Chuck, You Is Crazy!

**This blog will permanently destroy any "tough guy" or "cool guy" credibility I may have pretended to have but maybe it will be helpful to someone who needs the encouragement.**


In conversation I will occasionally say, "I know I'm not crazy; my therapist said so." I love the ironic sound of this phrase but it's actually very true. I may be irrational at times, I may have strange, emotional, nostalgic moments. I may not always connect to people the same way other people do but I'm certainly not "crazy" in the sense that I'm a danger to others and myself. But I have had at important times in my life sought the services of mental health professionals in order to address immediate and long-standing emotional issues.

I was hesitant at first to seek out professional help because, like many people, I had this perceived notion that mental health problems are like the conditions of a hypochondriac and, ironically, "all in your head" inasmuch as that it's something I was just making up. The only people you ever see in movies seeking mental health treatment were catatonic, violent, drug abusers, or purely delusional. It seemed that if you didn't think you were Napoleon you were just a regular ol' person and that you should be totally fine and that to suggest otherwise is to admit an unspeakable personal weakness. Fortunately, I was encouraged by good people, a family member and friend, who had found therapy beneficial and that gave me the strength to try to face my fears. While I'm not sure if the diagnosis is 100% correct I was diagnosed with a condition in therapy that at least gave me a jumping point to find avenues towards improving my emotional and behavioral health.

You see, the brain is so unfathomably complicated that it's currently impossible to explain how it works but everyday we learn more and more about how it functions and how it affects our behaviors and our decisions. We do know some things like our ability to use pure reason plays a very, very small part in most of our actions and choices individually. It stands to reason then that every single person on the planet probably has a few, if not several million, neurological misfirings and connections which cause us to think and behave in ways that may not be most beneficial to our physical and mental health, much less for how they affect other people. And, if that's the case, it seems rather sensible to me that people might want to take time to see if there may be things they can do allow their brain to function in a more healthy way just as they would their heart and lungs.

Recently "the failure of the mental health community" has become one rallying cry in regards to the apparent, though I think sensationalized, rash of acts of mass violence by individuals. This may be my irrational brain causing me to say this but it seems that a more immediate issue is the violent individuals' inability to address their own mental health issues. Perhaps when you're psychological function is that far gone you are incapable of recognizing that you may need a different mental health strategy and that's totally fair. I'm not sure if the same thing can be said for a person who posts twice a day on Facebook about their drinking habits, their misanthropic preference of dumb animals over their fellow human, or the often hate-fueled disgust for people with different political or sociological perspectives.

Perhaps we have this hold over belief that mental health is associated with sin and that we're unhappy because we aren't following God's will or something. Fortunately, we've pretty much eradicated that belief when it comes to physical health issues (contrary to what the Bible says, I might add) so maybe it's time that society starts looking to more reasonable answers. Perhaps your "relationship with God" operates differently than mine did but my experience involved scores of hours of requests to alleviate my youthful self hatred and loneliness to an unanswering God. But, as I eventually learned, just as an obese person can't pray away the fat, a depressed person can't pray away the pain.

There is so little we know about the brain and psychology is such a young, strange science that we know we are ignorant and wrong about some or a lot of things. I can live with that because I know that the heart behind it is the question, "how can we make people healthier, better people?" You don't have to be on the verge of shooting up a school to seek to improve your psychological health. You just need the strength to say, "I wonder if I could do this better?

Similarly Inclined

I've been reading this terrific book by Michael Shermer called "The Mind of the Market: How Biology and Psychology Affect our Economic Minds" (Times Books, 2007). It is no surpise that I find this and his other books compelling because a) like Shermer I'm a skeptic who seeks scientific explanations for events and b) Shermer advocates for free market economics for a variety of social and moral reasons. This falls squarely into the category of "preaching to the choir" as I am an atheist libertarian like Michael Shermer himself. Both of us have been persuaded by the same arguments regarding philosophy and ethics and we share a similar perspective of how the world does and can operate. I am aware that there are equally learned and brilliant people who criticize Shermer and his philosophies but I have yet to read or hear any messages that I find to be more persuasive than those that he espouses. Since I have drastically changed my mind about these subjects before (remember, I used to be a socialist Christian) I always like to leave open the possibility that I may, and most likely will, alter my beliefs about the world.

So here's my question: what's so hard about taking the perspective that a person may be wrong about things and that it's just part of being a human? All the time I see conservatives deriding liberals as being mentally disabled and stupid and I see liberals calling conservatives hateful and ignorant. Maybe it's because of my libertarian bent that I take issue with this because I tend to support economic conservatism and am therefore lumped together anti-abortion, pro-religion zealots. Perhaps it's because I think people should be able to choose what they put in their bodies, be it drugs, fast food or cocks, that I'm considered a morally permissive sinner bound for Hell. I have no idea what the best choices for you are. I certainly don't think that corporations or the government know what is best for you. I do think that we as individuals are more than capable of making relatively good decisions for ourselves and the more autonomy we are given the better off we are. At least I am until I am given sound reasoning to think otherwise.

I know I've written about this before but I'm just fucking tired of name-calling. I'm particularly tired of people thinking they have a moral upper hand because of their beliefs. I shouldn't be surprised about this because in "The Mind of the Market" Shermer discusses studies recently conducted in which people were asked to rank their virtue in comparison of others, including their friends in which they consistently ranked themselves as being more moral and compassionate than others. There are a number of reasons for this but it ultimately comes down to humans' irrational ability to justify their own actions, right or wrong. Having been associated with both religious and non-religious groups I can tell you that no one has a monopoly on self-righteousness. I think atheist libertarianism offers the best, most constructive worldview currently available but that doesn't make me a better person by any measure.