Is psychopathological behavior increasing in the human community or are many of us just becoming more paranoid? The dictionary defines a psychopath as “a person with a personality disorder, especially one manifested in aggressively antisocial behavior.” So to answer our lead-in question we have only to look at what’s going on in the Global Village and decide if we are seeing an increase in “aggressively antisocial behavior.”
Each of us, depending on our experience and perspective will have our opinion on whether members of our species are becoming more or less aggressive or antisocial but there is always the trained expert to rely on. We could consult “psychiatry’s bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for an objective opinion by the professionals. But would it really be “objective?”
“As false-self behaviors express increasing levels of fear, for the reasons we are all familiar with, then the DSM-5 would identify new alarming behaviors and create a label for them. Then the drug companies (never missing an opportunity to please stockholders by increasing profits) capitalize on these new behaviors by providing ‘suitable’ medications.” (1)
“It has probably become obvious that we are headed for a catastrophe with more pills for more types of craziness, for the deluded and depressed, terrified and tormented. The details will continue to multiply in an ever thickening DSM; the diagnoses, the pseudo-remedies, and the illusory sources of fear will color our future until we have no future.” (1)
“Human suffering and most of what we label mental illness takes root in the story we come to believe about ourselves which also determines our all-important attitudes and values. Our identity drives most of our behaviors. Hence, story, identity and behavior are interconnected, interdependent and interrelated. That is the fundamental structure of human consciousness. Humanity chooses the direction it will take collectively and individually but we are virtually clueless as to how and why we make those decisions. All of humanity is contained in the same P-B story and in that story we are all suffering from mental illness.” (1) So when we look around trying to answer the question: Just who is a psychopath? The answer is EVERYBODY!
Insight # 136: “Psychotherapists become the agents of the culture whose particular task is to adjust people to it; psychotherapy becomes an expression of the fragmentation of the period rather than an enterprise for overcoming it.” (2)
Link:
- “Crazy Metaphors? Maybe Not!” in this blog and also in the print version, The Human Community (2016) by Roy Charles Henry, page 119.
References:
- Henry, Roy Charles. Why Am I Here? Create Space. October 2014, pages 213-215.
- May, Rollo. The Discovery of Being. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 1983, page 165.
