Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Let’s start off this post with a brief tale that illustrates some of the strong feelings that come about when religion is discussed:
A rabbi and atheist are heatedly arguing over whether or not god truly exists. After a whole hour of this, finally the rabbi cries out in a rage, “How can you be so absolutely certain that there is no god!?”
“Hey,” cries the atheist, “a person has to believe in something!”
Neither of these two characters in this tale respects the position of the other. It illustrates my experience of regularly meeting people who insult others with whom they disagree on religious matters.
At times, I sympathize with some of these expressed feelings. I remember reading a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer titled “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.” It tells us about a girl named Yentl who wants to enter a school to learn about a subject that greatly interests her, but according to the leaders of her Jewish community she is excluded solely because she is a woman. That seems unfair to me.
Then I learned about Malala Yousafzai and two other young female students who, on 9 October 2012, were shot by people who, based on their religious convictions, believed girls should not go to school. And more recently, in 2022, I read of a religiously motivated man stabbing novelist Salman Rushdie because Rushdie had written a story that included what some viewed as an irreverent depiction of Muhammad.
When I learn about these types of stories, I do get an instant negative reaction about religion. But my mind quickly turns to the fact that the people I personally know do not condone violence against anyone because of their religious or non-religious convictions.
In thinking deeply about these issues, my mind always drifts to the ideas of William James, the esteemed Harvard professor of psychology and philosophy, and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience.
William James on Religion
James lived from 1842 to 1910, and throughout his lifetime faced some extremely challenging ideas about this topic. To begin with, his father, was a deeply religious person. Though James frequently expressed a great admiration for his dad, he, himself, had just the slightest connection to religious feelings. He expressed this connection in a letter to James Henry Leuba on April 17, 1904:
My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with a God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely. The divine, for my active life, is limited to abstract concepts, which, as ideals, interest, and determine me, but do so faintly, in comparison, with what a feeling of God might affect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but differences of intensity may make one whole center of energy shift. Now, although I am so devoid of religious feelings in the director and stronger sense, yet there is something in me, which makes response when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me, “thither lies truth”– and I am sure it is not all theistic habits and prejudice of infancy. Those are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical germ. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers. As it withstands in my case, so will withstand in most cases, all purely atheistic criticism, but interpretive criticism (not of the mere “hysteria” and “nerves” order) it can energetically combine with. Your criticism seems to amount to a pure non possumus [inability]: “Mystical deliverances must be infallible revelations in every particular, or nothing. Therefore, they are nothing, for anyone else their owner.” Why may they not be something, although not everything?
Your only consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic atheistic naturalism; and, without any mystical germs in us, that, I believe, is where we all should unhesitatingly be today.
Once allow the mystical germ to influence our beliefs, and I believe that we are in my position. Of course, the “subliminal” theory is an inessential hypothesis, and the question of pluralism or monism is equally inessential.
I am letting loose a deluge on you!… but I had to restate my position more clearly. Yours truly,
Wm. James
Meanwhile, many of the experts in his field believed those who were religious were suffering from a pathological condition. In his book, “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature,” he responded by calling this pathologizing “medical materialism” and critiquing its view as follows.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering.
Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.
George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.
James goes on from here to point out that it is true, of course, that psychology has found that there are definite psycho-physical connections that “hold good”. Psychology, therefore, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states on bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not every detail…. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another on their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see “the liver” determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.
James points out that in the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to refute opinions by putting down their authors’ neurological constitutions. Value is determined by “judgments based on our own immediate feelings primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true.” All states of mind are related in extremely complex ways to neural functions.The significance of each state of mind must be tested, not by its neurological origins, but by the value of its fruits. When the term “pathological” is applied to an experience, it wrongly implies a neutral science classification.
At another point in his career, James, wrote an an essay in response to philosopher Thomas Huxley and other great champions of the scientific method who were criticizing religious beliefs. James titled his essay, “The Will to Believe.” There he wrote that it was designed to be a “justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.” It goes on to say,
Our nonintellectual nature does influence our convictions. Once we recognize this, we have a duty “to ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our minds.
