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De-modernizing mental health: towards a

‘new’ philosophy.
James Barnes, MSc., MA

Introduction
The cultural organism we identify as “The West” has a funny habit, by and large, of believing
that what it thinks is correct just is correct, even though that is what people have always thought
in each of its cultural ages, and even though we can deduce that it is not true because if it were
true then ‘progress’ would have ended. Whereas we find reward in saying that in this or that
century people simply ‘didn’t know’ and laugh at their explanations of things — “how silly!” we
will say — we don’t then generally apply it to ourselves, to our time, and to our current
explanations. This is especially ironic because the doctrine of the straight arrow of time and the
ascending staircase of evolution is at the very soul of the West’s self-concept. But we are of
course and by necessity also in an age to be ‘superseded’ by another that will then have the same
relationship to our age as we do to ages past, and this ignorance of the ages is as relevant to the
current explanation of madness as any other.
I suggest, then, that the core modern ideas and theories of mental experience and its phenomena
through which we try to explain ‘mental disorder’ — most influentially: that we are really only
our behaviors; that we are really only configurations of rational thought-things and feeling-things
located inside of us somehow; or that we are really only the synaptic firings and patterning of our
brains —will too be seen as quaint, amusing and a case of “how could we have been that silly!”
in the hopefully not too distant future. When I say this, I do not mean these theories and
approaches per se will be deemed silly. Clearly, they are extremely valuable as parts of any
explanation of our experience. What is and will be seen as silly is the fact of them having been
generalized as total explanations of mental experience.
The reason why such explanations will be found to be such — apart from it being a fact of
repeated history, that is — is that when they are generalized, such claims are not resting on the
weight of any discovery, nor evidenced by any truths that make them function. Rather, when we
move to such talk we are moving into an abstract, philosophical domain. It is a philosophical
statement to say that mental experience is an irrelevancy and only the externality of our actions
have any causal importance (behaviorism); that minds just are, in whatever way, data-network
processing and processes of the brain (cognitive science); or that mental experience is the electric
play of neural synapses and therefore to be done away with and reduced to the brains code once
it is finally revealed. There is a move from the justified conclusion, “this tell us something
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interesting about mental experience” to the unjustified conclusion, “this is telling us what mental
experience is.”
It is the '‘is’ here and not the ‘tells us something’ that is the issue, and so I am also going to stick
my neck out and say that it is the modernist philosophy — which seeks and demands the finality
of the “really, only” and audaciously asserts it in their name— underlaying these positions that is
the problem awaiting re-vison. It is this ‘is’-ing that has become unsustainable, that is in
immediate need of drastic overhaul, and that is chiefly behind many of ills and injustices that we
find when it is applied to mental experience and its ‘disorder.’

The modernist philosophy is the problem

These theories of mental life, in other words, are not isolated, stand-alone positions that, it just so
happens, all believe they have found the unique, total truth. It is the spirit of this philosophy that
ontologizes a priori the abstract presumptions of the scientific method and unquestioningly
asserts that reality perfectly accord and resonate with the (mental) parameters of logic and
reason. It is the philosophy of modernism that desires a “theory of everything,” seeing no other
possibility than the entirety of existence fit into a single rational, logical scheme. And it is this
spirit, and really only this spirit, that dictates that anomalies are to be disregarded, noise is to be
‘filtered out’, side-effects are to be regarded as incidental, and fantasies are to be resolved into
objective, rational truth. This is what Isiah Berlin calls “philosophical monism,” and what is
specifically called ‘positivism’ in the philosophy of science, and it is this, I argue, that we must
take aim at if we are fed up with reductionistic psychology and its illegitimate and often
damaging practical applications — not any of its progeny.
Fundamentally, the modernist philosophy, as I am calling it, depends on reality objectively being
a ‘simple’ conglomerate of enduring entities with inherent self-same qualities, which is to say, of
discrete things with their own specific nature that cannot be accounted for also in terms of the
specific nature of any other thing. In other words, this philosophy understands a things relation to
others things as being external only; its ‘internal’ qualities are not considered to be constituted
by or depend on its relations to other things. While this is complicated (in fact, fundamentally
challenged) by the reality of the quantum realm, this basic commitment is never really
questioned, nor are its exceptions coherently explained within the framework — I should say,
‘yet.’
