ALAN writes:

The skeptical attitude that many Americans adopted in response to the Covid and “vaccines” propaganda should be applied equally to the self-serving claims of all other medical, psychiatric, and “behavioral science” propagandists and racketeers.

Recently I spoke with a friend whose brother was my fourth-grade classmate just as the 1960s were dawning. He and I remained friends for six years. His family then moved to New York City. He died in 1972. It was always my understanding that he died of natural causes.  He seemed a healthy, husky, robust fellow and had taken an interest in weightlifting, which I imagined may have put a lot of strain on his heart. But several years ago, his sister told me that he had had some involvement with drugs. I never suspected it, because he was not the type.

This matter came up in our recent conversation. She told me her brother had had a “mental breakdown.” At age 23? It seemed to me that most people at that age are energetic and eager to go on, not give up. Even if it were so, why would it lead to death? Many older people who are said to have had a “breakdown” live nonetheless for years after. Why would my friend have been any different?

I did not doubt what she told me because I am confident it was what she and her parents were told by some doctor or doctors at the time of his death. My interest was to penetrate the fog of those words: “mental breakdown.”

Precisely what did it mean?

I oppose that expression on principle because it reveals nothing concrete, conceals cause of death, and deflects moral agency. I contend that “mental breakdown” should be broken down into plain English and then abandoned on the junk heap of misleading terms that professional racketeers cling to because they are vague and mysterious. Any term prefaced by “mental” is almost certainly a fraud or an evasion. This is true for anti-concepts such as “mental health” and “mental illness,” neither of which exists. Yes, I know that many people “believe” those things exist, but they are mistaken and deceived by experts in scientific-sounding propaganda.

A machine, a thing, or the human body may break down. But the “mind” is not a machine or a thing and it is not “in” your body. Machines, things, and the body occupy space. But the “mind” does not occupy space.  It is a metaphor and only a metaphor.  To say that it can “break down” is to speak in the language of poetry. We cannot speak of “mind” as if it had the qualities of things that occupy space (e.g., size, health, disease, interior, exterior, etc.).

When someone claims or is said to have had a “mental breakdown,” people expect him to get “treatment” by “doctors.”

But when a woman is “broken-hearted” because her lover has left her, why does she not ask doctors to perform heart surgery to put it back together?

Why do people not advise a man with a “dirty mind” to use soap and water to make it clean?

Why do people not advise men who tell “sick jokes” to take them to a doctor to get them cured?

Why do people not seek to strengthen their “moral fiber” by eating more apples and oatmeal?

Why are such things absurd?  Because the language of metaphor and the language of science or medicine cannot be combined.

When a person has died and is said to have had a “mental breakdown,” it reveals nothing about how or why he died. People die either because of something they do or something that is done to them (by other people or by nature). “Mental breakdown” obscures the difference. Let’s listen to an “expert:”

“Please explain what is meant by the term “mental breakdown,” a reader wrote to a doctor who had a newspaper column.  His reply:

“The reason you can’t find a definition is because mental breakdown isn’t a term that means exactly anything…”

“What about the symptoms?,” the reader asked.  The doc’s reply:

“I don’t mean to duck the question, but this is so complicated that not even a book would cover the topic.  It would require a whole library.”

[Joseph G. Molner, M.D., “A ‘Mental Breakdown,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 20, 1961, p. 5-F]

In other words:  “Mental breakdown” cannot be broken down into anything you or I could understand without a building full of books deciphered by experts in the arcane realm of Mental Phenomenology.

If you aren’t laughing at this point, you should be — because that reply is not medicine or science; it is voodoo. It is a classic example of fake science. By allowing medical racketeers to write and speak such nonsense, Americans enable them to transform ordinary problems and conflicts into “diseases” requiring “treatment,” a stratagem extremely profitable for those racketeers and their allies in the drug-pushing industries.

I asked his sister if her brother had a job at the time of his death. Yes, he did. Did he get involved with a bad crowd? Join a group of pill-poppers? Follow their example in order to fit in? Possibly, but not too clear on that. Did he become irresponsible? Goof off at his job? Not want to continue working? Get involved with a girl? Not too clear about those questions.

His sister told me she had been particularly angry at one doctor who failed to keep her brother alive. I can understand her anger, because doctors often do immoral, incompetent, stupid, or horrendous things while claiming to be doing good. (All doctors claim that they are “doing good” all the time, which is one reason why we should be eternally skeptical toward their self-serving claims.)

