Welcome to From Insults to Respect.
Those who experience what is sometimes referred to as a nervous breakdown can receive a great many insults as their behavior begins to annoy. The Rolling Stones’s hit “19th Nervous Breakdown” insightfully explores this issue.
The lyrics begin,
You’re the kind of person you meet at certain dismal, dull affairs
Center of a crowd, talking much too loud, running up and down the stairs
Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years
And though you’ve tried you just can’t hide your eyes are edged with tearsYou better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown
The song tells us about someone who frequently, nineteen times so far, experiences what the vocalist, Mick Jagger, refers to as a nervous breakdown. I get the sense the “talking way too loud” is annoying. Mick hazards a guess in this first stanza as to what’s causing these breakdowns–seeing too much in too few years. The character in this tale is overwhelmed.
Mick, in the next verse, provides some additional theorizing.
When you were a child you were treated kind but you were never brought up right
You were always spoiled with a thousand toys but still you cried all night
Your mother who neglected you owes a million dollars tax
And your father’s still perfecting ways of making sealing wax
Early childhood experiences, such as being spoiled, a lack of motherly attention, and family financial difficulties can be significant stresses leading to a variety of emotional concerns. Supporting this line of thinking is an abundance of research evidence (see HERE, HERE, and HERE).
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry, along with psychiatrists who sold out to it, promotes the theory that these emotional concerns are due to a chemical imbalance. The right pill prescription, they claim, is the first line of treatment.
Because doctors in the physical health arena have become so respected because of many amazingly successful treatments dealing with physical health problems, doctors in the mental health arena find it easy to convince their patients to take a variety of pills. This financially rewording model continues despite years of negative research findings (see HERE). Hans S. Schroder, clinician and researcher at the Harvard Department of Psychiatry along with his colleagues, recently wrote:
“Our findings are in line with accumulating evidence that some biogenetic beliefs, like the chemical imbalance belief, are linked with poorer expectations for improvement, especially among those with the most troubling symptoms.”
As the Rolling Stones song continues, it begins to express the exasperation that can occur when trying to help someone going through emotionally challenging experiences:
Oh, who’s to blame
That girl’s just insane
Well, nothing I do don’t seem to work
It only seems to make the matters worse
Oh, pleaseYou were still in school when you had that fool who really messed your mind
And after that you turned your back on treating people kind
On our first trip I tried so hard to rearrange your mind
But after awhile I realized you were disarranging mine
It’s understandable how people can lose their patience with someone viewed as insane. That’s one of the reasons some people are super quick to encourage the quick fix of psychiatric drugs. However, in another hit by the Rolling Stones, “Mother’s Little Helper,” Mick doesn’t seem too comfortable with this. The song’s lyrics deal with the popularity of prescribed drugs and the potential hazards of overdose or addiction. The early part of the song tells us,
What a drag it is getting old,
“Kids are different today”
I hear every mother say
Mother needs something today
To calm her down
And though she’s not really ill
There’s a little yellow pillShe goes running for the shelter
Of her mother’s little helper
And it helps her on her way
Gets her through her busy day
We are indeed getting older, and having anxiety about this is a common useful experience, not an illness. Anxiety, when handled skillfully, motivates us to come to mature understandings about how we can live a life worth living (see HERE for a fuller understanding regarding the nature of anxiety). But when a mother goes to a doctor and expresses concerns about her anxiety, there’s an excellent chance she will have her expressed concerns translated into mental disorder language and she will leave the office with a drug prescription. That’s how the doctors make their money. How does this sit with Mick?
“
Things are different today”
I hear every mother say
Cooking fresh food for her husband’s just a drag
So she buys an instant cake
And she burns a frozen steakAnd goes running for the shelter
Of her mother’s little helper
And two help her on her way
Get her through her busy day“Doctor, please
Some more of these”
Outside the door
She took four more
What a drag it is getting old
Life has its periods of frustration. If you were brought up in a home where feeling down was viewed as something is wrong with you, it’s easy to move from that view to pathologizing such experiences. The pharmaceutical industry promotes this way of thinking with ads that depict someone feeling down, and then, following a prescription for a pill, the sun is now shining, and everyone is all smiles. There is a serious downside that comes with this approach, as the song’s next lines begin to bring into focus.
“Men just aren’t the same today”
I hear every mother say
“They just don’t appreciate that you get tired”
They’re so hard to satisfy
You can tranquilize your mindSo go running for the shelter
Of a mother’s little helper
And four help you through the night
Help to minimize your plight“Doctor, please
Some more of these”
Outside the door
She took four more
What a drag it is getting old
Notice that two pills are no longer sufficient for these mothers. The process of addiction is underway. In the scientific literature, this process is called “down regulation” or “tolerance.” To understand this process, let’s take the example of tobacco smokers. We see evidence of tolerance to tobacco in studies that indicate fewer responses than do non-smokers to the same amount of nicotine (Perkins et al. 2001b). More specifically, we see a reduction on measures of subjective stimulation that may be viewed as pleasurable, such as arousal, vigor, and a subjective experience often referred to as “head rush” or “buzz.”
