Where Judaism is opposed to the mental health ideology

If the new state religion is medical psychology, with a therapeutic ethics replacing the old dogmas, and doctors replacing priests, then, it is both a replacement for and a form of Protestant Christianity, with its demands for faith and ideas of salvation and damnation. And the relationship to it of Judaism would be the same: as the Christian ideas of God and ethics and morals were not rejected (as heretics could be accused of doing) so much as recognized as a less satisfying form of something that is otherwise shared, so too with the new religion of therapy. Some such notion was always part of religion, but in a very different way that has a much greater claim on facilitating, as is the task of every ethics and every religious or "spiritual" "way" or "Path," happiness. That's why we can reject the vast over-reach of psychiatric medicine, which entitles doctors with little or no education in the study of people in literature and the humanities to make judgments about everyone, considered true by virtue of their professional authority to state them, and still believe in things like psychoanalysis. One reason that "God" in Western theology cannot be identified with any particular trait, quality, or process that may be part of the broad workings of nature and history that sometimes can be called "good," is simply that any such identification attributes the trait correctly but is false in limiting the forces of good that we call divine to it. God is many things, including a cause of exile and homecoming, remembering and forgetting, generosity and combativeness, and many other things. There is healing in the divine as there is justice in it, but we cannot say that what is divine is healing or justice.

The new secular religion hypertrophies healing, and it makes everyone vulnerable and lacking in a way that gives the state a monopoly on the means not only of violent force as in Max Weber, but also on the right to identify lack in anything (individuals lack like Christianity's sinners, though now the lack is illness, and the state and the experts and managers it implies have a monopoly on declaring - in identifying "diagnostic and statistical" medical categories (which are police categories for dividing up and managing the population) - who has lack and what should be the proper correctional treatment.

One way this is Christian and not Jewish is that Judaism does not believe in original sin, or essential lack. People are not in essence guilty of sin. Sin is inescapable as is mortality, but these things do not quite define us.

Another way it is Christian is the focus on faith, and the authoritarianism that goes with this because the objects of faith are in large part the practices and statements of the authorities. There are two key aspects of this: first, faith is in authority, and secondly, faith is an attitude, and in Protestant Christianity since Luther, attitudes matter more than deeds. The concept of attitudes includes mental states and thus mental illnesses, at least as subjectively expressed in thoughts and emotions; and it includes an injunction, now enforced constantly and with much difficulty consequent upon resistance, to be nice to everyone particularly by not having any disrespecting prejudices. The focus of this is of course on attitudes to people for whom a minority or marginalized social status can be claimed. This is one part of today's attitude policing, the dense network of discourses and practices that form the apparatus of the psychological form of governance that today prevails is another.

While Jews have always believed in medicine, there are defining aspects of the (exclusively modern) idea of mental illness that, it seems to me, are incompatible with Jewish ideas of persons, mind, and health. Madness is a different concept, because it has to do with chaos or disorder and is defined as an other of reason, whereas "mental illness" is based on a bureaucratic regime that objectifies individuals and seeks to diagnostically and statistically identify everyone in terms of a typology. The Yiddish word "messhugge" means madness, not mental illness, and madness in the sense perhaps just of jazz, klezmer, wildness rather than highly ordered ways of thinking.

It is obvious that Auschwitz was a consequence and expression of that idea of modernity. (There are others.).

But Judaism almost never rejected any marked attribute of the larger society wholesale. Jews rejected magic and mythical thinking as the larger Christian world did, but does not reject technology, reason, government, and many other things. (Nor is it rightly said that Jews are the ones who really believe in them, as some claim with regard to "family," "community," or some other supposedly holy thing.). We are not against courts of justice, though we might oppose their corruption into the prosecutorial efforts of an irrational administrative state in a war against the poor. We are not against building towers, but only against believing a tower will reach God or substitute for him. We may choose not to believe in God, but we cannot treat any particular thing that clearly is not God whether God actually exists or not, as if it were. And we cannot want to abolish psychiatric medicine. But it uses a lot of bad or corrupted techniques, and makes for a terrible religion.

