It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were “anxiety disorders,” including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); “mood disorders,” including major depression and bipolar disorders; “impulse-control disorders,” including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and “substance use disorders,” including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment—up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier.

Nowadays treatment by medical doctors nearly always means psychoactive drugs, that is, drugs that affect the mental state. In fact, most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants. The increased use of drugs to treat psychosis is even more dramatic. The new generation of antipsychotics, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, has replaced cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the US…

The DSM is the official source for psychologists who are diagnosing patients with mental disorders. The article points out that the number of disorders in the manual has more than doubled since the 1950s:

Hypothesis One:  The DSM reflects an increasingly sophisticated and exhuastive compendium of all possible mental disorders.

Hypothesis Two:  More psychological disorders = more people diagnosed with mental disorders = more money is siphoned off to hospitals, treatment centers, drug companies, mental health professionals, social workers, school counselors, etc.  (Scientists who are currently working on the next version of the DSM have agreed to restrict their income from drug makes to $10,000 a year or less.)

Hypothesis Three:  We are an increasingly rationalized society and all things are becoming increasingly listed, compiled, organized, and annotated.

Hypothesis Four:  What is considered a “problem” depends on the social context.  (“Homosexuality” used to be in the DSM, but it isn’t any longer.)  Perhaps a shift in the last 50 years has created a social context that is less tolerant of difference, more insistent upon happiness, or requires a more compliant citizen.

Hypothesis Five:  Grassroots activists get together and lobby scientists to include disorders in the DSM so that they can raise awareness and money for research.

What is your hypothesis?

I have seen the exact manner in which the junk virus operates through fifteen years of addiction. The pyramid of junk, one level eating the level below (it is no accident that junk higher-ups are always fat and the addict in the streets is always thin) right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world built on basic principles of monopoly.

Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession. The addict stands by while his junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse. Junk is quantitative and accurately measurable. The more junk you use the less you have and more you have the more you use. All the hallucinogen drugs are considered sacred by those who use them-there are Peyote Cults and Bannisteria Cults, Hashish Cults and Mushroom Cults-“the Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico enable a man to see God”-but no one ever suggested that junk is sacred. There are no opium cults. Opium is profane and quantitative like money. I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India. It was called soma and is pictured as a beautifulblue tide. If soma everexisted the Pusher was there to bottle it and monopolize it and sell it and it turned into plain old time JUNK.

Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy… The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.

Junk yields a basic formula of “evil” virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of “evil” is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: “Wouldn’t you?” Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk is a big industry. I recall talking to an American who worked for the Aftosa Commission in Mexico. Six hundred a month plus expense account:

“How long will the epidemic last?” I enquired.

“As long as we can keep it going… And yes … maybe the aftosa will break out in South America,” he said dreamily.

W. Burroughs, Naked Lunch.

What is a drug? what the nature of a drug is. My desire was to get a fix on it; I wanted to be able to say what precisely we are dealing with here when we address that thing with which we become obsessed, that substance to which we become addicted. And this should be read both literally and metaphorically; drug as the reality of an ingested substance or thing; and also “drug” as that prime metaphor for all that we become obsessed by – religion, house prices, the futures market, tulips from Amsterdam, the person we are in love with… Surely, if it is possible to grasp the drug in its essence, in its reality, in its nature – then, and only then, can we answer the question as to whether obsession is passion or pathological, compulsion or choice, lust or disease.

But what if the meaning of drugs is precisely to disallow, from the start and in principle, the question: what is? What if the nature of drugs are such that to ask: what is this thing? – is to misplace this phenomena: although, as you will immediately see, if indeed “drugs” are not the sort of thing of which one can ask what they are, then that will mean, firstly that the word has no meaning, conventionally defined; and secondly that it most certainly is not a phenomenon.

For instance, it would be better not to raise these questions the next time I am arrested for possession of addictive substances: it is unlikely that the police will take kindly to a para-ontological enquiry into the grounds of drug law. This is because the discourse which will take place in that milieu is defined by that very law; the written law which does its job by answering the question: what is a drug? Once the answer to that question is written down, once it is made law – and, for reasons of justice and the separation of the powers of the state, the milieu for that operation is an entirely other one than the police station – once it is made law, the type of question is legitimated together with the specifics of the answer. We are permitted – nay, required - to ask and to know: what is a drug; ignorance of the law, as they say, is no defence.

At what level of discourse, then, in what milieu – for it is surely not everywhere or at all times – in what milieu is it necessary or legitimate to disallow the question: what is a drug?

In the essay Plato’s Pharmacy (from 1970) Derrida famously interrogates Plato’s notion of the pharmakon, in the context of a debate about the nature and status of writing and meaningful philosophy. The Greek word Pharmakon – which can be translated as “drug” – says, at the same time, simultaneously, in the same breath, both remedy and poison, beneficial medicine and harmful philtre. As he says: “The ‘essence’ of the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance. The pharmakon has no ideal identity; it is aneidetic, firstly because it is not monoeidetic (in the sense in which Plato’s Phaedo speaks of the eidos as something simple, noncomposite: monoeides). This ‘medicine’ is not a simple thing. But neither is it a composite, a sensible or empirical synthesis partaking of several simple essences.”

