Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

http://brucelevine.net/how-societies-with-little-coercion-have-little-mental-illness/

by cryoshon • 11 years ago

196 106 11 years ago

cryoshon2• 11 years ago

FTA: "Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far less mental illness. This reality has been buried, not surprisingly, by uncritical champions of modernity and mainstream psychiatry. Coercion—the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance—is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which are fuels for miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness."

How many great people did we lose because they weren't 'compliant' enough to conform properly? I can sure think of a few.

TeMPOraL• 11 years ago

I'd like to see some concrete evidence that people in the past did in fact had "far less mental illness", and it is not just a result of them not being diagnosed. Most of the mental illnesses we know have been defined within last 100 years. In the past they may as well have been known as anything from demonic possession, and magic, to being stupid, being a brawler or a person ill-disposed.

Secondly, I wouldn't underestimate the amount of coercion that was going on in the past. Sustenance farmers probably didn't feel much direct coercion (besides the days when the nobility showed up to collect their dues), they were just mostly scared of going hungry. But factory workers in the early Industrial Revolution? Miners before, during and after that? Militaries of various times? If coercion causes mental illness, it should be reflected in the historical records. It's probably worth checking.

crpatino• 11 years ago

I wouldn't underestimate the amount of coercion that was going on in the past.

Don't forget about the Inquisition. Most people hear that and think of the burning of witches and heretics, but that institution alone had a much wider array of non lethal punishments for all sort of behaviors considered "undesirable".

I have been in the Inquisition museum at the city of Guanajuato during the holidays, and they had a remarcable number of painful or even midly unconfortable artifacts that got used on people doing the pre-modern equivalent of littering. Victims would not face lasting harm, but the judicious infliction of pain plus public humiliation [1] was enough to keep them toeing the line more often than not.

[1] A remarkable example was a sort of iron flute. It was heavy and it had manacles for both hands and neck so that the transgressor would be forced in position as if playing it. They would attach it to the victims and send them back home for a few days to reflect on their sins, which was alteration of public order, or "wild partying".

WhatIsDukkha2• 11 years ago

It would be good to remember that he is largely drawing from hunter gatherer societies and not just "in the past" as you describe his thesis.

While valuable to look at, these agrarian and proto industrial societies also had large amounts of coercion.

As I read the other posts I see too many people wanting to T/F this thesis whereas I think it real value is as a critical tool to examine societies and the minds that have to learn to live in them.

PaulHoule3• 11 years ago

Mental illness is a complex entity. Beware of any simple "definition of insanity"

I recently discovered I have a mutation which makes my verbal intelligence too high to measure but has negative effects in other areas. Other people have similar variations.

Some kinds of mental illness such as schizophrenia seem very much to be a biological phenomenon, but stress and particularly the way stress is structured has a definite negative effect on the origin. You can become stronger and more capable in many areas by applying stress in the right way (athletic and military training, for instance), but stress without time to recover has negative effects on body and mind and certainly surplus coercion leads to surplus stress.

cryoshon2• 11 years ago

Are you talking about the Met-158 mutation? If not, which?

I agree that the real culprit is stress-- biological differences to processing and coping with stress are likely the actual mechanism at play rather than generalized "coercion" like the article suggests without providing evidence. Our society is intensely stressful, and provides no real permanent reductions in stress level.

PaulHoule3• 11 years ago

I don't have Met-158 thank god I am not like that crazy killer family from the Netherlands.

I am hetero at SNP rs1800497.

joe_the_user2• 11 years ago

Hmm,

It seems contradictory to first note problems in defining insanity and then make a claim of vast "verbal intelligence", a quality a bit further out on the fringes of psychology definition.

nommm-nommm• 11 years ago

What is "verbal intelligence" and how is it measured? Why can't yours be measured?

FreedomToCreate2• 11 years ago

The evidence he supplies doesn't actually prove the coercion is the cause. There is no scientific data presented, just speculative statistics and linkages to possible causes. The neurobiologist D.F Swaab wrote a book called "We are our brains" that talks about the issues outlined in this article and provides scientific proof to show how various illnesses like schizophrenia can come about. Many of these illnesses have biological and physical connections to be brought about in a person.

