COMMENTS ON

How Culture Shapes Madness

by

Paul Henrickson

tm.

2015

SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

The Delusions We Deserve

Suspicious Minds, by Joel Gold and Ian

Gold
By GARY GREENBERGAUG. 28, 2014
BELOW, IN RED, are my initial comments amounting to
an alternative view of causes and effects to the Golden
hypothesis.

It is
suggested that the reader read the
red and black text as something
comparable to an operatic duet.
Paul Henrickson

tm.

2015

It should be taken into consideration that these red

comments are responses and the results of having read
the reviewers comments and trusting in such a filter
might be illadvised.
Joel Gold first observed the Truman Show delusion in which
people believe they are the involuntary subjects of a reality
television show whose producers are scripting the vicissitudes of
their lives on Halloween night 2003 at Bellevue Hospital,
where he was the chief attending psychiatrist. Suspicious
Minds, which he wrote with his brother, Ian, an associate
professor of philosophy and psychology at McGill University, is an
attempt to use of course, one must this delusion but is

it really a delusion? I think there are

multitudinous indications that man is
cannibalistic, if not literally speaking, certainly
symbolically in a practice repeated many times
throughout the world daily as those who partake

in the Christian Mass. Take eat, this is my body

The cannibalistic imagry seems inescapable
Speaking of which in the various places Ive
lived there have been two which have been
outstanding in regard to various forms of
cannibalistic behaviour. One of them is the
Sephardic-Hispanic culture of northern New
Mexico and the other in Malta.
In New Mexico this preying on other human
beings takes two notable forms, While they rape
and kill each other their racism reveals itself in
the public and published comments by their
political leaders and anyone who isnt them is an
Anglo,the focus of all their frustrated efforts to
realise who they are, whether, white, black or
Semitic.
In Malta, the residue of centuries of foreign
occupation and the very new ill-fitting political
soveriegnty blossoms forth like acne on an
adoleseent in the public by means of theft, lies
and slander of those who are not Maltese. The
slogan would seem to be that only one who is
Maltese can be publicly recognized as excellent
in performance and the only fields in which this
is a reality ...an acceptable reality are medicine,
pharmacy and opera. Publicly, they take great
pride is cheating anyone who speaks English by
a standard 30% above the going price
Both areas pride themselves on being staunchly
Roman Catholic though I understand that the
Spanish in New Mexico are those who, escaping
the edict of Isabella of Castile, were conversos
fleeing for their lives from their Catholic
majesties. For some reason I have yet to
discover why Isabella decided to give those who
did escape to The New World vast tracts of land
that were already productively managed by
various Indian communities. Her actions
certainly set of later generations for an array of

uncomfortably idiotic situations...are there

consciences among the elite?
Life is a continuously bewildering adventure as
one, like Theseus, threading his way through a
labyrinthine array of impinging demands for
our attention which has been observed by many clinicians,
the many does not legitimize it to pose questions
that have gone out of fashion in psychiatry over the last halfcentury: well, good for the Golds they do admit to

fashion being a form of anti-intelligent

behaviour but, nevertheless, one that seems
necessary to keep the social group together.
After all, some actions require cooperation. Yet,
then there are the lonely ones who see the
limitations, speak about what they see, suffer
the assembled and organized abuse and
occasionally get beatified post mortemly. Why
does a mentally ill person have the delusions he or she has?

Does this question mean to ask why, of all

possible other paths, the one determined to be
mentally ill chooses the path he chooses? It
might be through a random choice, but I doubt
it. It is, I suggest, because Ariadnes thread, as it
lay on the floor of the labyrinth, had become
soiled , perhaps by Minatauran excrement and
mice, attracted by the undigested seed ate
through the thread and, in consequence
Theseus, poor fellow, and bad luck for us, never
found his way out. And, following the lead of the medical
historian Roy Porter, who once wrote that every age gets the
lunatics it deserves, what can we learn about ourselves and our
times from examining the content of madness? And as for

the delusionary-attribution does it not appear

that the seat of this delusion is not with the ones
labelled insane (or whatever) but in following
the masses....in running with the crowd. And
that it is the delusional one we see, as if in a
distortion mirror, is ourselves. The victim does
not choose the path it is the one, the only one,
perhaps, left open for him since, it appears that
as the conventional view of reality does not fit
what he sees he parodies it as best he can,,,as

clinicians it is our job to disentangle this

Gordian knot....well, good luck on that one!
The Golds answer is a dual broadside: against a psychiatric
profession that has become infatuated with neuroscience as part
of its longstanding attempt to establish itself as real medicine,
and against a culture that has become too networked for its own
good. Absolutely correct...the failure of the good

ole boy system to perform adequately is

enhanced by the drama of establishment egos
terrified of controversy...despite their public
claims.
Therefore, one might conclude that the system
which fosters peer-review publication is a
system which fosters conventionality over
alternative insight and, additionally, fosters
claims like the Goldss paper as a brave double

broadside.. while that is only pretence.

