The Being Human Disorder
By pathologizing normal human reactions and psychologizing true biophysical dysfunction the mental health establishment is giving cover to colossal injustice and dehumanization.
As Krishnamurti famously said, it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. But profoundly sicker these days tho, amirite?
Sure, there’s the half a billion documented COVID cases that have resulted in an estimated 18 million global dead. Those who survive acute infection, within a year see their likelihood of developing heart failure go up by 72%, heart attack by 63%, stroke by 52%, diabetes by 40%. Nearly 1 in 4 people who’ve been infected with COVID experience some sort of persistent cognitive difficulties afterwards. Globally, 100 million people are estimated to be living with Long COVID, 23 million of them in America, 1 million too disabled by it to work. But even as the mounting evidence of COVID’s vast chronic illness potential continues to grow in yet another upward trajectory curve we’ve become so used to seeing by now, our society is simultaneously telling us to pretend that everything is fine.
The US CDC’s latest Covid-19 monitoring system, based on what they call “Community Levels,” downplays Sars-CoV-2 transmission by tracking hospital admissions rather than infection rates. Released right before Biden’s State of the Union address, this scheme allowed the President to claim “Mission Accomplished” by defeating the virus with the clever use of color theory. Overnight, a pandemic map of Omicron transmission was transformed from red to green.
The move was “blatantly political,” write the public health practitioners, scientists, healthcare workers, educators, and advocates who’ve come together to form The People’s CDC. These new guidelines serve to justify abandoning measures that would keep infections from growing by perpetuating the idea that the pandemic is over. “The shift from red to green reflects both major US parties turning the page on the virus as a political problem rather than a change in the reality of the pandemic,” paving the way, The People’s CDC write, “for the political class to wash their hands” of COVID.
As both Parties tell you to reject the evidence of your eyes, their most essential command, our society is made profoundly sicker not just by the virus and the suppression of harm reduction measures against it, but by mass delusion. And as the cognitive dissonance between what is actually happening and what we are told to believe grows into an ever widening psychotic break from the inconvenient truth of reality, the mental health industry has entered the chat to ask the very critical question of our time:
What if it is your inability to be well-adjusted to a society that normalizes widespread death, harm, and injustice that is the true mental health crisis of the pandemic?
Pathologizing Human Emotions
Last month, the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) issued a new mental health diagnosis:
Hot debate over this “diagnosis” has been going on for a decade but in March of 2022, on the second anniversary of the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic in the US, which has since left 1 million Americans dead and an estimated 9 million family members in mourning — a community of grievers larger than the population of 39 states, including hundreds of thousands of children who’ve lost a parent or primary caregiver — “Prolonged Grief Disorder” finally made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
The core “symptoms” of this “disorder” are “a persistent and pervasive longing for the deceased or a persistent and pervasive preoccupation with the deceased, accompanied by intense emotional pain e.g. sadness, guilt, anger, denial, blame; difficulty accepting the death; feeling one has lost a part of one’s self; an inability to experience positive mood; emotional numbness; difficulty in engaging with social or other activities.”
The researchers who pushed for this “disorder” felt that they could diagnose it six months after a bereavement, however, according to the New York Times:
The A.P.A. “begged and pleaded” to define the syndrome more conservatively — a year after death — to avoid a public backlash, Dr. Prigerson said.
“I have to say that they were kind of politically smart about that,” she added. The concern was that the public was “going to be outraged, because everyone feels because they still feel some grief — even if it’s their grandmother at six months, they are still missing them,” she said. “It just seems like you’re pathologizing love.”
LOL! Wouldn’t want to do that!
Which is why, according to psychiatry’s most powerful body in the United States, if someone you love died — perhaps as part of a pandemic you might have heard of, which in two years has already killed more people than any war in American history, barred many relatives from supporting the dying, and disrupted or even made impossible religious and cultural mourning rituals that help the bereaved to process grief, and which society at large increasingly refuses to even acknowledge is happening, let’s say? — and you’re still thinking about them and missing them and wish they were here after One. Whole. Year. there is something wrong with YOU.
As the Coronavirus continues piling up bodies, in lieu of condolences our society is instead sending the message: Look, everyone is ready to have a good time now. If you insist on feeling bad and aren’t going to snap out of it and play along like everything’s “back to normal” 😉 😉 it’s because you now have a mental disorder.
The fastest-spreading virus in human history is, the CDC’s green fill color brush would have you believe, now over. But according to the APA, catching feelings about loss is a disorder. Good vibes only!
