“The Individual Disorder” of Descartes, Truth, and Mental Health in Politics

Insane. Crazy. Mad. Deranged. Defective. Lunatic. Violent. Dangerous. At times, society attributed all these descriptions to those many now the mentally ill. Even that phrase has its discontents; it implies disorder, deviance, incorrectness to the mind of the person who is considered “mad” or “insane.” If my use of those words bother anyone, it is advisable not to read the rest of this article. I must apologize for my crassness regardless, for I used those words quite brashly, and in many ways, ironically. I am, of course, discussing this social concept of madness that has been, not taboo, but extensively spoken about; if we wish to discuss it, we have to come to terms with the fact that it is not suppressed. Ironically, we find that philosophers have constantly and commonly addressed the insane in a variety of ways, and that the public constantly engages in speculation on it. The silence was never put in place; madness (to use the explicitly outdated term), rather than being silenced, has been spoken of throughout human history.

This brief essay is hardly enough to analyze the whole of madness throughout human history, or the opinions that reinforced its political use. Rather I will tackle how it became “the individual disorder,” something which is assigned only to an individual, which is made objective and non-political, non-social, and how this makes it incredibly politically useful.

The modern use of madness derives itself from the treatment of the insane by René Descartes, in his First Meditation on First Philosophy. He wrote, in 1641:

"But it may be that although the senses sometimes deceive us concerning things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away, there are yet many others to be met with as to which we cannot reasonably have any doubt, although we recognize them by their means. For example, there is the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in my hands and other similar matters. And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass. But they are mad, and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant."

Descartes’ philosophy relies upon these people being “devoid of sense” and their ideas of objects being “clouded by the violent vapours of a black bile.” This forms a core of his philosophy. The goal of his philosophy is to find the truth, and to do this he would be “putting aside everything that admits of the least of doubt.” Eventually he figures that he can’t even be certain of the presence of other minds, but only himself. What does that mean? Well, it’s complicated. He implies his method is the only way of getting at the truth. What if a madman were to go through this same process, where there is nobody, where there is nothing, would they come to the same conclusion? No. They can’t even arrive at the truth, by this philosophy; in his second Meditation, Descartes concludes that “as a general rule…, everything that I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true.” Since they are unable to see anything either clearly and distinctly, they are incapable of arriving at the truth.

But let’s look just a bit deeper into his method. Descartes’ is a method of self-isolating, of looking into oneself and refusing to believe in anything which might possibly be wrong. What does this mean for the mad? Their individual faculty for judgment is impaired; while they receive the same sensory impressions as anyone else, they nonetheless exercise poor judgment. By this logic, madness must be an individual disorder, a defect born of an absence of reason, an affliction which has no deeper cause than the individual itself. This has significant implications for today; here we have one of the precursors to the modern use of madness in politics.

The use of madness in this way, as a means of arriving at falsehoods with correct sensory impressions has largely been done away with. However, this was never the point. More recently, it arose in Freud that one should analyze the experience of the subject of psychology, the lunatic, in their individual childhood experiences. Lacan took this one step further, arguing that the ethics of psychoanalysis demands a “setting aside, withdrawal,” from the separation of “good habits” and “bad habits.” It is part of modern psychiatric ethics that requires a suspension of social practice upon the part of the practitioner. Lacan mentioned in his Seventh Seminar that the psychoanalyst must seek to isolate the experiences within the patient that are traumatic, and what perpetuates them. This methodological focus upon the individual creates a definition that trends towards the isolation and classification of disparate behaviors.

And yet, none of these have brought to the surface a complex system of social relations that currently exists. Let us turn away from the professionals for a minute; it is nice to read them, but most people in society today, most social commentators, do not. The political use of madness relies upon the use of these individual psychologies to explain broader social events. It is a tactic that displaces responsibility from the social forces that enabled and caused an event to the individual that participated in it. This individualization of madness, the drive to assign to it as a cause of historical events, this is what is concerning.

It is ironic, today, that we speak of breaking the silence on Mental Health issues, and yet our social critics seem to never stop mentioning it. The American Psychiatric Association invoked a “gag rule” to stop its clinicians from attempting to diagnose the former president, probably to uphold the methodology of psychoanalysis. According to one psychiatrist, “independent mental health professionals have been shut out of major media.” This same person accused former president Trump quite recently of threatening the nation much in the same way that an abuser would threaten a victim who tried to leave the relationship. It is tempting to call the former president unhinged, but ultimately this distracts quite a bit from the root problem. It indicates that Trump, being insane, is solely responsible for apparently undermining democracy. What does that tell us about these people; due to their method of analyzing individuals, they do not look at it in social context.

In an ironic twist of fate, one of the psychiatrists generating these charges, according to the Independent, hoped “that the public and politicians will understand mental health issues are not to be used as a weapon.” Let us look, then, to the generation of another social pathology, and see if it is used as a political weapon. The use of individual pathologies has always been instrumental in political discussion, particularly upon issues of race, sexuality, gun control, etc.

