It seems to some that newer mental and emotional illnesses are modern inventions – conditions that didn’t exist before psychiatrists named them. Bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, ADHD, social anxiety disorder, etc. Many people, opposed to modern psychiatry (many for good reason: it is, after all, as much an art as it is a science) consider these conditions and their treatments fictions – based on the presumption that human experience has not changed all that much in the last hundred or so years.

I posit, however, that human experience has changed substantially in the last fifty years, and because of that we have new illnesses, new failures to cope with complex modernity, that have arisen in the face of changed human experience. The modern era offers a multiplicity of choice so numerous as to exceed exponentially the imaginations of our forebearers. A night’s television, for example, offers some fifty or so advertisements for products fulfilling wants and needs, most of which are wants and needs created by conditions in our industrial age. (Panty hose, fabric softener, and Windows Vista are not needs our ancestors would’ve asked to have filled.) Moreover, that same night of television proposes to viewers different lifestyles that condition the viewers’ imaginations, and so condition the viewers’ abilities to imagine alternatives for their lives. This defines their desires.

I wonder if we have more desires than our ancestors, and more complicated desires at that? I wonder if that multiplicity of longing, defined by so many choices and suggestions, hightens our sense of emptiness and failure should those desires go too long unfulfilled? If the Buddhists are right, samsara – human desires – is what creates human suffering, and we live in an era when samsara is king almost by default.

Can’t modernly-named mental and emotional illnesses be genuine, then, new conditions that arise in the face of newly defined human experience? Can’t the abundance of choice clog our abilities to self-actualize, and wouldn’t it stand to reason that some individuals are less able to cope with so much multiplicity than others? Maybe those individuals are susceptible to malfunctions in the face of so much choice? Is it possible that’s what’s at the heart of these new illnesses?

theory /2007-05-02 by brandon e. heckman/

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