Commentary on the tragedy of the day: the massacre in Arizona

I’ve borrowed this article from a political website that I think nails the issue of mental illness as it’s being discussed in the media on the head. We are dealing with a serious social issue not just a single isolated “mad man.”

After an introduction on the website Paul Woodward excerpts from a Salon article in which the author there makes some generalizations about mental illness which, lets say, lack depth. He follows with the excerpt I print below.

From: The pitfalls of generalizing from the particular — what Jared Lee Loughner does and doesn’t tell us about the state of America via the website War in Context.

The willingness of a journalist to glibly write that mental illness “turns beautiful minds into nonsense factories,” says less about the nature of mental illness than it says about the degree to which introspective reflection is undervalued in the contemporary world, fixated as we are on the stuff around us at the expense of our interior life.

It’s easy to marginalize the mentally ill by regarding them as people with broken minds filled with nonsense, but that neither advances a wider understanding of mental illness as it exists within the wild territory of human experience, nor addresses the need to bridge a divide between the mentally ill and the society in which they lack support.

Alienation — which can be described as the feeling of not being heard and of becoming socially invisible — is not a marginal dimension of modern life. On the contrary, the quest for identity in a world where electronic connections increasingly serve as substitutes for physical relationships, is an expression of the degree to which alienation has become so ordinary, universal and normal, that it is also now regarded as natural and thus unworthy of being named.

Mental illness exists on the continuum of alienation and although most people’s experience might not extend so far out on that continuum, those who regard themselves as mentally healthy derive a false comfort in imagining that the Loughners in our world merely reveal the distortions of their own troubled minds and nothing about the world they struggle to inhabit. (read whole article here)