Let us interrogate the building of a pathology around Adam Lanza, the shooter at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. This led to the construction of diverse calls for action, a strengthened mental health care system, the “breaking of the chain of neglect” around mental illness. And yet, not one of the commentators looked into what exactly this would mean. So many people look at psychology and psychiatry today and take for granted that they are designed for the benefit of society. Of course, despite the best efforts of Lacan, most people see the purpose of psychiatry to discern good and bad habits, to determine what actions are good and what are bad. Here we come back to a vague notion of Aristotle, who argued in Nicomachean Ethics that the purpose of a government is to instill virtue in its citizens and combat vice. Today, if one observes what people expect about psychology, they have this type of Aristotelian view, where "vice" and "virtue" are taken as concrete influences that psychologists can influence with impunity.

In the pathologization of Adam Lanza, this is certainly the case. Paul Gionfriddo argued that by recognizing a number of times when an individual intervention could take place, we could have averted the events at Sandy Hook, but ultimately, the focus upon the individual here makes the study incomplete. Certainly intervening on the individual level is necessary. However, we fail to take into account the social practice into which that intervention would take place, and how it is often politically deployed.

A New York Times article from around the time of the shooting put much of the blame on Lanza’s mother. Another individual to blame, another chance missed, another failure to analyze the social implications of her actions, and another inability to cope. Gionfriddo, in an op-ed in the Hartford Courant, argued that “we have so many policy tools available to break” the chain of neglect, but this, too, misses important and influential interests at work in society. A study on the politics of gun violence listed four chief assumptions that do not hold water upon further inspection; the one most relevant to our inquiry here is that “psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime before it happens.”

A focus upon the subject of psychiatry, rooted in the individualism of Descartes and in the methodology of psychiatry as practiced, leads society to portray speaking about mental illness as the solution to the problem. A second case is that of Dylann Roof, a mass murderer who killed nine black worshippers in a historically black church, whose lawyers reportedly asserted that he had “social anxiety disorder, a mixed substance abuse disorder, a schizoid personality disorder, depression by history and a possible autistic spectrum disorder.” This made him incapable of acting rationally, logically, within the bounds of acceptable behavior, and thus he should be excluded from the proceedings. This was consistently despite Roof’s own assertions that he understood entirely what he was doing, and that asserting his incompetence would discredit “the reason why [he] did the crime.” He was declared competent and subsequently sentenced to death.

What does this tell us about the political use of madness? It is incredibly revealing. The conviction of Dylann Roof illustrates a more general problem of society; all acts of political violence become the acts of the insane, of people whose minds are, as Descartes would have said “are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile,” that they become incapable of speaking the truth. Rather than observe that any shred of truth might be taken from the insane, that their actions may be ascribed to a perfectly logical reasoning, the whole society seeks to diagnose them, assign them to treatment, and never to question what produced them in the first place. What produced, what was the reason behind the acts of violence that Dylann Roof committed, or the reasoning of Adam Lanza, or the reasoning of Donald Trump? What were the reasons they professed? Does anybody seek to understand them on the terms that created these individuals? No. The individuals take the fault for the whole society.

This is the creation of “the Individual Disorder,” the attribution of social problems to an individual pathology, rather than a necessary social function. Everyone seems to believe that we should talk more about mental health, but few propose that we look at the underlying assumptions in the practice of that. The only people who should speak about mental health are those who are “competent,” or “rational,” or “coherent.” The mad, the violent, the dangerous, these are all “incompetent,” “irrational,” “incoherent,” and thus may be branded as insane, and no further questions are to be asked. This has important consequences for when we analyze violence in the uprisings of the colonized. They have to be made “rational” and “reasonable” for people to address the legitimate social concerns expressed there. The problems of the colonized in society become individualized and written upon the psyche of the colonized. Why, one might ask, are African American communities so heavily policed? Why is there a significant amount of violent crime there? It is psychological, the right-wing tells us (and many of the democrats as well), not a product of the necessary function of the American economy.

What does this mean for how we socially value individuals? It is simple, I have addressed previously that the capitalist economic structure treats humans simply as commodities, that is, as human labor to be performed. The subaltern, in this case, the colonized, have to adopt to the way that their labor is expected to be performed and act in a way that is deemed socially rational in order to be employed, have food to eat, and fulfill the necessary conditions for their survival in modern society. Those obscuring black biles must be defined, and when the colonized community rises up, it must be used in order to imprison them, to justify the violence that is committed against them. Violence and irrationality (in short, Madness) was written onto the individual pathologies of the black men who the police murdered. Subsequently, when public opinion shifted, any meaningful change was deflected by the refusal to address economic, political, and social factors, and then to write the same violent, irrational (mad) behavior onto the individuals in the police force. Never was it questioned as to whether this irrationality might have a basis in the necessities of the current economic structure. Never was it questioned that the institutions as they currently exist, and in the allowances they have for behavior, were meant to function in the way that they currently do, to murder the black men viewed as transgressive, to attempt to control the colonized communities in the way that they do.

To address any social problems, one must view the things that produced them, and no individual has ever produced a social problem. It is time we moved past the “individual disorder” and began to look deeply into the way that people are taught to act in society, the way that economics and politics interacted to produce the idea of a “public morality” and the tendency to write social problems upon the individual as an aspect of their pathology. Psychology, due to its focus upon the individual, should keep itself out of social problems, because it is insufficient as a framework to address them. It makes the insane incapable of truth, determines that all violence is irrational, and reinforces the value structures produced by an oppressive society.