The problem is that this is almost exactly what mental experience and its phenomena are not.
And not only has this been evidenced by repeated clinical experience over the past 100 or so
years, one might also argue that it has been obvious to our own common sense for far longer. I
argue that we know, and in fact already knew, that mental experience and its ‘disorder’ have the
following three core principles essential to it:
 It is located both ‘in’ the person and ‘in’ the world simultaneously, and that one cannot
be reduced without losing the very meaning and causal reality of both.
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 It is inherently characterized by multiple, equally valid explanations for the same

phenomenon that also cannot be reduced to one another.
 It does not stay the same over time, but on the contrary, shifts, evolves, regresses and
mutates.
To put these together, I am arguing that a given thing of mental experience can only be
understood if we assume that its relations to other things are an integral part of what it is, and we
can only attempt to explain that with recourse to the necessarily dynamic relations — necessarily
because the relational network shift and changes — between the things it is related to over time.
If we do not, then we miss its very essence, and are then only trying to understand and explain
something that is more our abstraction than the actual reality of the thing. I am also saying that as
a result of it being internally related in space and time in this way, there is necessarily an
overdetermination of explanations that cannot be reduced to one another without also falling foul
of the same mixing up of abstractions with the reality.
For example, we know that our selves are made up of different ‘personas.’ We know that these
not only depend on the social context and are generated and sustained by the network of people
and things in that context, but change and mutate, and indeed come and go. These personas,
therefore, cannot be reduced to an enduring mental thing happening inside of us somewhere. The
relations are internal to that thing such that it can be paradoxically defined as both inside and
outside of ourselves and as present but also transient. We can also give equally valid
explanations of the genesis and maintenance of a given persona in terms of individual personal
desires and reasons and external social pressures and incentives, both of which explain the very
same thing, and not, as there is considerable overlap, as two parts of a single explanation. The
modernist philosophy will have us believe that any irreducible complexity and paradox here is
either because we don’t — yet — understand the simple logic underneath, or is noise to be
filtered out. I am saying not only that this is false, but that the complexity and paradox is in fact
its central quality, and if we want to stay within a logical explanation, anything single and simple
the anomaly.
To take another example, it is uncontentious to say that individual psychotherapy and social-
systems interventions both work. But they also provide categorically different explanations and
functioning solutions for the very same psychological experiences. We would not say, for
instance, that changing a family system is really changing the internal model of the family in the
individual; nor would we say that changing the internal model of the family is only metaphorical,
and that really, we are working with the actual family. The modernist philosophy would these are
separate things, and that there are as such two ‘different pathways’ to the same change. But,
while there is overlap, the fact remains that logically a person’s ‘disorder’ cannot both be
explained by dysfunctional thinking or a developmental complex of the past, and at the same
time, the ongoing, present dynamics of the family. These contradict each other and present a
paradox in the similar fashion.
Perhaps more importantly, however, this can be shown clearly in our common sense. In truth, we
constantly and unproblematically flip between loci of causality and intentionality, and at least
imply multiple, overlapping centers of agency in normal day-to-day discourse — indeed, I have
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already done it several times in this article. When we talk about really any social institution or
group we do this. We talk about a company, a county, a political group, or a sports team being
and doing things. We may say that Amazon gives such and such pay for its workers, that the
Republican party is racist, or that Liverpool are playing badly. When we say such things, it
makes sense; but we also know that it was particular people made the decisions, that it is
particular politicians that are racist, and that specific players played badly. The positivist
philosophy will have us say that what we are engaging in when we say such things represent
erroneous misattributions of agency and causality, and that speaking in this way has only
heuristic, pragmatic validity. Really there are no such agents as Amazon, the Republican party,
or Liverpool, and generally we acquiesce to this narrative.