What is it that we are obsessed by? What gives to be obsessed? This means, in turn, that there can be no “nature” of drugs, or that drugs are not defined in nature. Derrida, in an interview entitled Rhetoric of Drugs, says that: “There may be ‘natural’ poisons and indeed naturally lethal poisons, but they are not poisonous insofar as they are drugs…. There is not, in the case of drugs, any objective, scientific, physical or ‘naturalistic’ definition.” We cannot, the claim is, if we wish to get to the bottom of what drugs mean, to the bottom of what obsesses us, make use of a scientific or positivistic definition. Such definitions, of course, exist, as we have already noted, and as Derrida immediately himself points out: “[the definition of drugs] may be ‘naturalistic’, if by this we understand that it attempts to naturalize that which defies any natural definition or any definition of natural reality.”

And such an attempt is entirely legitimate – indeed necessary - when, for instance, it comes to framing the law. But more widely than this, we can say that in order to speak, in order to make discourse, in order to have knowledge, in order indeed to have truth, we must – legitimately and entirely necessarily – go a certain way down this route of naturalisation. Naturalisation, as Derrida will say elsewhere, is never innocent. There is always a strategy, a politics, a structuring of power within society by those with power, behind the process of naturalization, precisely because the claim that something is natural or, conversely – like drugs or, say, masturbation – that something is unnatural – these are claims which rules out in advance any questioning of that thing’s status. It is the claim that that is how it is: and such claims usually have the police to enforce them. Thus the dangerous status of drugs. Not just examples of drugs- real or metaphorical - but the concept – or perhaps we should say, the non-concept – of drugs, drugs in their non-essence. And this in a strange, manifold manner. For, firstly, it is on the basis of something like the non-concept of a drug, the non-identity of the pharmakon, on the basis of something which is not a thing because when we say it, we say more than one thing at the same time, we say (our) opposites at the same time – on this basis we can then differentiate between these two opposites which we subsequently give ourselves: poison and remedy. Things which have the character of drugs are, says Derrida, the medium within which we can differentiate that which we must differentiate in order to speak, to give knowledge, to allow truth to happen. In other words, they are that which enables differences to occur, and therefore have the status of Derrida’s neologism difference (spelt with an “a”), which means something like that which gives the possibility for difference to occur. They have, too, the status of Deleuze’s differences prior to any notion or possibility of identity; and the same status as Nietzsche’s eternal return, which is not the same thing returning, but rather the possibility of saying or positing the same within an eternal return; and the same structure as Bataille’s general economics, which means a milieu in which these non-ontological questions can be opened. This status is dangerous because it gets to the root, or rather beyond the root, beyond the thought of the root, of our current order, and therefore calls it into question.

Secondly, and to be more specific about the nature of obsession and addiction, we can see that in this environment of drugs there is a potentially obsessive movement.  We can see that obsession, in general, has something to do with inappropriate movement, more specifically inappropriate positive feedback machines which mutually and reflexively reinforce in circular and potentially destructive fashion.  We can see this across all fields of obsession.  Drug addiction has something to do with the effect of tolerance on dopamine receptors in the brain; the more coke we snort, the less the pleasure effect, the more, therefore, we need the drug.  This can be verified experimentally: rats which have their dopamine receptors removed do not self-administer cocaine; they do not, unlike their cousins, become dependent.  The obsessive movement of the futures market in commodities, or indeed any boom and bust market such as that we are seeing for property, occurs due to the reflexive (that is, discourse-based) effect of knowledge and rumour on price in a reinforcing feedback mechanism; a phenomenon which Soros, amongst others, has learnt to use to his own advantage, precisely because he has theorised it and is thereby able to operate at the level of the pharmakon and not merely at the innocent level of those who believe the naturalised information of the journalists and other reality-based commentators.

Tim Gough, Derrida and Drugs.

Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself. There is, indeed, another and better path: that of becoming a member of the human community, and, with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will. Then one is working with all for the good of all. But the most interesting methods of averting suffering are those which seek to influence our own organism. In the last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we only feel it in consequence of certain ways in which our organism is regulated. The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one — intoxication. […]

The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and peoples alike have given them an established place in the economics of their libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world. For one knows that, with the help of this ‘drowner of cares’ one can at any time withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one’s own with better conditions of sensibility. As is well known, it is precisely this property of intoxicants which also determines their danger and their injuriousness. They are responsible, in a certain circumstances, for the useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

When we say symptom, repetition is always found on the horizon.[…] Lacan talked about surprise as a structural trait of the unconscious. The symptom as “et cetera” is the opposite of surprise. When we say, “That’s him all right” or “That’s just like her,” that’s the “et cetera” of someone. A person’s symptom is his or her true identity. Lacan said that the symptom of certain persons could be the most real thing they possess. This illuminates for us how the symptom is associated with the real. […] Lacan placed the symptom very precisely at the level of the necessary: the symptom doesn’t stop writing itself. (J-A Miller)

(via fuckyeahmentalhealth)

scipsy:

Great research looking at the worlds most addictive stuff. Top of the list - media!

Top 10 addictions (in America):

1. Media

2. Tobacco

3. Alcohol

4. Marijuana

5. Food

6. Gambling

7. Prescription drugs

8. Bulimia

9. Cocaine

10. Hallucinogens

In USA.