Discussion
It is perfectly natural that folks vary in the degree that some aspect of life interests them, When I was growing up, I never once felt a call to become an accountant. Some people chose voluntarily to enter into that career, and love it. Some people have no motivation to learn to play a musical instrument. I was motivated to learn the piano and guitar, but just devoted myself to playing several times per week for 15 to 30 minutes. Others devote enough time to playing so they achieve a professional level. They go on from there to play in a band for two or more hours nightly and love it.
William James’s father valued his religious sentiment, invited similar interested folks to his home for long evenings of discussions about religious experiences. As we have seen, for Professor James, his religious feelings were of a far less intensity. “The divine, for my active life, is limited to abstract concepts, which, as ideals, interest, and determine me, but do so faintly, in comparison, with what a feeling of God might affect, if I had one.”
My own religious feelings are much more in line with Professor James’s than his father’s. Nevertheless, I don’t disrespect those folks who are more or less religious than I.
Some religious folks, I have found, are kind and pleasant, while others express their religious faith in ways that I feel is unfair or even horribly violent. Similarly, I have found that there are atheists who are kind and decent folks, while others do as awful actions as the very worst religious folks. In the end, like James, I judge a person not by their degree of religiosity, but by the fruit that comes from a person’s full range of beliefs.
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 and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
Imagine your thirteen-year-old teenage daughter begins to express a concern about being depressed. Many in the psychiatric profession, heavily backed up by the pharmaceutical industry, would urge you to make an appointment with a psychiatrist as fast as you can. That approach typically leads to the doctor encouraging your daughter to take pills referred to as “antidepressants.” The main argument that is made for beginning this type of treatment is, “untreated depression is associated with an increased risk of suicide.”
This fear arousing comment frequently works because parents tend to jump from this statement to the thought that treatment with so-called antidepressants either eliminates this risk or significantly reduces it. But a large body of 
Moreover, these drugs are associated with a number of troubling side effects, and many find that once they start using them, stopping them can lead to some awful withdrawal reactions that are far worse than the initial experience of depression.
Your letter came last night and explained sufficiently the cause of your long silence. You have evidently been in a bad state of spirits again, and dissatisfied with your environment; and I judge that you have been still more dissatisfied with the inner state of trying to consume your own smoke, and grin and bear it, so as to carry out your mother’s behests made after the time when you scared us so by your inexplicable tragic outcries in those earlier letters. Well! I believe you have been trying to do the manly thing under difficult circumstances, but one learns only gradually to do the best thing; and the best thing for you would be to write at least weekly, if only a post-card, and say just how things are going. If you are in bad spirits, there is no harm whatever in communicating that fact, and defining the character of it, or describing it as exactly as you like. The bad thing is to pour out the contents of one’s bad spirits on others and leave them with it, as it were, on their hands, as if it was for them to do something about it. That was what you did in your other letter which alarmed us so, for your shrieks of anguish were so excessive, and so unexplained by anything you told us in the way of fact, that we didn’t know but what you had suddenly gone crazy. That is the worst sort of thing you can do. The middle sort of thing is what you do this time—namely, keep silent for more than a fortnight, and when you do write, still write mysteriously about your sorrows, not quite open enough.
Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; and dissatisfaction with one’s self, and irritation at others, and anger at circumstances and stony insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it rightly. 
She went on to attend Bryn Mawr College, acted in a couple of plays, married, and had two children. She was viewed as the best of citizens in San Francisco, working with the civil rights group, supporting the Community Chest operations and heading up the Ladies’ Protection and Relief, and devoted her time as war began in 1939 to British War Relief. Throughout her life, she did have two more bouts with depression, but she handled them well. The last one, at her husband’s urging, she went with him hiking in the foothills near Santa Clara, and after a while, the exhilarating experience of being in the wonderful and exhilarating landscape, along with the lively exercise, led to the depression passing. The family legend pronounced this a California cure for a New England psychological illness.
