The Changing of the Minds

'Mental Health' is a battleground of ideals, science, and politics

Good news: In British Columbia, we’re changing the law about how we deal with out of control mental patients. The ones that grab knives and attack their nurses because they believe that they are the Devil. Instead of letting them be who they are, thus endangering themselves as well as others, which has been the method strongly endorsed by our Premier, David Eby, he has suddenly done a 180 and announced that henceforth, we will be forcing the dangerously insane into ‘secure beds’, of which there are very few as yet. This transformation is occurring because in six weeks, we’re voting, and the vast majority of the population as well as some professionals, is utterly fed up with his government’s unworkable far left mental health agenda. You could say that our Democracy is working as it should, at least at the provincial level in British Columbia.

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/ebys-finds-new-found-urgency-on-involuntary-treatment-on-eve-of-bc-election

But it’s not a strictly local story; it is in fact, international in its implications. At the same time that Eby had his conversion on the road to the election, I was reading The Best Minds: a story of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions, by Jonathan Rosen, a Jewish author living in New York.

I couldn’t put it down; inhaled it in two days, all 530 pages of it. One of the top ten best books of 2023, the Wall Street Journal describes it as “immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting”, and it is also one of Obama’s favourite books. I dislike Obama, but okay, he knows what an important book is.

This is one of those rare stories that takes a dreadful, personal encounter with madness and tragedy and asks if the way we treat or fail to treat paranoid schizophrenia, is helpful. Or perhaps too beholden to idealistic agendas and theories. As the story unfolds, Rosen finds the exact and poetically resonant words to show how his brilliant childhood friend, Michael Laudor, blazed through College in three years, got a high flying job at a financial firm and then was diagnosed with schizophrenia. That didn’t stop him from being accepted into Yale Law, indeed, he was quite open about his illness and became an advocate for the humane, inclusive treatment of the mentally ill. The tragedy is that everyone wanted so badly to believe in his messianic vision that they failed to notice his inner turmoil, the ever present demons ready to consume him. Nobody believed he was capable of violence except for his mother, but who listens to mothers?

So convincing was he that the Yale Law community gathered around him to help, mitigate and basically, usher him through the grind of writing papers and getting articling positions. All of this was done against the background of wanting to eliminate the ‘stigma’ of mental illness, which is a laudable goal. And one on which most public health rules in BC as well as most western countries, are based. But figuring out how to accomodate the competing rights of patients and the public has turned out to be full of pitfalls. One of them is the strenuous effort to ‘normalize’ a not fully understood disease. This is what Micheal was doing, and he was praised in the New York Times as a mental health role model genius. So convincing was he that he sold his Memoir with film rights to Ron Howard. They paid him substantial sums that enabled Michael to move into a nice home with his girlfriend Carrie.

And then he stabbed her to death because he couldn’t be sure that she was not an imposter. Not the ‘real’ Carrie. From the height of fame to dreadful infamy, Michael’s harrowing tale is a kind of metaphor of how dangerous the combination of ideals, hubris and science truly is. To this day, he is in a ‘secure ward’ of a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey.

So why am I telling you all this? What is ‘the takeaway’?

We cannot—indeed must not— let politicians decide public health regulations behind closed doors. That job should be left to professionals, and we ought to take their expertise seriously though also, with a grain of salt. We are overdue for a difficult public conversation about the role of Science in politics, indeed our society as a whole. As we witnessed during the pandemic, science cannot be a guide to ethical and moral questions; these are not its purview, they belong to philosophy and religion. And since most people have not studied philosophy and no longer believe that religion has much to offer, we find ourselves in a serious existential crisis. I will get into the discussion about religion in another post, the role of Science in health care is what concerns me here.

Perhaps we do not stress enough that Science properly done is an evolution of knowledge and as such, never final or settled. That is why Eby’s change of mind should be welcomed though it’s very tempting to indulge in cynical comments about politicians adjusting their ‘convictions’ according to public taste. Science may be ‘our truth’ BUT we should never treat it as something final and definitive. We must be ready to change our minds. New information comes in constantly, and what we knew before has to be re-imagined in the light of that new understanding. The goal posts do move, and they should. Which is why the pandemic is such an excellent example of how we are failing at this process, even now. We suffered through an ominous, oppressive and totally unscientific era marked by politicians who claimed to follow ‘the science’ as if it were an unchanging unilateral entity, while doing what was politically expedient. And mostly damaging.

This was a catastrophic failure of morals and ethics that played out across all western democratic nations. Science, especially mathematical modelling, was no good in guiding us in a serious crisis. If you wanted to question ‘the science’ you had to be prepared to have your life ripped to shreds. Some brave souls did it anyway and they are now coalescing into a small but influential group calling for fundamental change in how Science is ‘explained’ to the public and in fact how it is done, funded, and evaluated. This is an enormous challenge, necessary because have not recovered from the pandemic body blow. It’s surely not helpful to point fingers and label people who declined to get vaccinated with a largely untested and shoddily manufactured product as evil ‘anti vaxxers’ who should be shunned. As Trudeau did, repeatedly. What great leadership!

We are still in the process of figuring out how we deteriorated from a reasonably rational society into one that bore all the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime in the space of a few months. Vestiges of this attempt to trample on our freedom to speak and act as responsible adults, linger. We have some work to do yet, and are in urgent need of more politicians changing their minds in public, admitting that they were wrong. I long to see Boris, whom I used to admire, do the right thing and admit his pandemic misdeeds. I do fear I might wait in vain.

Books like this one are important because they help us to understand the society we live in, the fragility of our minds and by extension, our institutions. I hope we learn at least one lesson from the book and the pandemic: arrogance coupled with idealism and wanting to ‘do good’ is a dangerous delusion. It is what is driving the extremists, the woke mobs causing alarm and chaos. Fortunately, the majority is not listening to them. And in a democracy, that does count. Or it should. That is why I am uncharacteristically hopeful. If Eby, the most far left extremist in power in Canada, can admit to a public change of mind, maybe some of his ‘progressive’ friends will do the same. Maybe the woke virus infesting us will get weaker and finally, no longer matter because we have developed a strong moral immune system to protect us against further infections of righteousness and saving the world. It may take a new religion or a revisit of the old one, but it’s clear that the elevation of scientists to gods is over. The old gods are about to return because the new ones have failed us. More on that in the next post.

I have strayed far from the original theme of mental illness, but that’s how my mind works. I hope you found it interesting and stimulating.

So go read the damn book, already. You won’t regret it.