“Men are so necessarily Mad, that not to be Mad would be itself a form of Madness”

There’s an article here about ‘Mad Pride’, a group of people diagnosed with mental illnesses (couldn’t decide whether to put scare quotes round that…) who advocate personal freedom in deciding whether and what medications to take and treatments to receive. There’s a very long discussion about it in comments here. (The title is a quote from, I believe, Blaise Pascal)

I am broadly sympathetic to ‘mad pride’, ‘anti-psychiatry’, and related movements, but it would be disingenuous of me to act as though I had a confidence and settled opinion that I lack, so I won’t offer a definitive position. What I will offer is a few observations that may help to navigate.

So the first thing is: let’s take the most commonly used argument for forcible treatment, which is that some mentally ill people are dangerous to themselves or to others, and thus it’s irresponsible to not treat them. Now, probability of violence against others is statistically correlated with a number of features: most obviously, being young, and being male.

Diets and Anarchism

There’s a great post up at Shapely Prose about unrestricted eating. It resonated with me, though not so much about the eating.

The point is about the meaning of ‘unrestricted’. People who Restrict their eating with a capital R, i.e. diet, sometimes seem to think as if were they, or anyone else, not to diet, their eating would be entirely unrestricted, and they’d binge constantly.

Whereas in fact, people not on diets – people even without any ‘dieting-consciousness’, any habit of thinking ‘oh no I shouldn’t‘, eat a perfectly mundane amount. They see things that they’d like to eat, but for various reasons don’t eat them – like, they’re full, or it would be inconvenient, or they’re busy, or they are going to eat something else soon, etc.They can, as the author, Fillyjonk, puts it, think about eating something, without eating it – they can afford to “decriminalize [their] thoughts about food”.

But dieting-consciousness can lead people to associate the lack of Restriction (diets) with the lack of restriction (not doing absolutely everything that crosses your mind). As commenter Ailbhe says, “People Can Be Trusted To Look After Themselves Given Half A Chance – Nation In Shock”.

War on Drugs – huh, yeah, what is it good for?

Michele Kazatchkine, head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, has claimed that fighting the spread of AIDS, especially in countries outside of Africa, requires the de-criminalisation of drugs, since the illegal nature of intravenous drug injection, and the punitive stance towards addicts, endanger public health. He says

“A repressive way of dealing with drug users is a way of facilitating the [HIV/AIDS] epidemic…From a scientific perspective, I cannot understand the repressive policy perspective.”

I think is an under-statement. Drug policy is not just repressive, it is in many cases military. It’s not just that states focus on ‘punishment’ rather than saving lives, but that they focus on defeating and destroying the enemy force.

Someone who is punished is at least recognised as a community member, and their continued existence valued. But drugs policies often seem characterised by a deadliness and brutality that calls to mind more the attitude towards an enemy army or a hunted animal.

Murder, Drugs, and Genital Mutilation: Struggles in Guinea-Bissau

Guinea-Bissau is one of the world’s smallest and poorest non-island countries, and it’s recently appeared in the news (well, some news, my impression of news is mainly google world) but will no doubt shortly disappear again. I’m not really qualified to comment on it, but it bugs the hell out of me how the western media arbitrarily selects some countries/conflicts/situations and reports them in great detail, while leaving others, more significant in many ways, unmentioned. The most extreme example is probably Palestine vs. Congo, but there are endless others.

Anyway, so I have decided to counter this arbitrariness by arbitrarily selecting some little-attended issues and reporting them with the seriousness they deserve.

For those who need a brief recap of what has happened in Guinea-Bissau, about a week ago soldiers loyal to the president assassinated the head of the army, and then shortly afterwards, soldiers loyal to the head of the army assassinated the president.

The Epistemology of Soma

One of the most-referenced aspects of the society in Brave New World is ‘soma’, a euphoric and halluciogenic drug without any harmful side effects which is routinely used by citizens to escape stress or just for fun.

This is often something that people see as part of the ‘false-ness’ of BNWS, part of its lack of dignity or respect for humanity or truth. It’s also, relatedy, seen as a part of its political oppressiveness.

I want to look drugs more generally, in two ways: epistemologically, and politically.

Epistemologically, I would suggest, the way we typically think about drugs is the mirror image of religion.

Wait, what?

Jacqui Smith and Drugs! Are! Bad!

So what happens is:

The government’s top drug adviser suggests that ecstasy is about as dangerous as horse-riding.

Politicians fall over each other in their haste to tell the top drugs adviser that he doens’t know what he’s talking about.

Then, they remind him that not only is he ignorant, ill-informed and exceptionally stupid, the claims he is making are wrong and bad – it “makes light of a serious problem, trivialises the dangers of drugs, shows insensitivity to the families of victims of ecstasy and sends the wrong message to young people about the dangers of drugs”.

Fortunately, after sufficient repetition of “there is absolutely no equivalence between the legal activity of horse riding and the illegal activity of drug taking”, normalcy is restored, the troubling ideas are driven off, and people can get back to their depressing, frustrating lives, reassured that the only acceptable form of escapism is to fantasise that voting for a politician will make the country better.

Obviously drugs (ecstasy, tobacco, alcohol, salt) carry risks, like most things. Whatever you may think about whether this means people should or shouldn’t use them, it has nothing to do with why politicians oppose them, which is why the suggestion that the risks aren’t all that high after all is greeted defensively and painted as not just mistaken but immoral to even suggest.

The attitude people take towards self-damaging behaviours is extremely complex and usually inconsistent. Dangerous sports, but not all of them, are acceptable; body modifications, up to cosmetic surgery, are acceptable; self-harm as a coping mechanism is pathologised; extreme BDSM is debated; self-starvation is encouraged, when not too extreme; unhealthy eating is condemned, tacitly facilitated, and thoroughly mystified to make people associate it with being thin; alcohol drinking is acceptable, but people who do it too much are ‘bingeing’; working in unhealthy conditions is fine, within limits, because it’s profitable and encourages investment.

Does anybody really have a coherent account of how all of these differ and resemble each other, and which ones can be consistently regarded in what way? I don’t. I doubt most politicians do. Yet people’s lives are utterly ruined by being sent to prison over this tangle of knee-jerks. It all makes as much sense as executing people for attempted suicide.

Note also the class associations of the two activities. Who goes horse-riding? Who can afford to go horse-riding? Conversely, who can afford a few ecstasy tablets?