Elsewhere in the letter, James begins to frame Peg’s experience as helpful for producing “an enlightenment,” if “we react on it rightly.” The wrong way, according to James, is to get into the habit of accepting the woe without doing anything constructive about it. The right way is “to jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling.”
I believe that, rather than fighting against melancholy, we should allow ourselves some time to be with it, just as we would if an old friend came to visit. We can spend this time observing, in a nonjudgmental manner, the emotions drifting through us in a manner similar to a scientist observing a flock of birds flying off in the distant sky. When it comes to grief, we need not set some artificial time limit by which we “should be” through with the process.
For some, like Lincoln and Joni, their suffering never completely went away, but they, in a sense, made friends with it. They did so by coming to understand that experiencing challenges more deeply than people with a happy-go-lucky temperament has the potential to provide a motivating force to bring forth valued achievements. As Joni so beautifully expressed this, 
Leo Tolstoy provided us the most vivid example. His depression stimulated a gnawing questioning that eventually led to one insight after another. His trouble had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common people, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life that he had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. By spending more time in nature and in a supportive community, “things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light has never wholly died away.” According to Tolstoy, his suicidal feelings disappeared, and he went on to live a productive life until he passed away at the age of 82 of natural causes.
William James’s story is more in line with this second type of depression experience, in that he, like Tolstoy, found that by making certain changes in how he was living and the situation in which he was living, his experiences of dealing with depression decreased to a point that he felt he was getting more out of life. I briefly reviewed these changes in an earlier post titled, “William James’s Personal Bout with a “’Mental Disorder’” (see 
Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on the benches, or rather shelves, against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them, inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other.
It is of special interest that William tells us that his experience “has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since.” For those of us who value people who can sympathize with those having such feelings, we see that something positive came out of William’s own experience. This theme that depression is often a tool to create something of value, runs throughout William’s writings for the rest of his life.
Initially, William, upon having his fearful experience believed that all mental health concerns now referred to as mental disorders are required to have a physical basis and that there was nothing anyone can willfully do about them. Today, short of taking a pill, many of today’s psychiatrists are promoting a similar view. Thus, their basic position is that these concerns are due to something within the patient’s physical makeup. This misses the overwhelming evidence that how people construe their past and current experiences, and their current social and work situations, are often the central causative factors.
One thing that he had decided to do was to spend more time than he had been on focussing on some uplifting life experiences. For example, he began to read poems by William Wordsworth. Consider Wordsworth’s poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
Continuous as the stars that shine
For William, the delight that Wordsworth had for the beauty of nature was catching, and William began to spend more time in nature, especially in the Keene Valley area of the Adirondack Mountains. Also, of enormous help, was to find the right type of work for his temperament, as we see from a letter he wrote to his brother, the gifted novelist Henry James:
The good professor first covers the fact that to most the question of whether or not life is worth living hardly ever comes up, so intent are they to live every moment that they have. Others, spend most of their lives questioning whether it would be better to enter into the peace of being consigned to the earth. And then there are those who drift back and forth. After a poetic discourse of these different types, James delves into what we might say if we meet someone who indeed is questioning whether it would be better just to end it all.
“To breathe the air, how delicious!
“To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the assurance, ‘You may end it when you will.’ What reasons can we plead that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the burden again?”
At this point, Professor James hastens to confess that nothing he has to say will be able to prevent all suicides. If we make an effort to help and despite this, the person ends his or her life, “cases like these belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of this hour.”
He tells us that certain people who have grown up with a religious background, find that as they get older what they were taught and came to sincerely believe is not meshing well with their personal experiences. They observe that their own actions don’t accord with every teaching of the scriptures, and guilt begins to mount. And they begin to learn in science based teachings that the world was not created a few thousand years ago in six days, the animal kingdom evolved in a manner very differently than their religious stories, and when some of this science stuff seems to make sense to them, they feel they are engaging in blasphemy. They feel confused and fearful. Thus, Professor James tells us,
Once the springs of vitality are let loose in this way, without the burden of infinite responsibility, many experience an immense relief. Meanwhile, whatever is causing the suffering “can be tolerated for another twenty-four hours longer, if only to see what tomorrow’s newspaper will contain, or what the next postman will bring.”
