Our Broken Mental Health System

While Cho Seung-Hui quietly - very quietly - pursued his studies, millions of ordinary, non-violent, folks were being subjected to heavy-duty labels ripped from the DSM-IV. An estimated 20 percent of American children and teenagers are diagnosed as mentally ill in the course of a year, and adults need not feel left out of the labeling spree: Watch enough commercials and you'll learn that you suffer from social phobia, depression, stress, or some form of sexual indifference (at least I find it hard to believe that all this "E.D." is purely physical in origin.)

Consider the essay "Manufacturing Depression" in the May issue of Harper's. Hoping to qualify for a study on "Minor Depression" at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the author, Gary Greenberg, presents himself with a list of problems including "the stalled writing projects and the weedy garden, the dwindling bank accounts and the difficulties of parenthood," in other words, "the typical plaint and worry and disappointment of a middle-aged, middle-class American life..."

Alas, it turns out he does not qualify for the Minor Depression study. "What you have," the doctor tells him, "is Major Depression."

In the early sixties, the renegade psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argued, in The Myth of Mental Illness, that the real business of the mental health system was social control. Normal, physically active, nine-year-olds have to learn to sit still. Adults facing "dwindling bank accounts" have to be drugged or disciplined into accepting their fate. What therapy aimed to achieve was not "health," but compliance to social norms.

Szasz still rings true every time I've been confronted with a "personality test" which reads like a police interrogation: How much have you stolen from previous employers? Do you have any objections to selling cocaine? Is it "easier to work when you're a little bit high"?

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