Current psychiatric practice is to treat delusions as the random noise generated by a

malfunctioning (and mindless) brain a strategy that would be more convincing if

doctors had a better idea of how the brain produced madness . The brain

doesnt produce madness. What is called madness is the

brains, sometimes, disordered, response, to a view of a
situation that is already mad such as burning at the stake
people poisoned by bad rye seed, or threatening to put ones
paternally disobedient son into a military academy, or in the
case of Alan Turing and his offense of homosexuality a court
ordered chemical castration....these are mindless actions
dictated by a reactionary, revengeful and mad society. Mad,
that is, if madness can be defined as the holding of inadequate,
illogical or mistaken opinions.

Now, one more thought in this vein. It occurs to

me that the study of Brian Knudsen, et al, on
Density and Creativity might relate to this
topic as well as my own study conducted in the
early sixties at Radford University (VA) which
indicated that later siblings tended to be more
creative than the first born from which was
concluded that the increase in family population
described a significantly more complex
environment than existed initially. Multiply this
by the population of a metropolis and one might
expect increases in most measures of human
response...including creativity which, in this
case, might mean more and more varied ways of
maintaining semblances of independence.
and how to cure it. According to the Golds, ignoring the content of
delusions like T.S.D. can only make mentally ill people feel more
misunderstood, even as it distracts the rest of us from the true
significance of the delusion: If there has been any Gold

contribution to this area of thought it would be

in the area of paying attention to the content of
the delusion that we live in a society that has put us all under
surveillance. T.S.D. sufferers may be paranoid, but that does not
mean they are wrong to think the whole world is watching. True

enough! But what it chooses to watch is

fashionably biased,
This is not to say they arent crazy. Mental illness may be just a
frayed, weakened version of mental health, but what is in tatters
for T.S.D. patients is something crucial to negotiating social life,
and that, according to the Golds, is the primary purpose toward
which our big brains have evolved: the ability to read other
peoples intentions ah ha! indeed and their

intention , like that of the wicked witch in the

forest is to turn you into a ginger cookie and eat
you. or, as cognitive scientists put it, to have a theory of mind.
This capacity is double-edged. The better you are at ToM, they
write, the greater your capacity for friendship.
On the other hand, knowing how other peoples minds work also
creates the opportunity for clandestine exploitation, which in
turn requires us to develop a suspicious mind one that can

Andrew Wyeth. It would be hard for me to

select a portrait more suspicious in character

than this,,,She shows a 24/7 look of expectant

disappointment.

protect us from the mendacity that we know we are all capable of.

At this point I believe the reviewer, Goldberg,

needs correction for while we may all be capable
of telling lies, some of us, at great personal
expense, refrain from doing so. On the other
hand, perhaps Goldberg is warning us not to
take him at his word and that, in fact, what he
has gone at great pains to inform us, simply isnt
true. For an elaboration on this idea see: The
Perceptive and Silenced Minorities on
Scrobd.com The Golds argue that suspicion of others is a
primitive, lower-brain capability that would run unchecked
without the modulating effects of the higher brains rationality.
This, they say, is exactly what has occurred in people with T.S.D.
Their ability to navigate the threats of social living or the
threads of a labyrinthine escape route what they
call the Suspicion System is unmoored from reason, and thus
allowed to run amok.
Having replaced, or at least augmented, neurobiological accounts of the mind with
evolutionary and cognitive accounts, the Golds set the stage for considering what
biological psychiatry has elided in its rush to reduce mental illness to brain
dysfunction: and others, like Amabile, Runko et al, in making the
creative extraordinary common,...some one, some several, seem

to be following the wrong piece of mouse-chewed Ariadne

thread the environment as a causal factor in mental breakdown. And all of the
above could, should, or might be fodder for the creative and
manipulative mind to employ in its determined effort to avoid

the anonymity, through the exercise of

creative thinking, the cannibals would otherwise impose. The
image, above, of all the dots, Ive not had an opportunity to use,
but my sense of its usefulness is that given a careful and nonrestrictive introduction subjects might respond in revealing
ways were the dot results appropriately translated into
numeric scores and correlated with other reliable indicators.
They note that the psychiatric disorders in which delusions play a role are more
common in cities than in rural areas, which indicates that the more relationships one
has to negotiate, the more likely the navigational apparatus is to break down . or

the more inventively creative, or emotionally cautious or

isolated Unless And, they point out, Internet-enabled cameras and cellphones, not
to mention National Security Agency snooping, have turned the entire world into a
single, if virtual, city and a bizarre delusion about being watched into a sober
worry.. Mass culture has become a Panopticon of the 21st century; we have
achieved through technology what Jeremy Benthams infamous prison design tried
to achieve by architecture an arrangement in which inmates must always assume
they are being watched.