Professor James believed that for some suicidal folks, once they have reached the first stage, it may be possible to incite a fighting spirit within. Identify one or more perceived evil from their perspective, and make appeals to help to overthrow it. Professor James explains,
From these words, James encourages us to use inspiring narratives of those who, through acts of courage, made a real and wonderful difference. In the essay, Professor James’s examples are very dated. Therefore, readers may prefer to turn to my 
Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today we take up the question, can the science minded and religious minded legitimately take up an attitude of mutual respect?
There are, of course, people who fervently believe that opinions that do not rest firmly on the broad shoulders of scientific evidence are nothing more than superstition. Many of these individuals, as soon as they hear that a person is religious, give off vibes of disdain.
Meanwhile, there are religious folks who believe that science minded individuals have led to a world of atomic energy catastrophes, billowing coal chimneys, people with their noses in their devices while tending to their babies, etc. In their hearts, these religious folks angrily believe that the science minded are leading humanity down a filthy, destructive path.
Then there are people who richly agree with Albert Einstein when he wrote, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
“First, what is the nature of it? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value…. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together.”
Religion, in contrast, seeks to deliberately nurture the moral sense. For Einstein, “A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value.”
Did Laura and Harry make the right decision? The question may seem easy if they had a great time and came back uninjured. But what if they had had a terrible accident? Would this require that they conclude that they had made the wrong decision? Can science answer this question?
Now, some science minded folks well recognize that some decisions must be made before the availability of sufficient scientific evidence. They argue that in such cases, they don’t need any religion to tell them what is right and what is wrong, they can decide that perfectly well on their own. I, for one, am on friendly terms with these people. I am not seeking to force religion on them. At the same time, I know there are people who choose to participate in a religion, valuing the stirring lessons from their clergy, the social connections, and the community support for worthy causes. They choose to use some of what they experience by being a member of their religion to make some of their decisions. I, for one, am on friendly terms with them. I don’t see the sense of automatically disdaining either the science minded or religious minded.
Some people in the science camp like to point to several religious related incidents, such as planes crashing into the World Trade buildings, in order to condemn all religion. But there were people in the science camp during the religious hating Soviet Revolution that participated in the slaughter of millions. Moreover, during the Nazi regime, Hitler found plenty of science minded people willing to aid in the carrying out of atrocities.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty science minded people have with religion is that it promotes magical thinking. I hasten to point out that not all religions do so. For example, the Transcendentalists, with Ralph Waldo Emerson as one of their most eloquent writers, embraced principles of science. The Dalai Lama, as well, presents us a religion very open to what science can teach us.
Let me add as well, with regards to this magical thinking issue, that many people who view themselves as religious, well recognize the magical thinking that appears in their scriptures, but do not accept them. Instead, they view them as comforting to those who don’t have a scientific mind, then they slip by those sections of scripture to those that they more highly value. We can liken it to a guy who recognizes that his mother holds some beliefs with which he completely disagrees, but he continues to love her for all the other aspects of her life that so beautifully nourishes his existence.
This one has to do with the wisdom of remaining skeptical until we have sound science evidence to support our position. I can see some merit in that. At the same time, in real life circumstances, a question comes up regarding just what is the point at which our opinion should be coerced by the existence of sound science? Bear in mind that there was not so very long ago a procedure known as lobotomies. This brain surgical procedure was viewed as being backed by such solid scientific evidence that powerful people were able to involuntarily subject less powerful folks to the scalpel. It didn’t turn out well, at least not for those who had part of their brains gouged out.
So, there are good people who are hesitant to accept what science folks tell us. Is it wise to treat them with disdain, or to remain on friendly terms with them while respectfully disagreeing?
James points out that in most areas of human life, science simply has not come far enough to determine with any great precision what is the most favorable road to travel. The variables that in a controlled lab seem somewhat predictable frequently become entangled in so many other variables out in the more natural world that we must make decisions as best that we can, guided by nonscientific lights. Having some faith, even without sufficient scientific evidence, may be helpful.
