Why haven’t the mental health establishment (psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors) posited that all human beings are mentally ill, and, as such, need healing? I think that many of them have secretly done so but are afraid of saying it out loud and instead concern themselves with talking about the few people whose symptoms of mental disorders are so overt that most people around them can see them and since such persons are generally socially powerless it is easy to talk about their mental disorders and get away with it.
The fact of the matter is that the so-called normal person is as mentally ill as the so-called mentally ill; consider that the so-called normal people maintain powerful militaries with the sole purpose of using them to kill other human beings and the most adept at killing people are promoted to the level of generals and rewarded by society with honors and prestige. Only sick creatures train their young people to go kill and get killed just so they feel important and powerful and or acquire territory; in truth, all the lands of this world belong to all of us; birds fly to wherever they want to go and do not recognize our borders; borders are used by rulers to keep other people out and control those within their boundaries.
Mental illness is on a spectrum, some more overt and we talk about them and those who are suffering from the same mental disorders but in a masked manner we ignore and pretend that they are mentally healthy.
Talking about mental health, why is it that mental health professionals refuse to define what constitutes mental health? Why do they talk about mental disorders and not talk about mental health?
Mental disorders are deviations from mental health and if so, we ought to know what that mental health is.
Alfred Adler, I believe, was probably the greatest mental health professional but his ideas seemed so simple that the sophisticated people of this world could not use them to deal with the so-called mentally ill; instead, they kept grasping at straws, such as Sigmund’s Freud’s ideas on mental illness, none of which is proved as true. Freud’s ideas seem mystical hence their appeal.
Freud posited Id, Ego, and Superego. Where are those in our brains and minds? They are inferred and cannot be demonstrated as real.
People seek sex and some people are aggressive, so Freud calls those Id instinctual drives; society has laws, rules, mores, and norms that people living in it must obey for them to get along with each other and we try to get all children socialized to embrace those norms and Freud says that each child has a Superego, a compendium of society’s rules he internalized and are now in his mind checking his instinctual behaviors; Freud posited a third part of the mind, the ego that acts as a kind of referee making sure that the individual obeys the rules of society and tries to gratify his Id instincts in a socially appropriate manner (such as limiting his sexuality to wife/husband, and where those are not available, to prostitutes, such as militaries having brothels for soldiers to go release their sexual energies), and channeling their aggressive energy to sports, military and other arenas where attacking, harming, and killing people is socially accepted.
Where the three so-called forces are balanced, Freud says that the individual is normal but if there is misbalance he says that he is neurotic and encourages him to go visit psychoanalysts who analyze him.
The patient lies on the analyst’s couch and is encouraged to say whatever comes to his mind (this is called free association) and not check what he says with reason and social norms, to not block out any thought that enters his mind, regardless of how society sees it. The idea is that what he repressed into his unconscious mind would come tumbling out.
If he/she had wished to have sex with his mother, father, or sister, he says it if it comes to his mind and the analyst helps him deal with the issues and redirects his feelings to socially appropriate avenues.
Patients go to analysts, engage in transference relationships with them, and free associate without blocking what comes to their minds (Catharsis, and dreg from their unconscious minds to their conscious minds). What was repressed in the unconscious mind is brought out and examined; this is psychoanalytic therapy.
But does this help heal the people? Not one person has been healed by this Freudian razmataz. Yet people go to these people and spend up to five hundred dollars an hour to be analyzed. This is a psychological chick that makes neurotics behave like parrots and talk about their issues without really healing them.
ADLER’S INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY
Alfred Adler, building on his sense of inferiority, derived from his sensitive body and inability to do well in boys’ vigorous physical exercises, and intimidation by the physically stronger boys, posited that human beings initially reacted to their impersonal environment, physical and social, with a sense of inferiority.
To accept inferiority is to give in to defeat and not do what one must do to survive so the child denies his inferiority vis a vis nature and society and compensates with a drive to seem powerful, important, significant, and worthwhile. This reaction to existential issues is done from the moment of his conception, in the womb, and continues after his birth, and by age six is evident in each child.
By age six, the child’s personality, self-concept, and self-image are perceivable. Each child uses his biological constitution and social experience to form his sense of self. The human self is a mental and social construct, it is formulated in this world and learned, it is not inherent, not given to him by some unknown God.
