A long time ago, in a nation that has almost disappeared, I received a 2 CD set named “The Fire Next Time”. It was before the U. S. invasion of Iraq. In going through my collection of CDs I came across it and played it again. The first CD is the narration of the modern history of Iraq. The second CD is the music alone

It was profoundly moving. The destruction and suffering that this nation had already wreaked upon the unfortunate people of Iraq by 2001 was only the prelude to the unspeakable horrors we have visited upon them since then.

The CD set is still available from the website, which has moved.

THE FIRE THIS TIME

Several years ago I told a friend in the mental health business that, considering the epidemic of depression that hit the American middle class in the ’90s, we ought to seriously consider the hypothesis that depression is not an illness so much as the response of a normal, healthy person to a society in which it has become increasingly impossible to sanely live. Knowing that I was recovering from a nasty case of depression, he was sympathetic but non-committal.

Now Joe Bageant, redneck hippie grown mature, author of Deer Hunting With Jesus, has put it as well as it could be put:

Whatever else can be said of capitalism, it is miraculous stuff, pure alchemy. It can privatize and corporatize any damned thing under the sun, turn a profit on it, and then make it a bulwark of corporate state control to boot. Even human misery and oppression of soul and mind. Psychological practice and its institutions benefit greatly from this. After all, they are in the alienation business. It is entirely in the profession's best interests that it treat us as if our lives are lived in a vacuum, our loneliness and despair are entirely our own, as if there were no such thing as context, much less American society's corrosive and toxic environment in which so many of us live out our lives.

Put another way, it acknowledges our misery, then privatizes it, then administers lonely alienated "treatment" for our emptiness in a private void, one among tens of millions of like emptinesses in similar voids that are in no way supposed to be societal. No matter that there are enough sufferers to constitute an entire society in themselves. The result, whether or not by design, is to perpetuate the most venerable of American myths, that of the completely autonomous self. Which denies us the power and beauty, not to mention the healing and efficacy, of human unity. In the big picture, much of the U.S. mental health industry, and its associated systems, perpetuate and even propagate mental sickness perhaps as much as it alleviates, through its paradigms. In any case, for the most part, psychology as an institution has hardened into part of the national ideology, thanks to the catalyst of gobs of dough from the state. The American Psychological Association's initial refusal to condemn member participation in the Bush regime's torture told me all I needed to know about U.S. psych-officialdom.

Read the whole column, think about the life you and those around you lead, and attempt to convince yourself that he is wrong.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/02/a-commodity-called-misery.html

Rupert Sheldrake, the British biologist, believes that if enough persons start thinking about something, it creates a “morphic field,” that influences the rest of us who find themselves in similar situations. Jung called the phenomenon “synchronicity.” Perhaps this is a partial explanation for what is taking place.

Tags: psychology, psychiatry, Class, depression