The relief that smokers feel each time they give themselves another dose of nicotine creates the powerful illusion that cigarettes help them to deal with stress. Thus, in a study published in the American Psychologist, researchers found the following: Smokers often report that cigarettes help relieve feelings of stress. However, the stress levels of adult smokers are slightly higher than those of nonsmokers. Moreover, adolescent smokers report increasing levels of stress as they develop regular patterns of smoking. For those who quit the smoking habit their stress levels are reduced. Far from acting as an aid for mood control, nicotine dependency exacerbates stress. This is confirmed in the daily mood patterns described by smokers, with above average levels of stress during smoking and worsening moods between cigarettes. Thus, the apparent relaxant effect of smoking only reflects the reversal of the tension and irritability that develop during nicotine depletion occurring between nonsmoking intervals.
This is largely the reason why people become addicted to other substances, such as alcohol, caffeine, illegal drugs, and the drugs that psychiatrists prescribe. They all have the potential of creating for addicted people the illusion that they are functioning better than they did before they started consuming the addictive drug. During the interval when they do not take the drug they begin to experience an uncomfortable withdrawal reaction. They don’t attribute the discomfort to a withdrawal reaction, but instead, to falsely believing it is due to the return of how they would feel if they had never taken the drug.
Another part of the addiction process is that the addictive substance often is used as part of a ceremony creating a very pleasant experience. Here’s what that process is like.
Many people, when they have more than a small dose of the drug, they begin to feel sick. This keeps their intake of the drug at moderate levels. Even at these moderate levels, regular consuming of the drug tends to increase moderately the risk of negative health consequences. Nevertheless, once tolerance has been established the relief that comes from the easing of the negative withdrawal effects each time they take the drug is perceived as pleasant. Moreover, there is pleasantness from the rest of the ceremony that often involves marking the 
end of the work day, putting on music they love, and joining together with friends in a pleasant shared experience. In this way, people end up feeling the resulting pleasant feelings that come with this combination–the easing of the drug withdrawal process and the ceremony– is worth the minor risk of negative health consequences from the moderate use of the drug or drugs.
Although this can be an acceptable decision for many, for others, hoping they can remain moderate users of one or more of these types of drugs is disastrous, which is brought out in the last few lines of “Mother’s Little Helper.”
“Life’s just much too hard today”
I hear every mother say
The pursuit of happiness
Just seems a bore
And if you take more of those
You will get an overdoseNo more running for the shelter
Of a mother’s little helper
They just helped you on your way
Through your busy, dying day
There are a variety of skillful ways to deal in a healthy manner with anxiety and its sister experiences, depression and melancholy. There are ways to make friends with these experiences.
Meditating once or twice a day provides an opportunity to spend time addressing concerns with little distractions. Although as we enter into meditation, we don’t do so with the intent to address concerns, they naturally bubble up from the relatively peaceful state, and our minds spend time working through our various concerns in a natural healthy manner before we become overwhelmed. Taking a walk, particularly in a place filled with nature, journal writing about concerns, and speaking to a counselor are other healthy examples.Jeff
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
Mental health consumers would be given the choice to go to pathologizing mental health service providers or those using the concern approach. This is all the change that would be required to increase value for a significant number of mental health service users. The cost and effort for third party payers to make both the pathologizing and concern approaches available would be minimal.
Even if no immediate promising ideas come from a particular episode of spending time in this way, taking responsibility involves keeping hope alive. This means that you recognize that with particularly challenging situations, it takes an extended time to fully address such concerns. In the coming days, new, fresh ideas may yet come your way, or the situations that brought about the concerns may change in unexpected ways to your advantage. In contrast to acting responsibly, experiencing guilt when feeling anxious or grief becomes an aversive experience. The mental illness label pathologizes the concern, but there is a potential of improving one’s life with the experiences that get these illness conceptualizations.
n case this vague definition does not provide enough wiggle room for clinicians to label all people seeking their services as having a mental disorder and to prescribe a drug for it, the ICD tells the clinician, “When the requirements are only partially fulfilled, it is nevertheless useful to record a diagnosis for most purposes.” This type of double talk is one of the reasons why many people view the mental illness construct as super useful for a financially rewarding business model, but too vague and misleading for scientific purposes.