Of course, pathologizing grief — the normal human reaction that comes from acknowledging death and loss — into a “disorder” is exactly what a profoundly sick society would do. And just as the final, meager mitigation measures to protect people from America’s NUMBER ONE KILLER of people over 45, and the number 3 cause of death overall, are being dismantled, the psychology industry is showing up to support this necrophiliac culture.
In October 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health, saying that young people are experiencing “soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality.” What if, just spitballing here, young people are depressed, anxious, and traumatized because they’ve found themselves trapped in a profoundly sick society? One that not only denies their losses, pathologizes normal human emotions, and pressures them to dissociate from their intrinsic threat response to a clear and present danger, but also uses the tools of psychology to tell them that they should adjust themselves to accept this kind of profound brutality as normal?
It’s All In Your Head
It is estimated that some form of post-viral chronic disease occurs in 10-30% of COVID infections (may the odds be ever in your favor). A recent study of over 80,000 children and adolescents found the prevalence of Long COVID to be above 25%.
According to various studies and meta-analyses:
- People with Long COVID have mitochondrial dysfunction — mitochondria being the part of the cell that turns food into energy. Mitochondrial dysfunction could readily explain the debilitating exhaustion that leaves people with Long COVID bed-ridden and is made even worse by exertion (using already depleted energy when cells are functionally incapable of generating more).
- 1 in 3 Long COVID patients have endothelial dysfunction, i.e. their blood vessels can no longer widen when needed, offering another potential structural explanation for Long COVID symptoms of exhaustion and chronic pain.
- COVID infection can likely lead to peripheral neuropathy — damage to the nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord — which can also contribute to the chronic pain many experience with Long COVID.
- 45% of COVID survivors appear to develop pulmonary fibrosis (scarred lungs).
- Half of those with Long COVID show hypometabolic brain impairment — a diminishment in the brain’s ability to use glucose, aka energy. This can result in neurological symptoms such as brain fog and dementia.
- 76.7% of Long COVID patients showed dysautonomia — damage to the autonomic nervous system which controls your body’s automatic processes like digestion, hormone secretion, and even the ability to stand and balance. All of which are commonly impaired among Long COVID patients.
On and on it goes. Two years in, a mind-boggling range of systems and processes that enable you to have a functioning body and brain are shown to become damaged by the virus that causes COVID-19. And yet, for many with Long COVID, the first diagnosis they’ll receive from a healthcare establishment largely captured by the political narrative that COVID is no big deal, is that their symptoms are psychological.
What if we treated every medical condition this way? Myocardial infarction? Call a therapist! Mitochondrial dysfunction? Sounds like a problem for mental health! Vascular degeneration? Endothelial disease? Neuropathy? It’s all in your head! Why stop at grief, even? Why not just put Long COVID itself directly into the DSM and call it a day?
In the absence of any comprehensive approaches to managing long-term, disabling, chronic illnesses, simply writing off the symptoms of biophysical dysfunction as a psychiatric issue allows society in general and its medical police in particular to shirk any responsibility and shift the blame. For people obstinately refusing to comply with the prescribed narrative that everything is fine, who simply don’t want to get over a multi-organ system disease, listen up—
There’s No One To Blame But Yourself
When COVID first began its spread across the United States, one sector that was hit particularly hard was the fossil fuel industry. With the decline of in-person shopping and work oil demand plummeted. As Lever News reported:
Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world.
Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution.
Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies.
On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta…the document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration’s website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly $1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.
The declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with COVID-19 in order to reach herd immunity.
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” read the declaration.
“You have to hand it to the [authors of the] Great Barrington declaration: They have had extraordinary access to the very highest levers of government,” said Gavin Yamey, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University. “They have had a profound impact on policy-making. Time and time again, we’ve seen the [people behind the] Great Barrington Declaration get what they want.”
And yet one small detail has continued to elude them. In 2022 doctors are “seeing kids with [their] 3rd infection in [a] 4 month period.” The shortest gap between reinfections identified by the CDC is just 23 days in a child between 12–17 years old. “Herd immunity now seems impossible. Welcome to the age of Covid reinfection.”
“It is impossible to understand the failed U.S. pandemic response without understanding the role that schools have played as sites of political contestation.” write Abigail Cartus, Ph.D, MPH and Justin Feldman, Sc.D, MPH in Protean. “And it is impossible to understand the school reopening debate without understanding one of its main interlocutors: academic economist Emily Oster:”
Oster’s influence on the discourse around COVID in schools is difficult to overstate. She has been quoted in hundreds of articles about school pandemic precautions and interviewed as a guest on dozens of news shows. Officials from both parties have used her work as justification for lifting public health measures. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cited her study while announcing an executive order banning school mask mandates, while CDC Director Rochelle Walenksy referenced Oster’s research in anticipation of relaxing classroom social distancing guidelines. Oster also co-authored an influential school reopening guidance document that was released in early 2021.
