interiorization" is driving at the same type of idea I mentioned in my post on 'plastic free' living, that an overemphasis on subjectivity in mental health treatment (or on individual actions such as choosing what to purchase) is serving primarily to shift the blame, or responsibility, from societal structures (which cause mental illness along with all the other suffering as a result of the exploitation of the many for the material benefit of the few - and which, in the plastic example, allow megacorporations to pollute and to produce and use plastic at tremendous rates which account for the vast majority of plastic usage) to individual people. ( Read more... )
