The Psychedelic Savior Part I: Why Mental Health Has Gone Mental

Here I am an adult – and I’ve been one for what seems like ages now – and I’m still grappling with the same old issues, whether that’s depression, anxiety, stuck thinking, or having one drink too many when I know I shouldn’t. You have to wonder: Isn’t there a point where you put the past behind you and just get on with it?

 For all our boot-strapping self-advice, the turmoil that so often follows us out from childhood does have a habit of sticking around. Our moods and our obsessions come from a place that is deep inside us, are intimately part of us, and yet – strangely and annoyingly – can’t be directly touched by us. You can try saying, “stop it” to a difficult mood, but it doesn’t seem to think you are its commanding officer. The whole thing is quite weird.

 The problem with the problem is that we are looking at it the wrong way. Just as a for instance, next time you are on the bus, in the store, or wherever, take a critical look at the people around you. Does anyone glow with the radiance of living that wonderful depression-free life you believe you are missing out on? Do any of us have the air of true freedom about us? In fact, we all seem to be very much in the same soup together. The issue of my mood, my stuckness, my dumb compulsions is intimately part of a collective cloud cover over the whole culture that we live in, it’s not just me. My personal problems may be a lot more communal, than I think.

Think of a culture as its own entity, just as you think of a person or an animal as one being rather than billions of disparate cells cobbled together. In the case of a culture the cells are individual people, and if the larger organism gets sick all the individual cells within it will be affected, even though they might not see that and wonder what is the matter with me, why aren’t I functioning so well? Our strivings to get better can only happen within the constraints of the being of which each one of us is a tiny part. If the whole economy tanks I’m probably not going to make my fortune; if my country declares war it might be my house that gets burned down, and if my culture falls short of being joyous, creative and open minded, I won’t go unscathed.

 But when it comes to mental health, we don’t see this part of things. The government puts out information about depression rates, substance use levels how high they are and so on, but we take no collective steps towards the big picture aspects of the problem. Individual sufferers are told about their genetic flaws, chemical imbalances in their brains (which is a debunked theory), and their patterns of erroneous thinking. What doesn’t get a mention are the structural causes behind our despair, the travails of a hierarchical and empire-driven culture beset with racism, sexism, patriarchy and exploitation of all involved. Life is artificial, communal relationships break down, but it is the single “cell” of the individual person that gets the diagnosis while the body politic gets the free pass.  

The fall-out from this is summed up in the title of James Hillman’s 1992 book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. For all our new therapeutic drugs and many new psychological modalities, people are just as depressed, despairing, anxious and crazy as ever, and let’s just say the world has not been bathed in sunshine since Hillman’s book came out. Would it be unfair to measure the success of a healthcare industry by how much the diseases are being reduced? That’s how we rate cancer and diabetes, so why do we think of mental health so very differently.

Why is the big picture aspect of the conundrum of human healing passed over so consistently? I believe it’s a fox guarding the henhouse situation where the system that created the hamster wheel of modern life is the same one that is charged with fixing the little hamsters that freak out or drop from exhaustion. It’s so much easier to find defects in the hamster than in the wheel, and then fix up the hamster so it can start running again. The status quo remains unharmed.

 If someone goes to a mental health clinic the treatment will begin with a diagnostic code and go on to compliance with paperwork regulations, negotiations with the insurance company, discussions about what drugs they might be given, and eventually a discharge plan that will spit them back out through the revolving door. Who is the consumer here, the customer who clicks their way in and out of the entrance, or the institution that consumes clients as its meat and drink? The bottom line is that you can’t ask the sickness to make you well.

 And that is where we stand as psychedelics re-enter our culture. For the mental health industry psychedelics are the latest greatest magic bullet, and they will keep psychiatrists, pharmacists and regulators busy for years — not to mention venture capitalists. But the real promise of psychedelics lies somewhere totally different. They could revive us out of our spiritual and ethical torpor and spark a self-help practice for the culture, not just for individuals. The diagnosis for the culture is arrested spiritual/emotional growth, and we are all suffering from it/because of it. The primary marker of this is our worsening relationship with the divine and with our own imaginations, and it turns out that the strong suit of the psychedelics experience is exactly these two things –access to the divine and access to the imagination.

 When Aldous Huxley brought psychedelics to popular notice in the 1950s, he named his book The Doors of Perception. His inspiration was from William Blake’s famous quote that “if the doors of perception can be cleansed, we shall see everything as it is – infinite.” These words catch the state of the human imagination as it is today – well, 1790 actually – where our sense of the infinite is quite divorced from the experience of daily life.

 Blake completed his thought with, “For man has closed himself up, till he sees only thro’ the narrow chinks of his cavern.” If we agree that is the predicament, it doesn’t help much when the most we do is make our individual depressions or anxieties bearable enough to get back on the hamster wheel. In our own individual way we need to be working to get a little more light into humanity’s cavern, and psychedelics may be just the right chisel to carve a few holes in it. But the escape into sunshine won’t happen by magic, and psychedelics could be just as easily used to keep the hamster wheel paradigm in place as they could to be a tool for transforming humanity, the organism of who we all are.