I am not advocating for coercion being a good things, but manipulating a person to do something is not the same as guiding them down a path that has been generally beneficial for the majority, like going to school.

andrei_says_3• 11 years ago

as guiding them down a path that has been generally beneficial for the majority, like going to school.

Possibly unpopular opinion: school is not negotiable for children and so there's no guiding. It's pure coercion.

Also, there's no popular alternative to school so that we can compare enough data and prove that school is beneficial. Unschooling exists and seems to healthier, efficient and beneficial compared to school but there's just not enough data.

School was a great alternative at a time when it was the only place to get information. This is no longer true.

Dylan16807• 11 years ago

Efficient?

fsloth3• 11 years ago

"Possibly unpopular opinion: school is not negotiable for children and so there's no guiding. It's pure coercion."

There are lot's of things which are non-negotiable for children. Things like brushing teeth, going to bed and washing hands after toilet. All of which have some intrinsic value beyond tradition.

Coercion is the action or practice of persuading someone to do something by using force or threats.. There are other means of guiding children to do something. These include gentle reminders, routines and and just agreement.

And, yes, coercion as well, when all other things fail. Hopefully not that much.

If a child goes routinely to school I would not call this an action under coercion, unless the child has learned e.g. that he needs to go to school so he does not turn into a destitute when he grows up.

"School was a great alternative at a time when it was the only place to get information. This is no longer true."

I don't think there ever was time when "school was the only place to get information". I would claim this is location based (if true even then). I.e. rural villages with low rate of literacy vs. a literate society with access to books.

Or, in pre-literate societies, just having access to a sufficient number of people would probably provide a venue for some information access.

Besides, providing information is not the only function a school has. My kid internalizes all math he is taught immediately and combines all new facts he learns into a logically cohesive model of the world which he has structured in his head.

However, he does need to learn how to live in a society and how to work with other people and school provides a good place for that.

dsfsdfd2• 11 years ago

I tentatively agree with you. Although I am a parent and my child will be going to school - I do feel that the rail road that takes you from childhood to productive adult under the tutelage of the state is fundamentally a coercive one. It indoctrinates children to accept authority unconditionally and sets them up to be good little employees when they grow older - accepting the authority of their superiors without question. But this is the reality of the world we live in, change will be slow and at the end of the day we are all beholden to something, our existence as physical entities makes us subject to the laws of the universe. We all must eat, until we have a choice about this, we are merely choosing our master.

MrTonyD3• 11 years ago

But we have constructed our economy in such a way that school is required in order to be successful. So, for many of us, the very fact that education is required to be one of the "winners" is coercive.

Aeolun• 11 years ago

Not very surprising that some form of education makes you more likely to be successful, but does it necessarily have to be the institutional form of school?

petra2• 11 years ago

I agree the evidence do not strictly prove that , but at least, in general , from all we know about indigenous populations , we have good evidence on how one type of society that's conductive to mental health should roughly look like.

And yes, even if mental illness is rooted in biology , we know that some environments cause it to manifest and some environments don't , and since we cannot change biology (and drugs are a very poor solution to such problems ) this means , at least that a big part of the solution is environmental change.

tunesmith3• 11 years ago

Coercion and compliance are basically high-signal low-content terms. It's sort of dose-makes-the-poison in that you can't reasonably compare something like taxation (which is often described as coercion) to something like forced medication.

pasquinelli• 11 years ago

what do you mean by high-signal and low-content? i don't know about signal and content, but typically the word coercion is used to refer to forcing people to do something using violence and the threat of violence.

Avshalom• 11 years ago

And you would think "forcing", "violence" and "the threat of violence" would all be clear. Right up until some one comes along and asserts that it's impossible to force people to do things because they can always choose to die instead. Or some one defines violence as "anything done to me specifically that I don't like at the moment for rhetorical purposes"

tunesmith3• 11 years ago

high-signal low-content... for example, if you say a term like "gun control" to a collection of people, and every person in the group has a clear idea of what it means, and yet the definition might be different for every person. So, the content of the term has low meaning overall, while as a signal it evokes a strong response.

onetwotree• 11 years ago

Stress and alienation/isolation have been directly implicated in depression, anxiety disorders, and addiction.