But not so fast: we do know (in a non-rational way) that there is an Amazon, a Republican party
and a Liverpool football team that do things. We know, in one way or another, that there is a
collective entity, in space as well as through time, that the individuals are in relation with,
understand themselves in terms of, and live out. But whereas we also know that such entities
have no fixed enduring qualities, so long as we think in terms of them in terms of internal
relations in the way described above, there isn’t a problem. We easily identify that there are
three orders, in fact, that represent the personal, social and the socio-historic levels of the thing
and unthinkingly use them in our explanation of the events at hand knowing that you cannot
reduce any one to the other without losing something essential. Liverpool played badly because
certain players played badly, because the tactics were inept, and because of its history playing
this particular team. These are not, I argue, discrete, logical parts of a single explanation, but all
permeate the phenomenon in question and inter-constitute each other.
So as long as the above three principles are valid, then, the modernist philosophy therefore
exactly misses the very nature of mental experience and its phenomena. It is a domain where the
principles and methods of empirical science cease to properly function, and when these
principles and methods have been ontologized, it is also to speak of a reality that it cannot
explain. This being so, any of its explanations of mental experience give, and can only give, a
highly limited, distorted picture — a picture, moreover, whose validity is only temporary — and
any practical applications based on such principles (such as in the domain of mental health) are
therefore problematic at the very core.
This conclusion, however, does not offend neuropsychology, nor cognitive science or
behaviorism per se — for example, DBT or ‘4E’ both contradict the principles of the modernist
philosophy and involve central paradox, and there are many psychiatrists with complex ‘holistic’
attitudes and methods. It offends the modernist spirit that any given person is more or less swept
up in. It is the ardent modernist that loses sleep over the ever-frustrating refusal of the world to
submit to fixed structures and final analyses, not any given researcher or theoretician who may
happily live in a pragmatic hypocrisy between the between many things they know about their
experience — or rather, know they do not know — and the kinds of sweeping statements
empirical science makes when caught up in the modernist fantasy.
What I am not saying, therefore, is that any given explanation of mental experience or its
phenomena derived from the application of empirical science is wrong. I am only stating that
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such an explanation is an aspect, and only an aspect, of a given mental phenomenon. But as an
aspect in a complex of aspects, not itself glued together by reason and logic, it is fallible. More to
the point, it is inherently subordinate to a democracy of understandings some of which may
contradict it in essential ways — which is not a problem for a point of view disengaged form
modernist thinking.

The socio-historical contingency of the modernist narrative

As it is the modernist philosophy itself, I argue, that has failed — so far as explaining mental
experience and its ‘disorder’ is concerned — it is this that we have to unpack and assess. If we
wish to understand the problem at its roots, then we must understand its history, origins and
contingency.
Very briefly, while we can trace back philosophical monism to the classical period of Ancient
Greece, the modernist philosophy — where it was, one might say, born-again and acted out in an
uncompromising, quasi-religious way — emerged out of the end of the Renaissance period, most
conspicuously through Descartes’ philosophy in the 17th century. The new domain of “clear and
distinct ideas,” instantiated by Descartes but only really refined or elaborated subsequently,
became the sole domain of meaning, and its parameters became the unique and privileged
criteria for determining the true and real. The world became correspondingly understood as a
neutral, rationally organized mechanism, entirely conducive to and exhausted by the scientific
method and its presumptions, only intelligible in virtue of its rational nature. An absolute
sympathy between the rational mind and world was thereby set up, usurping any notions of
reality being opaque or irreducibly complex. Any species of irrationality and “unreason” were,
along with this, split-off, demonized and persecuted (Foucault, 1966).
Mental experience was henceforth understood as a system of inherently rational entities that
happen ‘inside’ of us, and any irrational mental experience was therefore inversely an error of its
system — or in its most sophisticated guise developed in psychoanalysis centuries later: an
infantile, phantastical mistaking of the objective, rational truth of the world for deviant
psychological purposes. To put it bluntly: either a given complex, irrational phenomenon could
be reduced to something clear and distinct, or it was simply a mistake, a fantasy, a madness —
an erroneous internal distortion of the objective, rational world. The domain of the irrational,
and, as such, any truth and reality found in the worlds of irreducibility, paradox,
overdetermination, and indeed simile and metaphor, became understood as immature and savage
explanations of things.
