“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
Psychiatric Soteriology.—Freud famously said that the goal of psychotherapy was to liberate the patient from neurotic misery, so as to deliver them into ordinary human unhappiness. This is apt to strike the uninitiated as anticlimactic, though for anyone who has suffered from neurotic misery, being released from neurotic misery into ordinary human unhappiness is a kind of salvation. Today we are better prepared to appreciate that ordinary human unhappiness is, in fact, a golden mean—ordinary human unhappiness is the golden mean between neurotic misery and medicated bliss. Since the advent of scientific medicine, mood altering drugs have become common in ways never available throughout the greater part of human history, and, given the economic imperatives of mass medical care for mass man, it is far less expensive to distribute drugs than to provide human comfort. Our chemically-addled world is a recent phenomenon. Throughout human history, psychotropic substances have been administered in ritual contexts—as, for example, the Eleusinian Mysteries or a peyote ceremony—which meant that their use was constrained by social structures and involved in an ancient tradition. The presence of social structure and tradition limits the use and abuse of psychotropic substances, even if it does not entirely eliminate all problems associated with them. The great exception has been alcohol, and alcohol has ruined countless lives of those seeking medicated bliss as an escape from the rigors of ordinary human happiness. But now the exception is close to overtaking the rule, as drugs for every conceivable mood disorder circulate en masse, cheaply and readily available, encouraging the idea that life can be a painless affair and every twinge of discomfort removed by the appropriate medicinal cocktail. Like every failure of the golden mean, this is a moral hazard that leads to disaster.