The so-called normal child desires power but is not conscious of it, whereas, in the neurotic child, the sensitive child that sense of inferiority and desire for power is conscious in his mind.
The neurotic child consciously feels inferior and consciously strives to seem powerful, important, and superior to all other children and later as an adult to all other adults. He has an either-or approach to people, to be the best, superior, or else he feels like he is nothing important, it is either he is first in his class, or he feels like a total failure and may drop out of school; he desires to be the best in whatever he is doing or he has an impulse to withdraw from it.
If he develops social avoidance, in withdrawal from other people he still fancies himself superior to them except that now he does not have to prove it in the competitive world, as normal kids and people do; he merely assumes his superiority.
He tells himself and other people lies about his superiority and if he is not believed or challenged, he feels angry.
Much of anger is rooted in other people’s lack of acknowledgment of one’s desired sense of superiority and imaginary worth. The neurotic flies into a rage when he feels belittled by other people and when his vanity is pricked; he talks rapidly (if passive type) or fights (if active type) to demonstrate his desired superiority.
Karen Horney and other psychoanalysts added to basic Adlerian psychology by saying that sociological factors play a role in the etiology of neurosis. If parents and what Harry Stark Sulivan calls the child’s significant others (parents, siblings, peers, teachers) expect the child to be successful at play and school before they accept him, the child feels fear of failing in those arenas and struggles to succeed. He may use his imagination to create a false ideal self and strive to become him. He fears not becoming his ideal, perfect self. His life is riddled with free-floating anxiety at all times because in every situation he fears failing and his body pours out those neurochemicals associated with anxiety (adrenalin etc.); he is stimulated by the ever-present fear of failing and has anger at whoever he believes made him fail (anger at those who do not recognize his great self).
Let us see how Adler and Horny’s categories can help us understand most mental disorders.
FEAR, ANXIETY, ANGER, PARANOIA, MANIA, AND OTHER MENTAL DISORDERS CAN BE EXPLAINED BY DESIRE FOR POWER AND INNER SENSE OF POWERLESSNESS
People who are inordinately fearful and have anxiety issues generally have a big self-concept and self-image and are afraid that they would not be able to gratify those grandiose self-concepts; the big self-concept and self-image feel fear and anxiety. Anxiety and fear are now used to alert such people when their grandiose selves may not be satisfied; to avoid failing they avoid situations where they are likely to fail hence feeling anxious.
People with big self-concepts and self-images are most likely to feel their grandiose self-concepts not recognized by other people and feel anger at them, attack them, or yell at them for belittling their desired self-concepts; much anger is a response to perceived or anticipated lack of recognition of one’s big self.
Paranoid people generally seek to seem immensely powerful, important, and significant and feel that someone is detracting from their desired worth. Racist American whites, for example, would like to feel important and come to believe that nonwhites detract from their importance, take their jobs, etc., and feel angry at them, attack them, and want to keep them out and in doing so retain their desired sense of power; members of the Republican party increasingly show paranoid traits towards nonmembers.
Deluded people feel inferior and weak and use their minds to construct ideal, powerful, and superior selves and pretend to be those who they are not. These people’s lives are geared to pretend to be important, worthwhile, significant, and powerful. They function as if they are superior people (as Adler pointed out).
There are six types of delusion disorders: grandiose, persecutory, jealousy, erotomaniac, somatic, and mixed.
In the grandiose type, the person feels falsely important and powerful and wants all people to see him or her as such and feels angry when not worshiped as God.
In the persecutory type, the important self feels detracted from, feels that other people are out attacking and destroying it, and defends itself.
In the jealous type, the man or woman feels that their important self is betrayed by unfaithful partners and feels angry at him/her and attacks her physically or verbally.
In the somatic type, the person feels that there is something sick with a part of her body and complains to doctors whose medical technology may not find it.
In the erotomaniac type, a woman/man who feels undesirable feels that the most desirable male/female desires her, or a man who feels not good enough feels that famous actresses are in love with him and stalks them.
In the mixed type, the person has a mixture of two or more of the five types.
People with mania tend to seek grandiose selves and use their thinking to speed up their somatic processes to the point where they become euphoric and excited in their talking and activities geared towards attaining the impossible goals that make them seem powerful; they show delusion disorder.
Depressed people tend to feel unimportant and inferior and seek importance, hence they end up alternating between periods of mania when they feel fantastically important and powerful and periods when they feel like nothing, unimportant.