This shift, as Foucault argued, constituted a socio-cultural ‘othering of madness’ — a necessary
corollary to the enlightenment project in that it disentangled and ‘freed up’ the western mind-
space — and contingent as a result. It was not, as such, something that should or even could be
understood as a transcendence, any more than conflict is transcended by the end of a given war.
Madness was not really discovered to be anything at all through this process. It was a concept
reformulated, and not in virtue of any new evidence or proofs, but due, in the main, to the
abstract theoretical whims of the peculiar social and political landscape.
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It was not that the illogical nature of psychotic experience and language, for example, was shown
to be an internal disorder of thinking but there were also, we now realize, important complex and
contingent socio-historical factors involved in this realization. The shift to seeing mental
experience as the product of an internal, rational mind-space, for which the very possibility of a
'thought disorder' explanation made any sense in the first instance, was itself the result of these
factors. This explanation was, rather, the attempt to force the experience into a single, rational
scheme. Madness ended up being an internal disorder in this way simply because we had
theoretically illegitimated irrational experience from conferring any meaning on the world or as
deriving from meaning inherent within it. And this was done not because anything was
empirically demonstrated, nor a priori unveiled; it was done to make way for the ontologizing of
the principles of the empirical method and so that it could have its way with the world, which is
precisely what then happened (and, of course, continues to happen).
This shift represented a socio-cultural reformulation of experience, not a discovery of objective
truths about it. However, this was not, nor generally still not, how it is taken. Instead — so goes
“the enlightenment” story —we finally discovered the truth in the error, light in the dark, and
disentangled ourselves from the insufferable illusions that we had been suffering from. All the
jiggery-pokery and hullaballoo of the ‘Pagan understanding’ of the world, which centralized
complexity, multiplicity, metaphor and the like, represented a stage of life that we had now
finally extricated ourselves from and transcended by the grace of our God-given reason. So
immense was, and is, the power and gravity of this story, and so abundant, it must be said, were,
and are, its riches, that it was, and is, forgotten into truth. And such is the cultural fixation on the
modernist philosophy and the denial of any other formulations or modes of experience, that it is
still not typically questioned by most people — this perhaps being the most glaring example of
the ignorance of ages.
We should be under no illusions, however, that there is any ‘objective’ reason to accept this
account and formulation of mental experience, nor that there is, in point of fact, even a coherent
philosophical one. It was and is only — which must be repeated again and again — an abstract
philosophical position, that has, moreover, been severely criticized, if not disproven, since that
time. It must also be said that this conclusion is not even new, not by any stretch of the
imagination. Indeed, from the very inception of the modernist philosophy and, in fact,
consistently thereafter, there has been a ‘counter-enlightenment’ movement right, as Isiah Berlin
calls it, alongside it at each turn. Vico, Herder, the British Romantics, Schelling, Jacobi,
Heidegger, Bergson, and Whitehead, to name but the most explicit, all vehemently rejected its
basic principles, and insisted that reality was to be understood not a logical nexus, but a moving,
feeling organism. Such criticisms and outright rejections may have been the most damning,
certainly the most passionate, when this ideology became flesh at the industrial revolution. It is
only that they have been cast-aside, locked away and shamed, in the same spirit, one might
conclude, as any species of what is considered irrationality has been and is. Positivism became
the drug-de-jour and, the odd withdrawal here and there aside, its use only became more
fashionable and its misuse all the more ingrained.
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The madness of modernism

While it may be tempting to stop there, it is also crucial to go beyond it; for, as Derrida (1978)
later alluded to, the cultural fixation on what I am calling the modernist philosophy — the
unjustified ontologizing of the scientific method and its presumptions, and madness explained as
an internal disorder of reason— can and should itself be understood as a species of the madness
that it sees as its object.