For James, some people possess a strong religious sense, others less so, and others find a void in that section of their brain. Where is the evidence that any one of these types are somewhat less human, or less worthy of respect? Perhaps there is some value in having some diversity within the human species.
William James explained that certain children, if they do not succeed immediately in doing something just right and are then criticized, flare up in anger and refuse to cooperate. Such children are oftentimes treated as sinful and are punished; or else the parent pits his or her will against the child’s will.
“It is in no other way that we overcome balkiness in a horse,” said James. “We divert his attention, do something to his nose or ear, lead him around in a circle, and thus get him over a place where flogging would only have made him more invincible.”
Well, it just so happens that if you use the William James approach consistently, you really don’t reinforce balkiness because children soon realize that they have not won. They simply come to the understanding that “dropping the subject” does not mean that anyone has won. Instead, they soon connect the “dropping the subject” fact with the “bringing the topic up again later” fact. Dropping the subject, comes to mean their parents will be returning to the subject after they and their parents have some time to calm down and think about the issues in a more calm state.
See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty by imparting to them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal’s inner springs of joy. And, in the lessons which you may be legally obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than the books on the drunkard’s stomach, kidneys, nerves, and social miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism kept in lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, sound blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown, and to which the morning sun and air and dew comes as sufficiently powerful intoxicants. 
The general idea here is that in the arena of the moral life, whenever a positive ideal is aroused, it is as if the whole scale of values change its equilibrium. As James makes this point, he declares that at such times, “The force of old temptations vanishes, and what a moment ago was impossible is now not only possible, but easy.”
Middle school students can read A Hero Grows in Brooklyn on their own, and it can be downloaded on a computer or any of the popular electronic readers for free 
“Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining powers less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important.” 
Dr. Kandel’s credentials are pretty impressive–he’s a Nobel Prize laureate and professor of brain science at Columbia University. Therefore, if you are among those who believe a person’s credentials should determine who is right and who is wrong, you need not read any further. You must simply conclude that what is referred to as mental illnesses are indeed brain diseases because you would be hard pressed to find someone with better credentials disagreeing with Dr. Kandel.
The argument that such labeling practices are not scientific, but, rather, value judgments, was intelligently made by William James when he defended the religious sentiment. He explained that pathologizing these sentiments as mental diseases was superficial medical talk. He called the reasoning doctors used to declare religious beliefs a type of mental illness, “medical materialism.”
assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states on bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not every detail…. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another on their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see “the liver” determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.
All states of mind are related in extremely complex ways to neural functions. There is a crucial distinction to be made between a brain difference and a brain pathology. The significance of each state of mind must be tested, not by some neurological difference, but by the value of its fruits. When the term “pathological” is applied to an experience, rather than an identified physiological pathology, it wrongly implies a neutral science classification.
In contrast to biological arguments, 
Today, if your behavior, thoughts, or feelings begin to concern you or a family member, for a fee many doctors will translate your experiences into mental illness terminology. Synonyms for mental illness, are mental disease, mental sickness, mental disorder, and psychopathology. These terms, as metaphors for experiences someone doesn’t like, have been with us for centuries. When used in this way, it can communicate something about an experience that others relate to. However, when we move from using these types of concepts as metaphors to believing wholeheartedly that they are proper scientific terms, we begin to lose the respect of those well grounded in the principles of science.
Let’s consider The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which William Shakespeare wrote in about 1604. This play offers its audience a magnificent tale of adultery, fratricide, revenge, and feigned madness by a protagonist. When reading Hamlet, we see how Shakespeare uses metaphors to vividly evoke in us the experiences of his characters. Thus, when Hamlet becomes dissatisfied that his mind keeps identifying flaws in his plans for action, he describes these plans as becoming “all sicklied o’er with pale cast of thought.” By extension, the reader senses that when Hamlet’s plans become “all sicklied o’er,” he, too, becomes in a sense, “sicklied o’er” with feelings of frustration, anguish, and helplessness.
