Psychotic: Let’s Talk Mr. Pakman!

    

Here is something I share with Trump supporters at least according to the David Pakman show: I am, by an official (and to me a bit arcane) clinical diagnoses (for which I have an official medical prescription, Quetiapine), a psychotic.Don’t worry. I am more than fine these days thanks to medical science: a point I’m sure you pro-science people will appreciate. Anyone who knows me can attest that I function reasonably well both personally and professionally and that my current problems and frustrations are only the ordinary human problems and frustrations. I am, for this reason, a bit bemused when the David Pakmans of the world constantly refer to diagnostic categories like ‘psychosis’ in their attempts to label Trump conservatives and other ‘deplorables’. Also, from puzzling out my own ‘diagnoses’ I am well aware, as Mr. Pakman seems not to be, that words like ‘psychosis’ do not have clear-cult, simple clinical meanings that can be translated directly into ordinary political discourse. [1]This, I have zero doubt, is a tic he has picked up from Sam Harris and his fan club. Sam Harris is a defender of reason. What is the opposite of reason? Madness! Who then are the opponents of reason? Mad people! Any opposition to ‘reason’ as instrumentally conceived by Mr. Harris and his fan boys must be othered as pathological. Catholics, for instance, are crazy for believing in transubstantiation though this is not individual but ‘group’ insanity.  

Can I say what utter horseshit this is? I never ‘reasoned’ so well as when I was ill and other ‘crazies’ have told me the same thing. Mania can enhance analytic and discursive reason as well as erase it depending on the individual and depending on the where they are in their manic cycling. Nor does one need to go full Frankfurt school to know that reason can go quite mad. You Tube star David Pakman, though, has picked this ball up and run with it. Pentecostal preachers, he solemnly informs us, are literally insane.  So insane that small children cannot be exposed to them. Trump supporters are cult members suffering from ‘group psychosis’ (which I’m not even sure is a thing in the DSM sense).[2] Mr. Pakman presents all this language as ‘descriptive’ when it is actually normative. He is using the language of mental illness to designate people who, in his mind, have made fundamental moral and epistemic errors about the world. Does he do this deliberately? Probably not but it takes no great sophistication to see that there is a heavy charge of moral othering that comes with the use of these supposedly neutral ‘scientific’ descriptors. Nor does it take any great sophistication to see that using clinical language in this loose ‘moralistic’ way threatens actual harm to real ‘psychotics’ whose faculties of political and moral judgment are quite intact. If I had any way of communicating with Mr. Pakman and other You Tube pundits (he doesn’t respond to comments) I would ask them to consider this not very subtle point. If there is a problem with right wing populism right now it is not psychosis and (by strong implication) US PSYCHOTICS who are to blame.  

 

 

                                                     

       

 

[1] I am, according to science, a ‘psychotic not otherwise specified with schizo-affective tendencies’. As far as I can make out this refers to a state of anxiety and depression that (possibly temporarily) takes on a manic edge. Interestingly, the drugs I take are do not heal but replace my natural brain chemistry. If I stop taking them the underlying whatever it is roars back to life for reasons unrelated to any stressors that might have originally caused it. It is now a permanent and un-treatable fact. This raises the interesting question of whether I still have ‘psychosis NOS’. It seems under current conditions I can never quite know. This is the mess of imprecision that surrounds the neat and clinical phrase ‘psychosis’. In fact, this raises a more than semantic point: am I ‘psychotic’ in some fixed, essentialized sense? Is it a ‘property’ I have? In one sense it is nothing more than a word conveniently pinned on a slip of paper to describe the mess someone happens to be in. If this mess happens to share some common traits with other messes then voila, we have diagnostic term! My mess though, is not the strong instance of a firm type representing a thing in the world. Psychosis only sort of exists though our constant urge to reification makes of it a ‘thing’ that somebody ‘is’. For Pakman's comments see (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEP3SVtwlAc&t=1s).    

[2] From what I can make out ‘disturbed’ behavior has to be defined against a cultural baseline that is not fixed and eternal but constantly shifting. This is why labelling a large cultural group ‘crazy’ is a treacherous business. It is also a waste of time and effort for you can’t treat a ‘population’. Plus, I am told that one component of a diagnosable mental condition is subjective distress. On this criterion a person who is quite happy to speak in tongues cannot be, in fact, mentally ill. At any rate, one thing of which Mr. Pakman is surely aware is that there are MANY good sociological explanations of the behavior of Trumpists and that dabbling in psychology adds nothing of explanatory value to them. At any rate if we are speaking in clinical and not metaphorical terms psychotic delusions are INTERNALLY generated and not culturally inculcated.



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