I find it interesting throughout most of my life I can recall society ostracizing and fearing people that it labels as crazy or out of their mind. I've written many times that I feel we have a horrible mental health stigma in modern society and that I feel it does more harm than good, but today I want to discuss a slightly different topic. Why is it that society has such a great mental health bias and what is the purpose of it?
Personally, I feel that it's a manipulative tool to keep people inside of the status quo. If our thoughts are too far outside of the norm or different from those of the others, then we can be labeled as sick. If we look at governments as essentially a corporate machine that uses people as a resource, then it's only logical that they would want to separate out the "sick" resources that could contaminate others. After all the most insidious disease that exists is an idea. They can spread like wildfire and burn away lies if people accept them as truth.
I feel that mental health facilities and care providers are trained and operate within a system that dictates how they do their jobs, much like teachers and any other heavily regulated industry. If the government controls how we are able to do a job and provides legal guidelines of our responsibilities, and they do this in many ways through funding and legislation, then they ultimately control who is or is not "crazy" or "out of their minds." We only need to look at the current state of affairs of society to realize that our mental health system is fundamentally failing and I feel it should be completely redesigned to stop viewing people as an illness and as a person first.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, "To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.” Unless you have blind faith in the people creating legislation and controlling the system, which I do not and have not since 2001, then it should be easy to see that allowing people that have questionable motives and agendas to dictate sanity is fundamentally flawed logic. I rather prefer to discuss these things with people that do know how to get outside of their own mind. If we spend all of our time thinking, we only ever think about thoughts and that's an easy way to get lost in our little world of expectations and assumptions about others and reality. Namaste.