Schizophrenia seems to be caused by biological factors. I have observed them at psychiatric hospitals, community clinics, and outside clinical settings and they simply have symptoms that their thinking and desires may have nothing to do with them. They suddenly begin hearing voices or seeing things or feeling like things are crawling on their bodies or smelling things, that other people do not smell and so on.
Schizophrenia is a medical disease and needs medication to heal it, but the other functional mental disorders seem induced by thinking. This is not to say that there are no biological correlations in the causation of these other mental disorders.
Anxious people, angry people, paranoid people, and manic people probably have bodies that are prone to quick elicitation of excitatory neurochemicals such as adrenalin and those make them fearful, angry manic, paranoid, and deluded.
Nevertheless, psychotherapy gets such people to stop desiring grandiose selves and accept the human condition of being not particularly important; we came from nothing during the Big Bang, and, as such, we are nothing and nothing can make us ever important and special. If the individual can accept his nothingness and not seek importance he tends to live in peace.
HINDUS’ TENDENCY TO DENIGRATE BLACK FOLKS IS ROOTED IN THEIR SENSE OF INFERIORITY AND COMPENSATORY SUPERIORITY
In North America, many Hindus, that is, East Indians have noticed that white folks look down on black folks and Africans. They decided to join them and currently look down on black folks.
In India, they perverted the religion they probably took from black Dravidians and used it to put themselves at the top of society, brahmins, and black folks at the bottom, untouchables.
If white America allows these sick people to continue on their need to put black people down to feel superior to some people and hope that that makes them superior people, they will destroy America and make it look like India, a place of mass poverty where only a few of the so-called Brahmin/Kshatriya, the priestly class and the administrative class, rule the people. These people are seeking existential importance at the expense of other people and must be nipped in their bud, their wings must be clipped before they destroy Western civilization with their religious bigotry.
RELIGION IS POETRY
Religion is poetry and takes snippets of information to build stories about God that no one can prove to be true or disprove.
Some Greeks, for example, posited Gnostic religion. Here, it is said that people are parts of God and rebelled against God and were chased out of heaven and they and their leader, Demiurge/Yahweh, descended to our world of darkness (from the world of light that is heaven). There are two issues here.
The Gnostics have not demonstrated the existence of God and his heaven and have not demonstrated that we did rebel against God and came to live in darkness hence the need to return to God, light. People’s behavior on earth can be explained without resorting to religion.
PEOPLE DO FEEL INFERIOR AND COMPENSATE WITH INFERIORITY FEELING
What is observable is that people on earth do feel inferior, weak, and powerless and want to seem powerful, and superior, and thereafter some of them pretend to be God-like in power, and we say that they are deluded.
We can explain mental disorders without reference to God and his heaven. If you give up your desire for power and worth and accept that you are part of life, see all people as the same, and equal, and love all people, you are healthy.
Instead of forgiving people, we must strive to correct their mistakes; forgiving racists, murderers, and thieves merely allows them to keep being antisocial, they need to change or be imprisoned. And while in prison we teach them prosocial behaviors and positively reinforce their prosocial behaviors by rewarding them with money/praises when they engage in prosocial behaviors.
THE UNIVERSE EXISTS TO MAKE PEOPLE SEEK TO SEPARATED SELF AND DEFEND IT.
The universe seems to exist to contrive for each of us to desire a self, have a self-concept, and self-image constructed with his body and social experience, and then believe that he is the self-concept, and self-image housed in the body and defend it.
Each of us desires a self and does defend that self. The self and its defense make us very unhappy and lacking in peace. As long as you believe that you are the self you see in your body, desire it, and defend it you will be prone to fear, anxiety, anger, paranoia, delusion mania, and other mental disorders.
IF YOU WANT TO BE PEACEFUL AND HAPPY LET GO OF THE SELF, DO NOT DESIRE OR DEFEND IT
Human beings desire separate self-concepts; as long as they desire the separated self and defend it, they are afraid of not being it and dying.
As Gautama Buddha pointed out, people suffer because they desire to have separate selves, self-concepts, and self-images and defend them. The moment they let go of those ego self-concepts and accept that they are just part of one unified life, that they do not understand, and do not defend it, they know peace.
Do you want to suffer? Then desire a self, big or small, and defend it and when it isn’t affirmed by other people you feel offended.
