Probing the Extent of Major Psychiatric Illnesses

If about 20% of all Americans in any six-month period, and about one-third over their lifetimes, suffer from “acute mental illness,” a reasonable hypothesis is that it is the culture and society that is psychopathogenic rather than simply individual susceptibilities.

That the culture may be pathogenic rather than the person pathological is something that psychiatrists are rather unlikely to see; their concern is with the individual and they function as society’s agents to fix people up so they can get back into the mainstream. Theologians and philosophers--and many a common man and woman--may see a good deal of the problem more clearly.

How is the society pathogenic? By its central focus on living up to images and facades (Martin Buber once wrote, “seeming” rather than “being”), the non-authenticity of most interactions and relationships including even the most intimate, the focus on self and self-satisfaction as the goal of existence, and so on. If this is not how life is really meant to be, then the strain and stress lead to the various fallings-apart we see as “acute mental illness.”

HAROLD S. SPEAR

Pasadena