Doctors should practice medicine, not policing. Their job should not be to make sure people judged or presumed “mentally ill” do not commit the crimes that are attributed to them as a potentiality that is considered a latency. The job of a doctor or therapist is not defend or protect “society”; the police are the ones with that job. The liberal idea (in America, sometimes considered “conservative”) of limited government should apply to medicine, as in general it only does today from the outside. That is, doctors and therapists along with nurses and other “health care” personally tend to only reluctantly concede that their power is limited by legal restrictions on it on behalf of the rights and civil liberties of patients. Their own professional ideology teach them that “health” is the name of God that matters for them, and “justice” is not their concern; mention legal issues to a medical personnel in America today and you will likely be treated with the same scorn as by the police.

The problem is exacerbated by some of the defining qualities of American culture, including its anti-intellectual character. Doctors and therapists do not have explain their thinking or even purposes to their patients, because in general expert professionals are authorized to use their judgment, and Americans very rarely say what they believe, but instead merely implement and enforce it. It is extremely difficult in most cases to speak to an American with regard to what they believe is true or right, even in the instance and in a matter that concerns both of you or you alone. We do not have a belief in the value of rational discourse in our culture. In those places where it is found, it is merely allowed as part of the professional discourse of certain workers, and the statements they make are authorized and legitimated by their professional status and institutional power. A general sophistry prevails in the broader democracy of belief and opinion that we are supposed to have in the public sphere, where, more often than not, different opinions about a common matter are a cause for violence rather than an opening to some kind of discussion, the very idea of which can only sound absurdly academic and perhaps ancient or medieval. Psychiatrists in particular have a medical education that is essentially that of biological science, they use their broad common sense about people, for the most part unaided by the broad literary education that would enable one to reliably make very knowing and good judgments with that common sense, and they operate with a set of categories that have, not definitions, but a set of attributes that indicate the authorized use of the category. The reason you cannot have a real discussion with your psychiatrist is only partly that he or she will only see everything you say as nothing more than an expression of your own mental illness, and evidence of its symptoms, but also that their way of operating mentally is not the rational thinking that prevailed in philosophy and the sciences before the advent of American business thinking in terms of declarations of purposes, procedures, and authorized beliefs, sometimes articulated in Power Point presentations that provides series of listed items without any actual rational inferences or arguments, since the purpose is not to persuade, and businesses are not run on the notion that what is to be done must first be justified; rather, it only needs to be clearly communicated to the subordinates so that they know what they are supposed to do. Similarly modeled groups of authoritative statements are sometimes fed by therapists to their patients, telling them how to think, solve problems, manage their disaffecting emotions and relate to other people, something that in other countries might be learned by school children.

Psychiatry does not think (it only processes ideas with sophistical rhetoric and for operational purposes, to get the job done in terms of the goals selected and defined in advance). Psychiatry differs from psychoanalysis partly in not expecting people to think, and not believing that the ethical character, positive or negative, of the behavior that it seeks to control depends in any way on how people think.

This is another point on which Judaism differs. In Christian and most other societies, only the elite needed to be educated, and, just as in America today, the laws people are expected to obey and can be punished for breaking are not an object of study, which only is needed by elites for the purpose of managing the society, which is the task of professionals making use of the social and “behavioral” sciences generally. Judaism, holding people to be equal, required that every member of the society be educated, as the things. that the elite should know are the same things everyone should know. This point would be lost on anyone observing one of today’s psychiatric hospital wards, for whatever they are, they are not places of any kind of learning. Group discussions are convoked to talk about trivial matters, and patients have their blood pressure taken four or more times a day, so that the hospital can claim that it is providing medical care, and charge the exorbitant rates they do. But there is rarely a library, and the patients, having first been separated from their lives with their jobs, family, friends, and interests, are then kept isolated and essentially subjected to a training in boredom. There is no individual therapy or any other kind except in a trivial and cosmetic sense, and when the staff engage patients in any organized activity, it often is just an attempt to re-educate people in highly disciplinary procedures with little meaningful content beyond that. Religion of course is respected in such places, but it is of the American Protestant kind in the sense that it involves declarations of belief and faith in authority, is ethically slight, and does not seem to need to much engage the mind. Rather, people are encouraged to affirm their conviction that (in whatever particular way they chose to think about this relationship) the state is “under God” and so its near-absolute authority is underscored and supported by expecting individuals to recognize a perfectly absolute imaginary authority that stands above but more importantly behind this secular one. (Its standing above it does not, of course, allow what it stands above to be criticized).

The American mental health system is irremediably Protestant. The ideologies that accompany it are as reactionary as the attitudes of most psychiatrists. It is an institution of social control and repression, part of our system of prisons.