The Myth of the Mental Health System
w r I t t e N b Y b L e S s I n g S s t r A N d e d
Hubris
One of the things that radically changed for me during my nihilist eclipse was my perception of our entire reality. I realized that absolutely everything we have come to know about it is nothing more than the human species’ attempt at comprehending it. I specifically had an image of a tree stuck in my head, and I thought about how it’s not actually “real”. Obviously it exists, what you’re looking at is real, but to perceive it as a tree or anything adjacent is nothing more than a human concept.
Absolutely everything we know & perceive is human beings—one of the many species that coexist on this planet—trying to comprehend the world around it. We do not own this planet. We did not create this planet. We are simply visitors trying to comprehend it. There is so much we don’t know that the sheer volume of said information is incomprehensible.
In the back of my mind I perceive all things in this reality to be outside of the confines of human comprehension, and the comprehension of all beings on this earth. Majority of people view the things in this reality as being below their comprehension, instead of above it. Even if you are “accurately” able to comprehend something in its entirety, it is still above you, even if the gap is negligible. The only exceptions are fully man made concepts that aren’t an attempt at comprehension because we are its origin. None of this is to discredit all the work people have put into expanding our understanding of this reality or to say we know nothing meaningful about it, it just is what it is.
To put it further into perspective, consider the other species we coexist with that are good at utilizing certain information to their advantage. Now think about how much information we have of the objects & environment they interact with. There’s quite a gap. That’s not to say other species lack intelligence, but there are things that other species completely lack the ability to comprehend, because their brains are incapable. You could never produce a valid argument as to how we’re magically the exception.
And yes, for those species they only know what they need to know, which is evident by the fact that they are still here. Technically that line of logic should extend to humans as well, but the difference is that we as a species are trying to know everything, as much as possible, so we can figure out how much value we can squeeze out of it.
To make it simpler, consider the color spectrum. Electromagnetic radiation is what we comprehend as light and there’s only a certain amount of that spectrum we’re able to see.[1] We call that color.[1] That is all that we, human beings, are able to see.[1] We are incapable of seeing anything else on that spectrum.[1] That is human limitation. There are likely things we would consider “color” that exist that we cannot see, but that doesn’t make them any less real or meaningful. That right there is the simplest way to explain the concept this chapter lays out. And if we take this to the simplest level possible, there’s the fact that no human can truly comprehend the idea of something coming from nothing. That is human limitation. It is beyond our comprehension.
The brain is how we perceive everything in our reality on both a collective and (obviously) individual scale. It’s how we are able to participate in this reality. That makes the brain the most meta, inception—whatever you want to call it—thing in existence. So if there would be anything that we as a species are cognizant of that we never fully understand; anything and the one thing that our species will never be able to figure out before our extinction, it would certainly be the human brain.
If none of this makes any sense that’s fine because generally speaking this information is completely irrelevant. But in the context of psychology & psychiatry it is very much relevant. It’s extremely relevant to any field that’s rooted in expanding human understanding of a given subject. It highlights the humility that’s needed both towards the world & each other when exploring both new and pre-established things. Psychology as we know it has only been around for about 145 years.[2] Psychiatry has only been around for a little longer.[3] That is obviously a very long stretch of time, but not for an entire field of science and research. Especially not one that has the impossible mountain to climb of understanding the human psyche in totality. In this context, 145 years is still a newborn that only just got out the hospital. So if you really give it thought, the confidence this system presents itself as having in how much it knows is quite bizarre.
The next chapter:
Loose Ends
- The Electromagnetic Spectrum by The National Aeronautics and Space Administration – March 2013
- The Place of Development in the History of Psychology and Cognitive Science by Gabriella Airenti – 2019
- The Emergence of Psychiatry: 1650-1850 by Kenneth S. Kendler, Kathryn Tabb, John Wright