America in the twenty-first century has become Manic Nation.
Manic Nation is a place of hyped-up lives, in which people move at an inhuman pace to keep up with unnatural demands. It is a place that literally denatures people, removes them from the natural rhythms and activities that evolved over millennia.
Manic Nation is a place where people are removed from nature, eat unnatural foods, don’t sleep well or exercise. It’s a place where the natural bonds of family are damaged or severed altogether. It’s a place where larger communities are torn apart by constant migration, economic insecurity, and alienated relationships.
In Manic Nation, people have less and less chance to be themselves—to be accepted for who they are—and feel compelled to submit themselves to the fragmented and disorienting demands of others.
Evidence of Manic Nation can be found in the alarming statistics of mental illness not only in the U.S. but also around the world. Mental illness has become the greatest cause of human problems—broken families, truncated work experience, inhuman behavior.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has found that 9 to 17 percent of respondents in an international survey—face-to-face interviews of 60,643 people in fourteen countries—experienced at least one episode of clinical mental illness in the previous year. Mental illness was experienced by more people in the U.S. (26 percent) than traditional cultures like Shanghai (4 percent) and Nigeria (5 percent).
The effects are devastating—on schooling and work, on family relations and friendships, on saving and building a good home life.
What’s the cause of mania in America? Many factors contribute — like imbalances in brain chemistry, bad responses to those imbalances, rushed lives, economic insecurity.
But it seems that there’s one underlying aspect of our society that contributes the most. We have become denatured — cut off from nature, cut off from our own traditional ways, detached from what it means to be a human.
Intriguing and tragic evidence comes from herds of elephants in Africa.
Elephants—profoundly social animals, with extensive systems of caregiving in their herds—have become begun to attack humans without provocation. Humans have invaded the complex worlds of the elephants, undermining ancient connections between elders and the rest of their tribes. Gay Bradshaw, who wrote a seminal article on the topic for Nature magazine, is quoted in a compelling article in The New York Times Magazine: “The loss of the elephant elders and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of the family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.” Cut off from each other and from their habitat, the elephants of Africa and Asia suffer damage to their brains’ development. They become both manic and depressed.
What can be done?
As Andrew Solomon writes in The New York Times, depression is the leading cause of disability across the world. And very few people who need professional help — counseling, pharmaceuticals, diet help — ever get it. Even though the effect of mental illness is widespread and devastating, we do not know how to talk about it. It’s still a stigmatized disease. We treat mentally ill people as if they are morally inferior, pathetic, worthy of scorn. A generation ago, people with cancer were treated the same way.
Solomon proposes the creation of a national network of mental health centers. The centers would conduct research and educate the public and decisionmakers about policy options about mental illness. The centers would help translate what we already know — what what we know about what we don;t know — to practitioners. They would foster a new way of talking about mental illness.
When figures like Tipper Gore started talking about mental illness — making counseling and other services available as part of a national health care package — I shuddered in fear. How can a system that is already so big and bloated and inefficient — not to mention unequal — handle a whole new set of mandates and programs? How could we ever make sure that the money gets spent well? Would we be paying $100 an hour for people to whine about their parents?
I still have concerns about how adding a vast new wing to the vast health care establishment could address the very real need for mental health care. What are the standards? What’s the accountability? But we need to do soemthing. It’s every bit as urgent a problem as Sputnik.
A mental health policy ideally would have two broad components:
(1) Fostering more healthful environments and lifestyles. You can’t legislate against TV, computers, videos, iPods, cellphones. You can’t pass a bill and solve the congestion problem. You can’t adopt a three-point program to slow down the pace of work or improve the ways of family life. A federal agency cannot mandate that people eat real food. You can’t wave a wand and replace all the alienating structures of modern life with human-scale communities reminiscent of Mayberry, N.C.
But you can build these considerations into debates about minimum wages and urban design. Enlightened businesses can grow not by exploiting workers but by creating longterm business plans based on the idea that healthy workers are more productive. Schools can counter the mad scramble for grades and test scores and instead concentrate on teaching kids, one at a time. Public buildings can make sure than only good food gets served in cafeterias. Congress (ha ha) can cut off subsidies for destructive products like tobacco.
(2) Treating people who suffer from mental illness, whatever environment they find themselves. We need to find ways to track people’s health more reliably, from infancy to old age. We need to notice when kids are acting out or withdrawn. We need to make early interventions with girls starve themselves to death. We need to protect people who suffer the trauma of violence and abuse.
Sometimes, that takes incredible effort and expense. It;s never easy, especially in a culture that stigmatizes people who are suffering.
But the sooner we can find out who needs help, the better off we’ll be.
Here’s where the difficulty lies: There’s a difference between someone who’s tormented by traumatic incidents, or just unloved, and someone who suffers because of chemical imbalances in the brain.
As Albert Ellis and others have argued, dealing with the former requires fostering habits that enable to move beyond their problems rather than dwell in them. Ellis pioneered effective strategies for “rational-emotive therapy” to get people to follow the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
But sometimes, no matter how effectieve this approach is, the patient needs chemical intervention — if only to stabilize his being so that the wisdom of Nieubuhr has a chance.
Somehow, we have to acknowledge thatour culture has become so alienated from nature and ourselves that we risk ruining it.
The Roman Empire supposedly expired, in part, when lead pipes dumbed diminished the mental capacity of the empire’s people.
In 21st century America, the danger is much more pervasive. Time to have a debate — and act.