The experiences of Abraham Lincoln (see 
A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled, “
Don’t you dare start with this crap or I’ll give you a real reason to cry! You’re acting like an infant!!! Now you stop this instant and get to bed!!!”
“I see you are feeling sad. That’s understandable. You were enjoying the game so much, and you’re disappointed about having to stop. You know, when we feel sad, it’s to help us figure out how to better handle what we do in the future. I wonder how we can better handle the going to bed situation. Any ideas, Carl?”
A team of researchers (Brock Bastian, et al.) published an article in the peer reviewed journal Emotion titled, “Feeling Bad About Being Sad: The Role of Social Expectancies in Amplifying Negative Mood.” The authors begin by summarizing previous relevant research, then describe four studies they carried out to throw light on this subject, and then present their conclusions. The entire article can be viewed for free 
Daily we are reminded of the value of happiness, from TV advertising that highlights the hedonic pleasures of consumption, to national campaigns designed to improve happiness and well-being.
Meanwhile, commonplace emotional experiences such as sadness, depression, or anxiety are pathologized and medicalized, viewed as deviant from desired norms…. Negative emotions are touted as bad for our health… and can be “cured” with an array of drugs and interventions designed to quickly and efficiently return us to normality. On the other hand, the many benefits of negative emotions, such as their creative potential…, importance for interpersonal relations…, and role in achieving a rich and meaningful life… are rarely prominent in current social discourse. 
[T]he importance placed on happiness and the devaluation of sadness is not as apparent in Asian cultures. In Japan, acceptance, emotional balance, and even hardship are highly valued, and the pursuit of happiness often has “immoral” connotations.
Among the findings, there was a clear tendency for Australian individuals to feel worse about themselves when experiencing negative emotions than the Japanese individuals who were more likely to view sadness as normal and helpful.
Emotions are fundamentally social phenomena. Our research provides the first evidence that people’s generalized beliefs about how others expect them to feel may play a central role in their emotional experience and well-being. Our work shows that the more people hold beliefs that others expect them not to experience negative emotions, the more frequently and intensely they are likely to experience those negative emotions. Such ironic effects also relate to indicators of well-being, such as satisfaction with life and depression. 
Moreover, our findings suggest that these relationships are at least partly mediated by negative self-evaluations that people have when they experience undesired emotions. Attempts to promote the value of feeling good over the value of feeling bad by emphasizing social norms for these emotions may therefore have the effect of making people feel bad more often.
Now, relevant to this discussion, there does exist some evidence that sometimes people who experience depression end up hurting themselves, or lapse into periods in which their functioning diminishes. This evidence is used by many psychiatrists to urge people to take psychiatric drugs. But, is it really the depression that leads these people to hurt themselves, or is it how they respond to their sad feelings that lead to various undesirable outcomes?
Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today we take a close look at one reason some folks have a low level of respect for people who are viewed as having a mental illness–the belief that such people are avoiding responsibilities.
One has to do with the fact that some people at a gut level look down upon anyone who acts a little different than the norm. The other is the belief that people labelled mentally ill are prone to be violent. In actuality, the vast number of these people are not any more violent than the average Joe or Jill (see 
Many years have gone by since James wrote that letter, and yet I have found it just as relevant in our own time. In recent years I have become acquainted with many who become angry at any suggestion regarding the value of seeking within, and to be open from others, for suggestions on how they may actively deal with these types of concerns. Rather, they choose to passively respond to what they view as a mental illness, while insisting that something like the “Powers of the Universe” is the only thing that could secure them. Although “The Powers of the Universe” sometimes is viewed by them as some religious figure, more and more in today’s world, filling this role are often psychiatrists prescribing drugs.
Approximately 2 million individuals classified as having a mental illness manage to receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Some find this infuriating. I have personally heard many folks make remarks such as, “These recipients should go to work like the rest of us, damn it!”
The only reasonable proposal that I have heard to address this type of attack on responsibility is “Universal Basic Income” (see 
People who feel guilty typically seek to punish themselves by either throwing insults at themselves, or actually physically hurting themselves. In contrast, taking responsibility for one’s anxiety and grief, in my opinion, involves welcoming these two experiences, kind of like you might a friend, for these experiences enrich our lives if handled responsibly. If you have something more pressing to take care of for a short period of time, it can make sense to gently delay your interaction with whatever anxiety and grief you have to deal with until a more convenient time. However, the responsible thing to do is to soon invite these experiences back so you can spend some time to work through these types of concerns. Daily meditation, quiet walks, and journal writing, are ideal ways to do this.