Perhaps these sometimes result from what might be described as coercion, but I think that to characterize, for example, the problem of parents who physically abuse their children as one of coercion misses the point. Coercion is a catch all, and in many cases coercion does not result in stress, trauma, etc.

That and holy shit, when did basing arguments on the notion of the noble savage come back in style?

jerf• 11 years ago

"when did basing arguments on the notion of the noble savage come back in style?"

When did it leave?

Animats• 11 years ago

It left when more people started traveling and meeting other cultures.

butterfinger3• 11 years ago

Another point that this article does not discuss is that in many of the "less coercive" societies, schizophrenia or related diseases are not seen as a disease or problematic at all.

McKenna writes: "A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. You are told: “You are special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society. You will cure. You will prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.”" [0]

[0] http://www.scribd.com/doc/12470230/Eros-and-the-Eschaton-rou...

jessriedel• 11 years ago

I'm willing to bet that the welfare of the average schizophrenic is quite poor essentially everywhere in the world, a handful of tribes supporting them for myth-related reasons notwithstanding.

sillysaurus3• 11 years ago

While this may be true, hearing that you're useful is important.

As someone that society has basically forgotten about, realizing that I won't be useful has recently crushed me.

I would not presume to speak for schizophrenics. My quirks are bad, but not that. But the welfare of a person is greatly improved by the feeling that they'll be useful.

Deluding yourself into thinking you're useful is much easier when there aren't external forces making it entirely clear that this is false. I can see that in a society without too much coercion, people with problems would be much happier simply because they aren't called out to prove themselves on a daily basis.

I say "called out" rather than "asked," because it fits much better. The feeling that you have to do something very important is so pervasive. If you're not doing that, then what are you doing?

Which is why it feels like you're called out to prove you're useful, rather than requested.

I hypothesize that in a society that doesn't do that, schizophrenics' welfare would be much improved.

Alex3917• 11 years ago

I'm willing to bet that the welfare of the average schizophrenic is quite poor essentially everywhere in the world

Actually schizophrenics in the developing world do significantly better than those in the US. That said, McKenna's models of shamanism weren't actually valid across cultures -- shamans actually played completely different roles in different societies.

astazangasta2• 11 years ago

You lose your bet. Outcomes for schizophrenia (recovery) are substantially better in developing countries compared to developed ones, sometimes called the WHO paradox. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26640277

krapp6• 11 years ago

In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans.

This is a form of coercion in and of itself. And as there's no such thing as prophecy, or magical cures, it turns out to be a profoundly unhelpful kind of coercion, both for the "shaman" and the society in general.

aranazo• 11 years ago

...as there's no such thing as prophecy, or magical cures...

Isn't that quite a strong claim?

hderms• 11 years ago

Yeah, but what if it was substituted with art, or something similar. It's possible to produce a society which values mentally ill people without necessarily coercing them.

butterfinger3• 11 years ago

But is it any more coercive than putting those kids into psychiatric care and putting them on drugs that just make them not feel anything anymore?

I'm schizotypal myself and I can say those methods of coping with this have not helped me at all. By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind. I think that having a centuries old tradition of identifying and using these thoughts would have helped me better than talking to psychiatrists that don't have the slightest clue about what goes on in my mind.

zappo2938• 11 years ago

This is the same with children who are ADHD. Also, in France children who had symptoms of ADHD and were disruptive were made apprentices in kitchens usually around the age of 14 or 15. This might have changed in the last 20 years. It's why a lot of French chefs are notoriously psychotic, many of them were troubled children given a chance to put their energy to good use in a kitchen. [citation needed]

api2• 11 years ago

I love McKenna's raps but I really disagree with him here. I doubt he had much experience with actual schizophrenia, which is horrific and debilitating, and I doubt shamans present or past actually had it. Psychedelic drugs induce a superficially schizophrenia-like state but it's transient and may not actually be much like schizophrenia at all. Visionary, trance, and highly imaginative states are not schizophrenia or even indicative of mental illness.

