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“If you get rid of pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it.”

—Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking, 1975.

People come to mental health professionals in pain—the pain of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, inattention, and a variety of other mental pains. Psychiatric “treatment” routinely is directed at getting rid of these pains as quickly as possible so that an individual can “function.”

In this sense, we should be grateful that psychiatric treatment has been such a failure, a reality that has now even been acknowledged by some in the mainstream media including the New York Times, which concluded in 2021: “Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direction, even as access to services expanded greatly.”

Had psychiatric treatment been more successful in getting rid of pain before its questions were answered, the struggle for authentic self and a healing culture could well have been lost; as it is, those of us who care about such are only losing the struggle, but we have not been completely defeated.

Psychiatry’s Damage to the Authentic Self and a Healing-System Culture

Despite establishment psychiatry’s protestations otherwise, the vast majority of psychiatric patients will tell you that their psychiatrist had no interest in the idea that their pains posed valuable questions. The vast majority of psychiatrists provide only “medication management” and refuse to acknowledge that all they do with their “treatments” is numb pain; and most psychiatrists are clueless as to what is meant by a healing culture and how they damage it. The tiny minority of psychiatrists who allow themselves to feel these professional pains are the tiny minority of psychiatrists who become dissident psychiatrists—or quit.

What questions does our mental pain ask? It often asks questions about the lack of love, freedom, power, creativity, or meaning in our lives—questioning us as to whether we are deceiving ourselves about their presence, and questioning us about our failure to act on the truth of their absence. All our mental pains, large and small, ask questions that can lead to other questions.

Our pain of inattention may be asking: Am I being coerced to attend to something that I have no intrinsic interest in? Is that coercion causing the pain of resentment and rage? Is that pain so overwhelming that it makes me want to depress my entire being so as not to feel? Do alcohol and other drugs help me not feel my being? Does depressing my pain cause me to have no energy to pay attention? Does my lack of attention cause the pain of anxiety over the possibility of not being able to survive?

By answering questions that pain asks, one can rediscover one’s true self. One may discover that one’s authentic self actually values inattention to that which one doesn’t really care about; values not hanging around people who coerce attention; values people who love one’s authentic self; values not spending life depressing one’s being to shut down pain; values being whole and paying attention to what one truly care about; and values the pain that compelled questions that allowed rediscovery of one’s true self.

Many of us—not just the poets whom Lewis Hyde discusses in his 1975 essay, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking”—have pain over the nature of our current civilization. Hyde, echoing other widely read public intellectuals in that era such as Lewis Mumford and Erich Fromm, tells us that money and technology have become our “dominant models” for security and liveliness, and have created a false sense of human power. Societal authorities told us that we could control technology, but of course many of us feel enslaved by it. Furthermore, this focus on the power of technology and money, Hyde points out, “has become so inflated as to impoverish other forms of power. . . . A civilization based on [technology and money] puts people out of touch with their creative powers.”

The pain of a dehumanizing civilization........

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