When swept up in the modernist spirit, the behavior characteristic of the scientific enterprise can
legitimately be described as a thoroughly obsessive —some might say manic— mode of
experience and way of coping with the world. It is only not thought about in these terms because,
in virtue of its very universalizing, it unsurprisingly positions itself on an untouchable perch as
the arbiter of what is true and real and therefore sane and mad. But if we do not accept the
theory, then its psychological make-up is open to review. Understood in terms of its classical
explanation — as attempts to ride oneself of ‘bad feelings’ through extreme and rigid reliance on
exactitude and ordering, ritual and repetition — it is, in fact, almost classically obsessive-
compulsive. In both cases, we are talking about behaviors designed to eliminate deviations from
a preconceived and pre-valued reality in order to assert an experience of omniscience and
omnipotence, to fend of feelings of powerlessness of some sort. It is beyond the scope of this
article to do so, but suffice it to say, the case can certainly be made for why this would be the
case on a cultural level. The only actual difference between the two is that untherapized
modernist philosophy, which refuses the dawning of insight, will not let go of the idea that it is
actually achieving this, and achieving it without incurring unsustainable harm and suffering.
We might also say that the very notion that ‘madness’ signifies something wrong with the person
— a categoric deviance, an illness, or a pathology to be ‘cured’ — whatever is then othered into
this category, can itself be understood along similar lines. The assumption that madness itself is
‘not-me,’ and that the experiences that live under its umbrella are what differentiate someone
who is ‘mad’ from someone who is ‘sane,’ can also be shown to be a very anxious notion and an
abstraction which has been forgotten into truth. It is clear to anyone who has made a serious
point of exploring their experience that we all go into psychotic, obsessive-compulsive,
dissociative and depressive modes from time to time, just as it is clear that we all have trauma
reactions and use substances (and we can include behaviors designed to induce different bio-
chemical reactions, such as exercise and types of diet, to this) to cope with the world. There are
differences, by and large, between these experiences and the experiences of those of us who
come to be labelled with a corresponding diagnosis, of course, but they are of degree and not
kind (interestingly reflected in the DSM 5). We might say, then, that this more basic othering has
something not accidental in common with phobic behaviors, when this is understood as a form of
self-disgust ‘put outside’ in order to deal with the experience through extreme behavioral
avoidance and control.
To be sure, there was ‘a madness’ before ‘The Enlightenment,’ and of course, at different points,
this was presumably also derived in a similar fashion. What is different was the obsessiveness
and mania in which it was done, the intensity of the projection. There occurred, seemingly, a
centuries-long anxiety, and when the modernist neurosis had dug all of its talons into the very
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heart of the western culture, ‘madness’ became something that we had to do something about —
and imminently. We had to put these people somewhere out of sight, out of mind, and “cure”
them. The idea that there was something irreducibly complex, paradoxical and regressive in our
nature was so intolerable and threatening to the modernist spirit that severe action had to be
taken to ‘prove’ that unreason was unnatural. And, given that it couldn’t do so with scientific
methods, as the problem is of an abstract philosophical variety, the only way it could do this was
frontal attack. This is something that the world had not seen before, and it is something that we
are by and large still wrapped up in.
If we accept that modernism itself is mad in this way, then we are left concluding that one
structuring of experience and way of coping with existence only became culturally valued and
prioritized over another, whatever the inevitably complex reasons. We might, to be fair, say that
the pre-modern structuring of experience perhaps over-valued and over-prioritized the
irreducibility, opacity and confounding depth of mental experience — perhaps that the so called
“dark-ages” were maybe too dark and reason needed to have a light shone on it again — and if
we wished to be neutral and democratic leave it as some sort of dialectic description in this way.
But the point here is not to evaluate it, so much as to point out that not only is the modernist
explanation of mental experience and its ‘disorder’ socio-historically contingent and thus open
to, indeed asking for, revision, but that the whole process of determining how we think about,
and in some sense experience, the mental world is itself a product of the organization of mental
experience in question. And as mental experience, unsplit, un-othered, has the full gamut of
experience in its purview, it is therefore also important to explicate its defensive process and
coping strategies as a means of that doing exactly that.