Even if no immediate promising ideas come from a particular episode of spending time in this way, taking responsibility involves keeping hope alive. This means that you recognize that with particularly challenging situations, it takes an extended time to fully address such concerns. In the coming days, new, fresh ideas may yet come your way, or the situations that brought about the concerns may change in unexpected ways to your advantage. In contrast to acting responsibly, experiencing guilt when feeling anxious or grief becomes an aversive experience, and one way to avoid such negative experiences is by finding or creating distractions.
These distractions, when used too often are far from ideal. It is analogous to sleep. When people try to distract themselves from their sleepiness for too long, say by watching exciting TV shows, their sleepiness becomes stronger and stronger and more and more intense. If they continue to press on, avoiding getting enough sleep with various distractions, their functioning becomes compromised. A similar process happens when we keep avoiding providing sufficient time to work through our anxiety and grief concerns.
Thus, mania may, in some cases, be a way to avoid responding responsibly to anxiety and grief because of the guilt that occurs over misunderstanding the nature of these useful experiences. This misunderstanding, along with not knowing how to respond responsibly when these experiences occur, may lead to reaching a point at which the person becomes overwhelmed by unprocessed concerns. It is at this point that creating grandiose ideas manage to further distract these folks from the distressing thoughts spinning out of control. It has been estimated that 47 per cent of people who experience what mental health professionals often refer to as psychotic delusions during their manic phase claim they have grandiose abilities. This often leads to friends, family, and community members, concluding such folks are behaving irresponsibly.
Now, having surveyed these main reasons, some may therefore jump to the conclusion that people labelled as mentally ill should be blamed for not acting responsibly. Blame, in my estimation, is typically counterproductive. Too often, it will provoke horror, total rejection of the blamer, and a hardening of whatever position the person who is being blamed holds.
For a more in-depth story of this kind, I recommend my novel, Fights In The Streets, Tears In The Sand (see 
In the article, Dr. Szasz put forth his belief that the behaviors and experiences that are considered “mental illnesses” are more accurately construed as problems in living. As someone whose family narrowly escaped the violent, inhumane actions of Hitler in 1938, he expressed a concern about society giving psychiatrists the authority to convert these problems into a language of illness. As he saw it, his own profession has a financial interest in converting more and more problems in living into illnesses that require its services to reach some vague harmonious state thought of as mental health. However, according to Szasz,
To Dr. Szasz, it is logically absurd to expect that it will help solve these types of problems by prescribing tranquilizers and other drugs as if they were like a bacterial infection, or the growth of a tumor. To be sure, people on their own have tried to deal with these problems by taking a wide range of drugs, such as alcohol, tobacco products, stimulants, and heroin. Such approaches, rather than promoting healthy outcomes, tend to lead to less healthy outcomes. 
To Szasz, changing to the drugs doctors prescribe to deal with these problems in living is like changing seats on the Titanic.
Dr. Szasz’s book, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, also was met with high praise. In a review published in the New York Times, Edward de Grazia wrote;
One boy had recently become depressed. When I asked him why he thought he was depressed, he said that his mother was making him take Ritalin to treat his ADHD. The boy didn’t believe he had ADHD, and when the drug’s stimulant effects began to wear off each evening, he was left feeling awful, with waves of sadness, stomach aches, and difficulty falling asleep.
At the same time, I had become concerned that so many of the kids referred to me who were in foster care were on drugs typically prescribed for people diagnosed as psychotic. These students typically were dealing with serious emotional challenges involving being taken from their parents’ home. A couple of these cases involved parental child abuse, others involved parents being sent to prison, and I had another case of a boy dealing with his parents dying in a car accident. My efforts to help these grieving kids became ever more difficult because of the side effects of the psychiatric drugs prescribed to them. Some of the side effects were known to be life threatening.
Regarding the October 3rd Binghamton Conference, I am writing in great dismay and utter incredulity that so much mental health money would be spent in this fashion. The money for the needed basic services has been so sharply reduced for our ill family members; plus with the number of mentally ill homeless ever increasing, then to see the large number of participants in such a program was definitely upsetting to me.
This time I did add to the panel a family member who belonged to the local chapter of the National Alliance On Mental Illness. Despite that, I received a letter from the president of that organization’s New York State chapter asking that the debate be cancelled. In his letter, he specifically objects to Dr. Szasz expressing his views.
Over the years, I found his love for his two daughters particularly heartwarming. I could easily relate to his feelings toward them because I have two dear sons.
So, what do you do in a situation like this, that is, a situation in which some people highly respect your friend, while others don’t? As for me, when I meet someone saying negative things about Dr. Szasz, I take some time to listen carefully, and I respectfully summarize the person’s position. I then gently say a few supportive things about Dr. Szasz, while bracing myself to deal with the person’s reaction. As the other person replies, I again listen, seeking to be as empathic as possible.