Do you want to be happy and peaceful? Then do not desire the ego-separated self, and personality and simply see yourself as part of life and flow with life, other people, and all existence do not take you seriously, in fact, do not have a you, and just be a part of life.
There is life, life is what our ancestors called God, feared him, and worshipped him. We do not have to fear him or worship him because he/it manifests in us, he/it is us; life is in us.
Life has no physical form and dimension, it is not in your body or any other forms (such as animals and trees), it just manifests in forms but is not those forms.
We can call life spiritual light provided that we do not go about worshiping spiritual light. It is formless; it is simultaneously wave and particles.
As the wave of spiritual light, we can call it God; as particles, it is each of us. The same spiritual light (wave) is itself and yet each of us (particles of it).
There is no space, time, or matter between the wave and the particles of spiritual light, God and his sons; they are one shared self with one shared mind.
They are perfect intelligence; in their formless state, they are eternal, permanent, and changeless. In their formless state, they always exist.
DISCUSSION
HAVE NO SEPARATED SELF, ACCEPT ONE UNIFIED SELF
First, we have separated selves in bodies, which seem to live in space, time, and matter; we thereafter learn that space, time, and matter are illusions that seem to exist in a dream state but in reality, do not exist.
Now, we reverse our original invention of separated selves and accept that we have no separate selves and see ourselves as parts of one formless, unified self, life. In that knowledge, we are enlightened to our true self, illuminated to the one spiritual light that formed all things in the universe.
In being egoless, having no separated selves, personalities and just flowing with one unified life we attain peace and joy.
The wise teachers of humankind, such as Krishna, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus Christ, and others teach one lesson and one lesson only: they teach that there is only one force, in anthropomorphic terms, one God; we are all parts of him, are his sons; we seem to now have separated selves in bodies and live in separated selves in bodies on earth; when we let go of our desire for separated self and live as one unified self we return to the awareness of our true self.
That true self is love. Love is what unifies all the seemingly separated selves in all of us, animals and plants, into one life.
Employing the Christian metaphor of death and resurrection, when we die to the desire for a separate self and not defend a separated self, we resurrect to the awareness of a formless unified self (which is spiritual light) and in it live as one shared spiritual light and know eternity and joy.
CONCLUSION
You can read all the great psychologists, such as Freud, Adler, Jung, Fromm, Horney, R.D Laing, B.F Skinner, Bandura, Harry Harlow, Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo, Pavlov, and even the great philosophers of the West and the East and not know peace.
Human suffering lies in our desire to have separate selves housed in bodies, and self-concepts that we individually made, with the help of those around us, and then we believe that they are who we are and defend them as if our lives depend on them.
As long as you desire a separated self and defend it, as you see it in your body, you will suffer; to stop your suffering, as the old Sage, Buddha said, you have to give up your desire for a separated self, and as Jesus Christ said, you must die to your old self and be reborn in a new self, a Christ self, a self that sees itself as a son of God who is the same and equal to all other sons of God, all of them parts of God’s one family.
The self you currently see as yourself is a chimera, an illusion, a dream figure in our collective dream called the physical universe of space, time, and matter. You have to awaken from the dream to know your real self.
Your real self is a part of one unified life, aka God. When you experience one unified self, by no longer seeking and defending a separate self, you begin to live.
As long as you seek a separate self and defend it you are dead, living in prison, and the hell of your making.
You gain freedom, emancipation, and liberation from the prison of the ego, when you let go of the separated self and identify with the unified self, in Christological language, the Christ self, in Buddhist terms, the Buddha self, in Igbo terms, Chi.
Try meditation, Buddhist style. Sit quietly. Tell yourself that you are not your body, not your self-concept and self-image, not your thought; you are the thinker, and what that thinker, outside the dream self, the ego-separated self is, you currently do not know.
Make your mind a void, empty of all ego-based thinking, and stay silent. If you can keep your mind devoid of all thinking for thirty minutes, without falling asleep, you will have experiences that tell you that our earth is a mere dream. What you will experience transcends pure reason and science. It cannot be explained in language because language and speech exist to enable those in separate states to communicate with each other.
You will enter the world where formlessly infinite selves are oneself and one mind and know eternal peace and joy.
The world of oneness is beyond me or anyone else’s ability to explain it.
Ozodi Osuji January 10, 2025.