In addition to grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.
Throughout the pandemic, Oster’s advocacy has helped make the “data-driven” case for peeling away successive layers of COVID mitigations: first ending remote instruction in favor of hybrid learning, then ending hybrid learning in favor of a full return to in-person instruction, then eliminating quarantine for those exposed to the virus. The direction of her vision for schooling during the pandemic ultimately involves abandoning universal public health measures altogether, turning masking and vaccination into individual, personal choices. [emphasis added]
Rather than reaching herd immunity against COVID — which was obviously always impossible due to how coronaviruses work — what the propaganda financed by the fossil fuel oligarchs and other billionaires has accomplished is inoculating society against the very idea that protecting the health of a public is the responsibility of their government at all. In a civilization-level emergency, we are told, there is no one accountable. There are only our own, disenfranchised, individual choices, atomized and conveniently ineffectual against a crisis of global scale.
As our political leadership, information networks, health institutions, and medical establishments betray us, we are indoctrinated to believe that there is no one to blame but ourselves. Instead of mitigating COVID it is undermining the very thing that could lead us out of the pandemic.
Since its inception in the 19th century, the prevention, control, and elimination of diseases has been what public health does. Cholera. Polio. Tuberculosis. The reason you’ve never had to worry about these scourges, unlike your predecessors, is because of public health measures that span everything from sanitation to vaccine distribution to soap. Yet in 2022, many people have arrived at the idea that we should not even try to prevent or control, let alone eliminate LOL are you crazy?? COVID. That we should simply accept it. Why has such a profoundly sick idea found so much purchase in our society?
Learning to Love Your Abuser
“A lot of people are anxious about returning to normal activities,” says UBC psychiatry professor Dr. Steven Taylor. “For most people, the anxiety will pass. But if it doesn’t, and the anxiety [emphasis added] is getting in the way of your life, you might benefit from seeing a mental health professional.”
Notably, what’s getting in the way of life is no longer the pathogen — which has not only not disappeared, it keeps mutating into progressively more and more infectious variants — but rather “anxiety.” The real threat, the so-called mental health professionals would have you believe, is actually your nervous system’s ability to discern threat at all.
“Learning to live with uncertainty is a big part of learning to live with COVID-19.” Taylor goes on. “Some people have difficulty tolerating uncertainties in their lives, leading them to feel anxious or worried. Fortunately, there are effective methods for improving your tolerance for uncertainty, including cognitive behavioural therapy, which is available in a variety of formats, including internet programs, phone apps and sessions with a therapist.”
Ah yes. Uncertainty. Our real enemy.
We get onto planes all the time knowing they might crash, do we not? You can’t “live in fear,” the newly minted actuaries insist.
Yesterday in America, at least 944 people died of COVID. A typical Boeing three-class 747 airplane accommodates 416 passengers. That’s more than 2 plane crashes worth of people killed by COVID in one day. Would you still get on a plane so eagerly knowing, with certainty, that at least two would be scheduled to fall out of the sky that day? And this metric is still at a time that is, technically, our “one wild and precious month between covid waves.” The deadliest days of the Omicron surge, just 3 months ago, routinely saw more than seven 747s at full capacity exploding in mid-air.
Let’s say you would be likely to survive the plane crash itself with a 30% chance of being permanently disabled after. Would that sound appealing? Or would your entire nervous system revolt at the prospect of getting on a flight? Would you want to be cured of this inconvenient survival instinct trying to keep you alive? Phone apps and therapists are standing by to help.
Instead of a robust health warning about the risks of Long COVID we are told to adjust our tolerance for “uncertainty” — a euphemism for a colossal public health failure that has destroyed the lives of millions and is disabling entire generations.
What we actually need is public health education, improved indoor air filtration systems, comprehensive testing infrastructure, access to treatment, paid sick leave, accelerated research, increased global vaccine distribution, spread containment through simple masking, and support for the emotional trauma of the pandemic. Instead, the mental health industry has stepped in to tell people that the ways society is structurally failing them are actually their own, personal psychological flaw that they must fix within themselves.
The resigned helplessness of the language being used by the medical collaborators is telling. We must “live with” COVID instead of seek to reduce its harm. We must “get used to it” instead of mitigate it. Mass death and suffering are our new “normal.” Submit, submit, submit.