The following from a Wikipedia discussion on the Panopticon prison: After Fidel
Castro's revolutionary triumph in 1959, Presidio: Modelo was used to jail political
dissidents, counter-revolutionaries, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and anyone else
considered unfit or an enemy to the new norms and dictates of the Socialist Cuban State.
By 1961, due to the overcrowded conditions (6,000 to 8,000 political prisoners at one
time), it was the site of various riots and hunger strikes, especially just before the Bay of

Pigs invasion, when orders were given to line the tunnels underneath the entire prison
with several tons of TNT.[3]
Prominent Cuban political prisoners such as Armando Valladares,[4] Roberto Martn Prez,
[5]

and Pedro Luis Boitel[6] were held there at one point or another during their respective

incarcerations. It was permanently closed by the government in 1967.[1]

The prison now serves as a museum and is declared a national monument, and the old
administration building now serves as a school and research center.

See also[edit]

People with T.S.D. are those who, for whatever reason, are
uniquely sensitive to the resulting loss of privacy. They are, in
other words, the canaries in the data mines of the surveillance
society. There may be, I believe, a more definitive

explanation for some being uniquely sensitive

to the loss of privacy and the analogy to their
being canaries in poisonous mines used to save
the lives of men I interpret as yet another
professional attempt to sacrifice truth to evil
ends. All, we may assume, are born with the
instinct to discover who and what they are and
how, in this discovery they may learn to expand
self awareness, or, to borrow a term from
Mazlow to actualize the self. The only legitimate
comparison between the canary and the creative
mind is that the mining administrators and the
general society dont give a mouses farts worth
of care for either the canary or the creative
mind.
Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
As refreshing as the Golds attempt to restore meaning to
psychiatry is, they miss one important implication of T.S.D.
Privacy, they argue, is a prudent form of personal hygiene, like
washing your hands, locking your door or using a condom; in
other words, it is vital to our health. But privacy is nothing
natural. At least when it comes to the masses, it is a modern
invention; it came into vogue along with autonomous selfhood
and other Enlightenment notions, and it imposes certain burdens,
like the loneliness and isolation so often noted by modernitys
critics.

This may explain the fact that with the notable (and outrageous)
exception of government spying, the loss of privacy they lament is
largely voluntary. We violate our own privacy every time we use a
credit card instead of cash, or send an email instead of writing a
letter or use an E-Z Pass instead of stopping at the tollbooth. Such
activities may be the cost of admission to a networked world, but
we seem to have embraced them without much reluctance and
sometimes to judge from the alacrity with which we Instagram
and Facebook and YouTube our lives exuberantly. What the
Golds fail to explore is the wish for universal recognition, for
celebrity, embedded in the Truman Show delusion. Its a delusion
well deserved by an age that seems slowly and inexorably to be
turning solitude into a pathology.
The Golds answer is a dual broadside: against a psychiatric
profession that has become infatuated with neuroscience as part
of its longstanding attempt to establish itself as real medicine,
and against a culture that has become too networked for its own
good. On the surface it would seem that I agree

with the claim that networking (a form of the

good ole boy syndrom and be very inhibiting
to the broadcasting of alternative ideas and this
does seem to be underscoringly characteristic
these days and has been so for nearly half a
century. Current psychiatric practice is to treat delusions as
the random noise generated by a malfunctioning (and mindless)
brain I doubt it is mindless. a strategy that would be
more convincing if doctors had a better idea of how the brain
produced madness and how to cure it. According to the Golds,
ignoring the content of delusions like T.S.D. can only make
mentally ill people feel more misunderstood, even as it distracts
the rest of us from the true significance of the delusion: that we
live in a society that has put us all under surveillance. Is this
claim a delusion?T.S.D. sufferers may be paranoid, but that
does not mean they are wrong to think the whole world is
watching.
This is not to say they arent crazy. Throw this word away it is only for
the bigoted Mental illness may be just a frayed, weakened version of mental
health, but what is in tatters for T.S.D. patients is something crucial to negotiating
social life, and that, according to the Golds, is the primary purpose toward which our
big brains have evolved: the ability to read other peoples intentions or, as cognitive
scientists put it, to have a theory of mind.

It occurs to me that reading other peoples intentions

is not a matter of the growth of the brain but a
function of personal caution, a matter of survival. This

may be initially innate, but certainly develops from

experience. Its loss, I suspect, is a matter of social
training. It is, admittedly awkward to deal with
someone who finds you suspicious. It interferes with
negotiations, so some of us, regrettably, forego caution
in order to accomplish the deal and then, perhaps,
later take the fellow to court.

Do you remember this...the real

face of the minataur? I have often wondered what Fellini (or perhaps it was
Danilo Donati who made the decision) to make such a dramatic change from the
frightening bull mask to this handsome seducer