We may then be justified in quibbling about which madness is the ‘more mad’ — that is, if we
don’t wish to make much sense. But what we are not justified in doing is insisting on, and
developing societal treatment and care around, the abstract hypothesis that madness is an internal
disorder defined in terms of the parameters of reason and logic. We are likewise not justified in
doing this with the abstract hypothesis that the experiences that constitute the madnesses are in
any way categorically different from any and all of our experiences and needing to be ‘cured,’
however the category is then defined. These are illegitimate extensions, unconscious
philosophies that do not know they are philosophies. Given how deeply problematic these
hypotheses have turned out to be over the course of their history — given the clear harm (clear,
that is, to people on the outside) that has come from this obsessive-compulsive structuring of
experience and its blanket impositions — we might find ourselves more than justified, then, in
rejecting both.

What next, then?

If we say, then, that it is no longer through this modern formulation of experience that we are to
understand mental experience and its ‘disorder’ — if the madness of modernist thinking has to
be rejected — then how the hell, one might ask, are we then to understand it?
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Well, what I not going to argue that what needs to come be postmodern. There is no doubt of the
many virtues to all the arguments and ‘truths’ that come under this title. But as the postmodern
approach itself essentially accepts modernism at face-value and only wishes to then ‘transcend’
it, it, I argue, only recapitulates one of its essential problems, thereby living out the very same
spirit. It is no good just rejecting behaviorism, cognitive science or neuropsychology as
explanations of mental distress simply on the grounds that they are historically dependent
socially-constructed-power-structures, or because they are only games of language that do not
know they are only games in an ever-shifting, ever indefinable, evolution of incommensurate
games.
These critiques are important, but they are, in the main, critiques. If nothing comes in their wake,
then it only constitutes a passive-aggressive gaslighting of our modernist selves, serving really
only to tie ourselves up in an ever more complex and stifling conversation. If we settle on this,
which is where most of it ends up, then we only move the target while awaiting new arrows
endowed with GPS. Indeed, the problem and the dominance of modernist solutions to it have
only persevered unaffected, if not emboldened, through this supposed postmodern time.
We must not get lost in the allure of better explanations, better theories, better scientific projects
of the future; but equally we must not get lost in the tantalizing, fascinating, and in truth infinite,
deconstruction of minds and meaning. Both go on with no end in sight. We need to let go of this
mania, this very desire to leap into a future where all ‘the bad’ will finally be eradicated by some
‘genius’ of whatever variety we are partial to. The problem is not the abstractions themselves,
but what we do with them, and post-modernism, to my mind at least, seems to only proliferate
and mix up complex, confusing hybrids of abstraction and reality.
Bruno Lator, a philosopher and anthropologist who has had quite impact in ‘social sciences,’
argues that the categorical distinction between the social-psychological world and the supposedly
neutral, objective world of nature has had damning consequences, and identifies this as the root
of our present issues. And while I am not going to go that far here, what is key in his arguments
is that, as reality was never actually discovered to be as the modern philosophy tells us it is, then
“we have never been modern,” and, in psychological language, have only dissociated the truth of
the reality around us and fixated on these abstraction as if they were real. We need therefore, to
remember the abstractions forgotten into reality back into theory — returning them to where they
belong — to reassess the situation in a safe place, sober up and look at the actual world around
us that we have acted out from for almost 500 years. We need to undo the knots we have tied
ourselves in and de-modernize — or ‘unmodern’ as Bruno Latour calls it — our understanding of
mental experience and therefore of its ‘disorder.’
Despite the fact that such an idea is a terrible affront to our sense of security as ‘modern’ folk,
there is, in fact, no glaring problem with this, which one would immediately suspect there would
be if one is thinking through the modernist ideology. Indeed, if we look back to before the rise of
the modernist philosophy and the Enlightenment era, and, indeed, if we look across most of the
world right now, there was, and is, no real problem as such to be solved, nothing really to be
worked out, and no need for any kind of fundamental science of mental health. There were and
are, of course, many ills that modernism itself has at least alleviated, but this is not the point. The
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point is our general, psychological well-being, and these understandings have served and serve
the times and cultures that have conceived them very well, so far as mental health is concerned.