What other preventable medical tragedies do we talk about this way? Who says, yeah, cancer, man. Gotta learn to live with it. Addiction? Let it rip! If your pancreas can’t produce insulin, well, you’ve just gotta get used to that. I mean, he had a pre-existing nut allergy, so of course he was going to die anyway. Yet COVID must be lived with. Rapturously embraced.
Like children trapped in an abusive household, we are being harmed by the very people, structures, and institutions we rely on. Rather than validating our rightful outrage at the harm and dereliction of duty, we are instead being groomed to believe we must resign ourselves to the abuse. “Learn to live with it” language conditions us to accept helplessness. And that sense of helplessness itself perpetuates the belief that what is happening to us is right and good.
How To Be a Terrible Person
In the 1960s, social psychologists Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons conducted a series of unusual experiments.
As Nicholas Hune-Brown explains:
On the campus of the University of Kansas, [they] had subjects observe a woman undergo a series of tests. When the woman (ostensibly a fellow test subject but actually a grad student playing a role) got a question wrong, she was given a jolt of electricity. As the subjects looked on, the jolts became more severe. She writhed in pain. It gradually became clear: they were witnessing a woman being brutally tortured.
The subjects were understandably distressed. When given the option of changing the experiment, the vast majority chose to end the electric shocks. When they weren’t given that option, however, Lerner witnessed a disturbing reaction. As the participants continued to watch, unable to alter the victim’s fate, they began to derogate the woman. Different groups were told she was being paid different amounts of money for the experiment. The lower the pay, the more the subjects disliked her. Irrationally, with no evidence to support it, the observers became convinced the woman deserved her punishment.
What Lerner and Simmons’ research revealed is that when people are presented with an obvious injustice they’ll try to fix it at first, but when they feel helpless to change things, rather than give up their belief in the essential rightness of the universe, they’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: they’ll rationalize away the injustice by blaming the victims. Lerner and Simmons called this the “belief in a just world.”
Since their original experiments, several decades of research have tested “belief in a just world” against a variety of attitudes and actions. Among other things, people who strongly believe in a just world have a tilt towards authoritarianism, are prone to blame sexual assault victims, are less compassionate towards victims of spousal abuse, and — conveniently for our times — are more willing to malign people suffering from illnesses. They were already old. They had pre-existing conditions. They made bad life choices. They were overweight. They let sickness happen to them because they were weak. They weren’t white.
Wait. What?
A study published in Social Science & Medicine, found that the more it is emphasized that COVID disproportionately affects people of color (it does) the more white people receive the message: “This does not affect me at all.”
In February a study published in Personalty and Individual Differences, found that “dark” personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, sadism, spitefulness), are generally associated with less worry about the COVID19 pandemic and a maladaptive response to mitigation measures.
You’re not just imagining it. People who think the virus is no big deal and don’t care about harm reduction objectively are just worse humans.
The pandemic has taken something from all of us. As grief advocate and educator, Megan Devine, says: “It doesn’t matter if it’s from death or illness or job loss or a loss of the sense of the world as a good and orderly, reasonably safe place. Grief is everywhere. Everyone is grieving.”
And yet, even as the psychology industry is pathologizing this human reaction to loss, our society is normalizing becoming a monster.
In the void of any structural accountability for public health injustice we’re told to turn inward. To blame ourselves. To look to our own individualism for guidance. To seek refuge only in personal mental health. As if any of our little choices will protect us from being affected by a global pandemic even if we are lucky enough to be spared by the virus.
According to the mental health establishment, the disconnect we feel between what we know is true and the lies we’re told to accept is just an “anxiety” to be cured through CBT. There is no room for grief, for rightful, moral outrage, or even for self protection. Only coping skills to further normalize and enable the spread of mass harm, dehumanization, and abuse.
“Republicans and Democrats alike, we are essentially leaning into public health apartheid in America now,” writes Gregg Gonsalves in The Nation. “Creating two tiers, one for the privileged… who know just whom to call to ensure they get the best medical care should they get sick… and another for everyone else. It’s brutal, but is being normalized.”
This is the sick society we must become adjusted to.
“A belief in a fundamentally fair world is a comfort,” Hune-Brown writes. “It’s a way of maintaining the vital illusion that we, the healthy and prosperous, are not just lucky, but somehow deserving.”
The false beliefs we have created about COVID give us a sense of control. They present a fictional orderliness to reality that leads us to see it in a disordered way — not as it is.
“Facing the truth” Oliver Burkeman writes, “that the world visits violence and poverty and discrimination upon people capriciously, with little regard for what they’ve done to deserve it — is much scarier. Because, if there’s no good explanation for why any specific person is suffering, it’s far harder to escape the frightening conclusion that it could easily be you next.”