Doctors love nothing more than to increase and expand their power. They love to meddle in matters that involve morality, choice, consequence, responsibility, or conflict — but not health or disease. All such matters involve moral agency — the quintessential attribute of men and women that medical racketeers in The Therapeutic State in “partnership” with bureaucrats in the The Nanny State seek to deny and erase. (“Forensic psychiatry” is the most obvious example — and observe how few Americans object to it.)  Such problems, dilemmas, predicaments, conflicts, and frustrations are as old as history and as inevitable as rain. Words like “mental,” “healthy” and “ill” cannot apply to any of them, except metaphorically or poetically.

To be sure, the strain and stress resulting from the preposterous tempo and texture of modern life in big cities like New York are often overwhelming.  There is nothing “mentally” wrong with people who declare they are sick and tired of what Ralph Borsodi called This Ugly Civilization (Harper and Brothers, 1933).  But there might be very much wrong — morally, not “mentally”— with people who agree to accommodate it.

Feeling sad is only that — not a disease called “depression.” Getting tired of the rat race is only that — not a disease called “mental breakdown.” Saying “I am sick of it all and I give up” is a choice, not a “condition” (medical or “mental”).

The myth of mental illness and all its variations (as in “insanity,” “bipolar,” “ADHD,” “PTSD,” and “breakdown”) give scientific-sounding excuse to the age-old lust for evasion exemplified in the claim “I couldn’t help it.” All of that, I suggest, is hoax, fraud, and self-deception. Such myths would have us believe that men are helpless objects. That is a Big Lie, but a useful one for people who hate responsibility. The simple truth is that men and women are moral agents and should always be held accountable for what they do but shouldn’t do or fail to do but should.

Did my friend die as an unforeseen result of ingesting this or that drug? I don’t know.

In all the years when I knew him, he was never in the least irresponsible. Like me, he had been an altar boy. He never made excuses. Nor did his family, who were Catholic. They were refugees from Communist Hungary and were the embodiment of responsibility and integrity. The three of us — he, his sister, and I — are frozen in time in a color photograph taken by my mother as we sat on a ledge in Central Park one day in June 1965.

His sister is not a “Liberal.” On the contrary, she is a conservative Christian and extremely kind and thoughtful.  She is the only friend I had with whom I could talk candidly about the Covid propaganda and who shared my impression that Birx, Fauci, and Wallensky were liars. We talked about Babel and the confusion of tongues, and found ourselves in agreement.  I tried to make the case that pseudo-medical/psychiatric jargon (like “mental breakdown”) is a perfect example of the deliberate corruption and pre-emption of plain English by doctors who crave power over our lives and language.

I tried to dislodge “mental breakdown” from our conversation, but I failed. We were getting nowhere fast, so our conversation turned to other things.

Unfortunately most Americans have agreed to give doctors not only the power of life and death but also the power to choose the very words we use in framing our problems. That latter concession is a blank check for tyranny by medical racketeers whose power depends on mystifying and frightening people, not telling them the plain truth, and who will stake out more and more power over our lives at the expense of our liberty, our rights, and our moral agency.

C.S. Lewis warned about zealots who want to wield such power. So did Senator Sam Ervin. So did Ivan Illich and Robert Nisbet and Dr. Thomas Szasz. Most Americans paid no attention to them and continued to imagine that doctors are wiser about life and ethics than ordinary people, a fallacy aggressively promoted by medical and pharmacological racketeers. They aren’t. Doctors are mechanics and nothing but mechanics. Their knowledge pertains to the machine for which they are mechanics — the human body.  They may be very competent mechanics, but their knowledge about that machine does not include wisdom about life or morality — or about anyone’s “mind.”

As the philosopher Daren Jonescu wrote in a recent essay:

“Realize that ‘mental illness’ was never anything but a metaphor, and the entire pharmacological framework of modern psychology—along with the billion-dollar industry that depends on and fosters that framework—comes tumbling down.”

Quite right — and that would be a “breakdown” that should be welcomed by all of us who value our political liberty, individual rights, and moral agency.

My friend died either because he did something that had a terrible price — or because something was done to him, by other people or by nature. Did he make a bad decision or series of bad decisions? I don’t know. But I am an expert on bad decisions because I made a number of them when I was young and ignorant and well into my twenties.

We cannot change the fact of his death, but we can choose to speak plain English instead of the pretentious, misleading, and fake-scientific vocabulary that medical racketeers want us to accept in its place.

The Catholic Church has always taught that men possess free will, and it is right.  I would not insult my friend by denying his free will — his moral agency — and blaming his death on anything so nebulous as “mental breakdown.” I would rather respect his moral agency by saying that he made a bad choice for which he paid a tragic price he did not foresee.

All of which is terribly sad, not only because she lost her brother and I lost a friend, but because it is one small example of how almost all Americans — even “Conservatives” — have agreed to accept the medicalization of matters that are moral, not medical, and that can be resolved only by moral courage and plain speech.  And Americans today are notoriously lacking in both.

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