What we discover when we look in these places is that mental experience was then and is now
understood both paradoxically— rational and irrational, light and dark, generative and regressive
simultaneously— and as continuous with the world it is ‘happening in'. Both of these are the
defining features of mental experience as I am suggesting it now needs te be understood. And
these show a very different mode of being in the world in which such experience — indeed
madness itself — is part of, or even speaking to, the very essence of reality. As a result,
crucially, there are ways within these understandings to view suffering both as an experience that
needs to be tended to and taken care of and as something inherently meaningful — something
which is foreign to the modernist approach which only sees errors and how to fix them. It is even
possible within these views to understand these kinds of experiences as offering unique and
privileged vantage points and insight into certain strata of society and the self, something again
foreign to the modernist approach that only sees a single, uniform objective reality that is either
correctly or incorrectly comprehended.
These understandings — or more accurately, I would say, knowledges —make a mockery of any
reductive, materialist account of mental experience, which is the very problem. If we accept
them as speaking to something real, then we have no choice but to de-ontologize the scientific
method and its presumptions, so far as mental experience is concerned. Along with this, we
would have to come to terms with the damage and suffering that society has incurred along with
the advances and benefits it has enjoyed. It would involve a sort of cultural therapy that seeks to
de-dissociate some painful feelings and truths, which is, of course, a serious undertaking given
the extent of the disorder. Furthermore, that this therapy must be done irrespective of whether we
mind eating some humble pie and opening ourselves to the wisdom of other traditions or not.
If we do this, however, we will have to undo the knots we have tied ourselves in without also
undoing what was and is good — what is crucial — about what modernism has given us. To
revert back to ‘folk-thinking’ and ‘folk-solutions,’ as crucial as these are when the philosophy of
modernism is rejected, would be an error in my opinion. The past, just like the future, contains
no utopia. Specifically, in regard to mental health, we will have to think through how not to
demonize and dispense with psychotropic medications solely based on the notion that ‘mental
disorder’ just is neurochemical disturbance is false; find a way to justify the continued need for
hospitalization in some cases, even though we might totally disagree with the idea that ‘severe
mental disorders’ represent a dangerous diseases of narcissistic dreaming; and so too will need to
find a place for the insights and techniques of the modernist projects even though we are not, as
it turns out, static,‘manualizable’ CPUs with legs, nor mindless, passive lumps of reaction-
complexes. These can be parts, when understood as parts, of a nuanced — helpful for its
increasing nuance — understanding of what mental experience is and how to manage it; not
things, by and large, to be thrown out with the bath water.
Most importantly, though, will have to find a way to not do away with the notion that people
suffering from mental distress, persecution and alienation from society require special
consideration and attention as individuals with inalienable rights. This might sound obvious, but
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I say this because the individual proper —as we know it and have come to experience it —
essentially grew out of the very spirit of the project in question, and required and requires the
ontologizing of abstractions — for ‘the individual’ is an abstraction. If we simply ‘went back’ to
a form of experience prior to the modernist philosophy, or tried to transform it to kinds of
experience already existing now in the world today, we risk, in some important way, losing what
came with the realization of the individual as an individual. There is no absolute, committed
notion of the individual and their rights when social identity is primary because the proper entity
of consideration is first that social being and only secondarily whatever individual remains. This
is also why the ills cannot just be blamed on modernity’s actors and their specific claims to
power. To make the point again, we will have to be comfortable with paradox.

A new direction
If we accept the diagnosis stated here, I believe that the following key points would be vital in
reformulating our understanding of mental experiences and treating its disordering.
 The reformulation would need to realize the fallibility and limitations of reason and logic,
taking paradox and contradiction as in some sense central and vital to what mental
experience is.
 It will also have to be acknowledged that reason and logic are important principles of
experience, to be democratized not themselves othered.
 It will have to be acknowledged that the ‘location’ of mental experience and the causes of
suffering are trans-individual — located ‘in’ the individual, ‘in’ their interpersonal
relations, and ‘in’ the world simultaneously.
 This will have to be understood in a paradoxical, overdetermined way, and not as
different stages or parts of a complex of ‘clear and distant’ causes.
 It would need to take past and present-but-far-away forms of experience that already do
so as their starting point, not endpoint.
