Is mental illness contagious?

"A strife of interests masquerading as, a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage: Politics."- Ambrose Bierce, American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, and satirist in The Devil's Dictionary.

To go by what is happening in parliament, what our parliamentarians are saying, doing, and how they are behaving; I believe it to be so - mental illness must be contagious. For even sane persons act mad once they are there. That leads me to conclude, most firmly, that those that seek to enter politics, and through politics parliament; must have a touch of madness or be prone to it. Now consider that our future, the future of generations to come; we have elected to leave in the hands of the deranged, whose aim and occupation seemingly is to either plunder and loot, rob and ravage, lay waste and devastate, public property, the peoples wealth; or distribute largesse as if this nation is their heirloom. Then, the question arises: Are we - the ones who cast our votes to elect such representatives and support their idiosyncrasies - normal? Again, as is normal for questions to follow questions, I must ask, what is normal? The standard definition of normal would of course be - conforming to a standard: to a usual, typical, or expected condition. Now that again must address the question: who sets the levels for quality of, or attainment to, normalcy? Who is to evaluate comparative norms, models, or measure of normal? For all I know, diagnostic labels are proliferating, and mental disorders seem to be annexing ever more territory - as it has, the parliament.

Diagnosable

At the same time, many people with diagnosable conditions are forging their own original take on what is normal: once again, as those in parliament. In addition, a spate of popular books challenge, psychiatry narrowing the meaning of normal. The real force behind a proliferation of labels is the increasing ability of technology to see us as never been seen before. Still, the notion of a shift in the normal invites unease.

The National Institute of Mental Health in the USA reports that in any given year, over a quarter of humans suffer a mental disorder that some might consider normal. Perhaps it is because it is a short hop from critiquing, narrowed normalcy to claiming that we are overstressed and overmedicated. May be we narrowed healthy behavior so dramatically that our quirks and eccentricities - the normal emotional range of adolescence and adulthood - have become problems we fear and expect drugs to fix. An example: In bed, the girlfriend of a friend of mine let her pet puppy share the bed. Since the dog took an interest in the proceedings, the arrangement made my friend uncomfortable.

Obsessive

When he expressed misgivings, she accused and attacked him as obsessive; and insisted he seek medical opinion. Was he neurotic? Was she perverse? With or without diagnoses, the situation would normally lead to the two to break up or enter the sort of stable relationship where the woman calls him fussy and he considers her irrational. Hence, do we need a psychiatrist to adjudicate: Who is normal? Such incidents have made me think a good deal about normality lately.

It is of course a concern in the medical world. The complaint is that doctors are abusing the privilege to define the normal. Ordinary sadness is, turned into depression.

Boyishness stands in the shadow of attention deficits. Social phobia has engineered a hostile takeover of shyness. Psychiatry's critics also complain that doctors medicate patients who meet no diagnosis.

They move a person from one normal, but disfavored personality state, like humility and diffidence, to another normal, but rewarded state, like self-assertion. Thus, it seems to me that to constrain normality is to induce conformity: conformity to majoritarian thought, or medically defined conditions of the time.

The human condition includes variation and vulnerability. Hence, it is past time that we rethink what we mean by the word normal; because, being deemed neurotic is hardly a cause for distress anymore. If anything, the affliction seemed to signal opposition to mass culture, as if emotional sensitivity were a protest against conformity. Normal cannot mean, must not mean: what we see all the time, what we see the most, or what we believe the most. It must have a different meaning from that for it to mean anything of value to right-thinking people.

Every person is distinctive: a particular individual with his own ideas and his own ways of doing things.

The mentally ill seem special only in that they are more distinctive, like our parliamentarians for instance. They are idiosyncratic or eccentric, even peculiar; yet in their strangeness there is, nothing unrecognizable.

They experience no impulse nor longing that is foreign to a normal person, and they suffer no illusion that a normal person has not known. Since life is varied and complex anyway, it is hard to determine where normal behavior leaves off and abnormal behavior begins.

Perhaps that is why we too chose to elect them as representatives: it is hard to determine our normality and abnormality. Like birds of a feather flocking together, and being gregarious by nature; we too must be corrupt at the core to vote for and elect corrupt politicians. The consequences of conscience, reason, and awareness are not matters of concern for peoples such as us: a corrupt people.

Freedom

We profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are a people who want crops without ploughing the ground; we want rain without thunder and lightning; we want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. We want achievement without struggle, fortune without work.

We, the people, love and live amidst a corrupt, slaveholding, women whipping, cradle plundering, partial, and hypocritical people in a land called paradise. The pomp, show, and bombast of politicians, we admire. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other - devils dressed in angels' robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.

In thinking of this land, my land, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky; her grand old forests; her fertile fields; her beautiful rivers; her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains.

Yet, this rapture is, soon checked; my joy soon turned to mourning.

For then I remember that, all of that which delights in this land, is cursed with the infernal actions of robbery and wrong; that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters.

That this is the result of our politics and politicians, and the follies of a foolish people that elects them; fills me with unutterable loathing; because the happiness of politicians cannot be purchased by the misery of a people.

Independence

Thus, what value is, to the citizen of this country, independence? Is there a meaning to the word? My answer: our independence only reveals to us the gross injustices, and cruelties to which we are the constant victims.

Thus, celebrating independence is a sham. The boasted liberty - an unholy license of national greatness - is nothing but a swelling vanity of the politicians.

Their sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; their denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; their shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; their prayers and hymns, their sermonizing speeches and thanksgivings, with all their religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast.

Their fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy; is nothing more than a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages.

The whole history of the progress of human happiness shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle.

Hence, it is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake, to clean up the scourge of politics.

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