Literature regularly uses this type of metaphor. Ralph Waldo Emerson, to take another example, once wrote:
I actually like Emerson’s disease terminology here because the context in which he uses it so obviously reveals that he is using it metaphorically. Notice how he cleverly uses diseases associated with childhood to evoke the feeling that individuals who worry themselves over problems of original sin and so on are acting, in his view, childishly. In this context, disease, to Emerson, was a metaphor for immaturity. If he were a man of science, in contrast to a literary personality, we would expect that he would use terms with clearly defined, objective meaning, that avoid value judgements.
At the time, medical writers were already heavily pathologizing a great number of experiences. Thus, James cited W. Griesinger, the author of The Pathology and Therapy of Psychological Illnesses, and T. S. Clouston, author of Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases. As James delved further and further into the experiences being pathologized in this way, he came to believe such terminology was “simple minded” and “superficial medical talk.”
Does it make sense to say that when people are suffering, they have a “mental disorder?” Well, consider the experience of giving birth. It is typically accompanied by suffering, and yet it makes more sense to classify this experience as a natural part of creating new life rather than a pathological condition.
When writers receive rejections from publishers, or a loved one dies, suffering often accompanies these experiences. Yet, we do not typically describe them with pathological terms.
For example, cortisol levels in saliva and heart rate variability has some connection with a person’s self-reports of how much stress they have experienced in recent days, while hair cortisol levels have some connection with longer term exposure to stressful experience. Other measures of stress utilize a list of stressors, such as the recent death of a loved one, living in poverty, etc. The person being assessed places a check mark next to each of the stressors on the list that applies to him or her. These check marks are then used to calculate how much stress the person has been experiencing.
Having indicated some of the problems of unambiguously, and non-subjectively applying the descriptors of suffering to the concept of mental disorder, we now turn our attention to the descriptor, “dysfunction.” As with the notion of suffering, the pathologizers almost never use the various scientifically validated measures of functioning to determine if someone has a mental disorder. A pretty good such measure is the Scales of Independent Behavior-Revised. It has norms for functioning in such areas as social interaction (communication skills, language comprehension, language expression), personal living skills (eating and meal preparation, toileting, dressing, personal self-care, domestic skills), community living skills (time and punctuality, money and value, work skills), and gross and fine motor skills. Rather than using measures of this type, pathologizers rely on their professional privilege to make a subjective estimate of dysfunction.
In the most current edition of the DSM, someone who is experiencing abnormal levels of distress might be considered to have a mental disorder. But the issue of the boundary between normal and abnormal experiences lies at the heart of the most contentious disputes in the field of psychopathology today. A major problem with using the term abnormal as one of the defining attributes of mental illness is that it leads us to forget the fact that natural to all organisms is substantial variability across individuals and within individuals. Having above average or below average functioning in various areas of our many areas of functioning is normal. Displaying rare behavior patterns that are highly valued, such as the great altruism of Mother Teresa, are not viewed as mental disorders. Psychopathology is applied when someone does not like a particular experience. Thus, a term that masquerades as a scientific term is really a value judgment masquerading as a scientific term.
Although there are some fairly well developed scientific measures of the three major factors (suffering, functioning, and abnormality) that the psychopatholgizers tend to claim are usually part of the mental illness experience, these measures are almost never used in their “diagnostic” determination. Instead, subjective indicators of these three factors are combined into an even more subjective abstraction called “mental illness.” This process is not scientific despite claims to the contrary.
Rather than a scientific concept, the mental illness concept has been very useful as part of a highly lucrative business plan for the pharmaceutical industry and medical doctors, which includes psychiatrists. This plan has doctors first convincing people that the experiences referred to as mental illnesses are scientifically real illnesses just like physiological pathologies. It then provides license for doctors, in as little as fifteen minutes, to declare that they have provided their patients a diagnosis, and to send them on their way with a prescription for pills. With this plan, billions of dollars flow their way.