Real schizophrenia is a hell of paranoia and anxiety and I doubt anyone with a severe case could heal or make art or any of the other things a traditional shaman might do.

dikdik• 11 years ago

There's some really interesting research out there on schizophrenia.

"Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful." http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/voices-culture-luhrm...

benbreen• 11 years ago

Agreed completely. I was sympathetic to arguments like his right up until the time when my brother began acting weird and fell into a downward spiral that ultimately led to a schizophrenia diagnosis. What really sticks out to me is the brain damage-like effects of the disease - not just paranoia and delusions but a total breakdown in verbal and reasoning abilities. What my brother suffers from really is more comparable to Alzheimers or even forms of brain damage or post-stroke states than other mental illnesses I've encountered - it's not so much a visionary state as it is a crippling disability. Really grim stuff, and I suspect that many people who glamorize it don't have firsthand experience with the destruction it can cause.

To end with a somewhat more positive note, the late Oliver Sacks has written beautifully and with great sympathy and humanity about his brother's battle with schizophrenia - I think it's mainly in his "chemical memoir" Uncle Tungsten. I've often wished that he wrote a whole book on the subject but I guess it hit a little too close to home for him.

mtdewcmu• 11 years ago

It's doubtful that schizophrenia is all nurture, but it seems conceivable that coercive circumstances could aggravate a case of schizophrenia, taking a subclinical case and making it floridly symptomatic. Coercion could possibly tip the scales into psychosis.

hoorayimhelping• 11 years ago

I doubt anyone with a severe case could heal or make art

Makes me think of Wesley Willis [1] who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and found the only way he could manage it was by making music. Just such a sad and shitty disease.

1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Willis

DanBC2• 11 years ago

and I doubt anyone with a severe case could heal or make art

...or create an OS?

threatofrain• 11 years ago

I'd say that firstly, these are anthropological case studies without much quantification; there can't be. It's meant to provide rich account or potential insight, and that's how it's taken.

Secondly, I think the general professional narrative about those accounts is that those shamans were schizotypal, and that severe marginalization of the schizophrenic population is a cross-cultural phenomena.

Every culture has its idea of what is acceptable, including what's acceptable magical or religious thinking (we don't think that Christians who pray to Jesus for cancer relief, whether effective or not, are schizophrenic). But if you step outside of those realms, you will be mistreated. If you tell Christians that you have a personal relationship with Jesus, they'll think that's normal. If you tell them that you actually hear the voice of Jesus, they'll be conspiculously polite but suspicious.

zwischenzug• 11 years ago

A great book to read in this context:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Sleep-There-are-Snakes/dp/18466...

or indeed, any context. It's a fabulous book about the good and bad in societies untouched by civilization, and about one man's attempts to understand a language with no reference points. And his struggle with his Christian mission, ending up in his atheism. It's got everything, and would make a great film.

aarpmcgee• 11 years ago

Terrific book. Was mind expanding for me.

gooftop• 11 years ago

Not clear to me if the article implies that totalitarian societies have more coercion - but if it does, should a country like China have more mental illness? I don't know if thats the case, at least in percentage of entire population. What does that mean for the central hypothesis of the article and its validity?

WhatIsDukkha2• 11 years ago

China is an interesting case of thousands of years of relatively modern social order with high coercion in many ways.

However, it's also a society that maintained high levels of family and clan based organization which counterbalance the atomization and individuality that you see in modern "Washington Consensus" societies.

I highly recommend "The Search for Modern China" if you are truly interested in thinking about these things in context. It's very pleasing and readable.

Modern China isn't as straightforwardly authoritarian as you might want to compare against.

North Korea might be a better choice.

Kinnard• 11 years ago

I imagine its hard to get good data on mental illness let alone a good definition of what "mental illness" is across societies. Is homosexuality still considered a mental illness in most of the world?

DanBC2• 11 years ago

Homosexuality was listed in ICD 9 and earlier. ICD 9 was created in about 1975 - 1978.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Statistical_Clas...