 Consequent of this reversion to complexity, it will need to acknowledge from the outset
that there will be losses as well as gains. The attempt to eradicate ‘the bad’ in whatever
form is, paradoxically, the very reason for its destructiveness, and mitigating it will
necessarily involve the incorporation of the dissociated feelings involved.
 As an integral part of this, we will have to withdraw the projection of the category of
madness itself, explicitly acknowledging that the gamut of so-called disordered
experience is present in all of us to different degrees and at different times.
 It will mean, finally, that we will all have to be involved. Just as the onus is on the
dominant group to understand they ways they perpetuate oppression, so too it will be the
onus of the non-diagnosed to understand how they perpetuate and are complicit in the
othering of madness and the irrational.
As these points are related to the general, philosophical level of mental experience, they do not
constitute an argument against psychiatry and the medical model per se. The mental health
concerns of our society extend far beyond the politics of medication, and for this reason alone,
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we cannot isolate it and apportion it all the blame. It is too easy to suggest, for example, that if
we had cognitive behavioral therapy or some equivalent, in place of medications, then all would
be well. There is growing evidence that such forms of psychotherapy, very much like the
medications used, have only temporary effects (references). And this is, I would argue, not
coincidental. Whether we talk about medication, CBT, or even most humanisticly defined and
organized approaches, we are talking about approaches that locate the problem in the individual
and as some form of enduring quality of that individual, irrespective of the anomalies and noise
they pragmatically accept as part of it.
Most conspicuously, these approaches are unable to account for the now glaringly obvious
interpersonal and socio-political causes and maintainers of the suffering, and indeed symptoms,
involved. While these approaches do generally acknowledge ‘external stressors’, they are only
understood as triggers for an internal process gone awry, or considered, at best, internalized
features of the thoughts, beliefs and concepts that make up the internal data of the person. They
are generally not thought of as ontologically constitutive of the (ongoing) experience, which is to
say, as actual concrete dimensions of the persons world that need to be treated as such.
This is a huge difference, and it is not one born out of simple ignorance and therefore easily
amendable without radical change. These conclusions represent the limits of what can be
meaningfully thought while being committed to the modernist philosophy — without paradox
and contradiction, that is. There is a difference between the stress of constant physiological
activity, and constant physiological activity that has chronic feelings of powerlessness,
worthlessness, persecution and shame, not only its core but at its core because the person is
persistently navigating a world that has such experiences woven into its fabric. Perhaps it is no
surprise that effects of medication and CBT alike are generally temporary when little is done
about the very worlds that the people inhabit.
The paradox, in conclusion, will be that the only way to mutate society into what we wish it to be
will require us each to mutate ourselves first, because the very thing that I have argued is the
problem is the very thing that manifested a complex of little person-worlds with rights, benefits
and belongings in the first place. We came to experience ourselves as a collection of agencies,
and therefore we are all, collectively, the only legitimate location(s) of change. As such, it is not
that we have to de-modernize mental disorder per se; this is only the other of how we understand
mental order. We will have to de-modernize our experience in general. It would be in name only
if we did not at least mitigate the essentially modernist obsessions and mania that we all engage
in when we try to deny complexity, contradiction and uncomfortable stasis. We all try to deny
complexity and transcend ‘the bad,’ striving for a continual, repetitive experience of ‘the good,’
and this is how, at base, madness was, and continually is, projected into its own category and
filled with the narrative of internal dysfunction.
We are all modernism, and we are therefore all responsible. If I cease to engage in this process,
then the world ceases to be populated by mad people with internal disorders. Therefore, it is in
this individual way, I argue, that we will get what we are all after: a ‘mental health’ and a way of
treating it that does justice to its reality and one that honors its individuals and the ‘progress’ that
a culture of individuals has made. Of course, much more will be needed than this as the reality
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we face marches on. In this respect, practical frameworks must be developed that acknowledge
the problems described and provide solutions for the system of mental health treatment that I
believe must persevere in one form or another without us regressing in ways that are
counterproductive. Such frameworks are already beginning to take shape, however, such as the
Power Threat Meaning network, and it is these kinds of ideas that I believe need to be seriously
considered in this shift we are culturally crying out for.