Homosexuality was removed from ICD 10. ICD 10 was created in about 1983 - 1990

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Statistical_Clas...

Individual countries may be using their own definitions. EG US uses DSM.

DSM included homosexuality in the first version published in about 1952, but it was scrutinised early and homosexuality was removed from DSM in 1973.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality#Psychology

Things like conversion therapy have been weirdly hard to stop, even with clear advice from professional bodies and regulators that it's probably harmful and has no evidence of efficacy or usefulness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_therapy

rrggrr• 11 years ago

Identity is harder to come by in today's society than in the forests of New Guinea or in our own recent history. At the same time diagnosis of mental illness is easy to come by, as is anxiety provoking news media, and identity models of narcissistic, sociopathic and borderline celebrity personalities. Our young people, identities still forming, have many traps in which they can fall and most are alone with their thoughts. I think the author's hypothesis is the polar opposite of what is actually occurring... we've given our young people too little structure and not enough direction.

vannevar• 11 years ago

The societies described in the article have many dissimilarities with modern Western civilization. Why attribute the level of mental illness (a somewhat difficult thing to measure in a primitive society) to the "level of coercion" (an extremely difficult thing to measure in any society)? Why not correlate it with the number of cars, or the number of zoos, or the average diet? Such cherrypicking is generally a strong indicator of a pre-existing bias.

Jupe• 11 years ago

I think the author jumps to some conclusions here - not sure what is cause and effect.

Is it possible that people stricken by serious mental illness in these societies simply die? I have some experience with mental illness and I can see how someone 'out of their mind' could easily die young when exposed to the elements.

I don't have direct evidence, but I believe the mortality rate in rural / isolated societies is higher than in more cultivated societies.

altonzheng• 11 years ago

The author makes a good point about re-examining our approach to treating mental illness. I think the viewpoint that "Big Pharma" has psychiatrists in their hands is a bit too conspiracy-ist for me. What's really happening is mental healthcare is being excessively quantized and dehumanized. We're too concerned with the symptoms and we have studies that lump a variety of people under the ridiculously general label: 'depression'.

We're going too fast, the brain and human spirit is hopelessly complex, and it takes a holistic, humanistic treatment that doesn't reduce the patient to a set of symptoms to make a change. A book I recommend concerning this is "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" by neurologist Oliver Sacks.

backtoyoujim• 11 years ago

I'd rather be smashing imperialism

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ed-stamm-and-others-c...

_yosefk• 11 years ago

You said it, man! Nothing is more fun than smashing imperialism. I think I'll close the tab and go smash me some right now.

jmnicolas• 11 years ago

For all we know it could be as well the food : there's a lot of people that believes that highly processed food is toxic for the organism and is the source of most of our ailments.

They're generally heavy on beliefs and light on science, but empirical evidence suggest that they might be right.

eneifert• 11 years ago

With response to "The 1916 book The Institutional Care of the Insane of the United States and Canada reports" paragraph. Schizophrenia is by no means easy to diagnose and there is a lot of debate over when someone is or isn't Schizophrenic. I have known two people (one a family member) that some would call Schizophrenic and after many years I'm still not sure if that is a fair diagnosis or not. I think it might be a bit much to expect a society with little social expectations to evaluate this well.

In our society we suspect people to have mental illnesses but it takes years to get a good diagnoses and sometimes they never get a clear one.

rogeryu• 11 years ago

A while ago I read that societies around the equator have almost no schizophrenia. This was linked to vitamin D or UV-B, which we lack in the western world.

SCAQTony• 11 years ago

The article was a bold, confident, hypothesis with possibly cherrypicked examples rather than a serious study. YMMV

astazangasta2• 11 years ago

On the subject of schizophrenia, the most interesting and insightful thinker I have read is John Weir Perry: http://global-vision.org/papers/JWP.pdf His notion is that schizophrenia is a normal process to reorder the mind to heal from severe psychic trauma, which neuroleptics interrupt and prolong.

dawnbreez• 11 years ago

Define "coercion".

Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

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