The Abridged Ajani

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It starts off with me pondering about my thesis to-be-written. The proposal has already been submitted, so I may not change anything. Even if I could, I would not even though I have now come to realise the difficulty of my task. After all, this is but a limited-word length college academic research essay that shall not be published anywhere mainstream to allow the mass construction of an artificial untruth. Perhaps I could expand on this new realisation of mine next time, in the universities where such deepness of thought may find a willing audience to critique upon it.

It must be my most-unconscious assumption in writing for my independent study, but I find that this very same thing may happen to anyone around the world as long as they may engage in social and human trend-spotting and truth-meditating. This is the problem of anachronisms in trend analysis.

In my proposal, I would have written of exactly how the treatment and views towards ‘madness’ by society has become more humane over the years. The independent variable here is “humane” - I defined it as the holistic-ness of their treatment methods, and their regard for the patient’s will. I shall be comparing the biomedical etiological model of psychiatry, to the biopsychosocial etiological model of psychology, using these models as the objects to be assessed against a fixed set of criterion - to figure out how “humane” are they really.

There is an anachronistic flaw here. Undoubtedly, I will eventually propose that psychology is the more humane of the two. Why? Arguments will be elaborated in my study later (which may or may not be published online here at The Abridged Ajani), but essentially I will be bringing up the fact that in clinical psychology, rather than to simply say that maladaptiveness is caused by biophysical causes, it also acknowledges and proceeds with treatment from the line of thought that the former could also be caused by psychosocial factors, hence accounting for the ‘psychological dimension’ of sanity.

What could be so wrong with that? Is it not correct of us to criticize a field of knowledge that has neglected a truth to compose an exclusive form of treatment? The problem comes when we must understand, from when, did our conception of knowledge regarding mental illness include the “truth” that there is a psychological dimension to things? This only came with the rise of clinical psychology in the 1960s, when the works of Michel Foucault and Thomas Szaz found resonance with the general public and the “survivors of psychiatry”. The “Third Force” of psychology emerged with an emphasis on humanistic psychology, to understand maladaptiveness not in terms of chemical imbalances, not conditioned behavioural responses, not repressed sexual desires, but rather support the idea that it is for a lack of meaning in events, that cause one to have maladaptive behaviour, for an incapability to adequately adjust to one’s circumstances and accept the human condition. Above all, this movement put forth the notion that human beings cannot be reduced to components, or that the whole is more than a mere sum of parts. The holistic-ness of a human-targeted therapy was therefore compromised if they were not treated as human.

What is a human? We are more than our material bodies, even as I may make some assumptions in this, that the world is not purely materialist. We humans think and therefore have thought, we feel and therefore have emotions. We reason and therefore have ideas, we perceive and therefore have insecurities. All these may not be reduced to as being mere by-products of biology, chemistry and physics.

Hence, when we dysfunction, according to humanistic psychology, which we must remind ourselves stresses that in the treatment of men must first treat him as a man, we cannot solely point to one place and say “that is it”. With this, a shift of emphasis away from age-old biomedical models towards psychosocial influences on this concept of “sanity” therefore evolved. The contribution of psychology was to create the “truth” of the existence of other dimensions of the human self which we can blame for our maladaptiveness.

At this point of time, “truth” is not an objective body of knowledge. It is subjective, and its nature remains uncertain. Could it be true? Could it not be true? Truth remains to be created. Upon its creation, the function of a truth is to testify for its own validity and supplement existing true knowledge. Psychological etiologies hence only now became part of the truth, that things have a psychological dimension to it.

This new truth altered the way we saw psychiatry. Today we may attack the premises of psychiatry as being exclusive, as a result inhumane, treating the human by his components. Yet we must notice that what is humane shares a relation with what is our truth. Prior to the addition of the “existence of the psychological dimension”, we could, to a certain extent, very safely declare that psychiatry, despite focusing only on chemistry and biology, was holistic. This was because of our etiology of maladaptiveness, that the latter is caused by simply those. Treatment was therefore prescribed to tackle those very same causes, and was in itself wholesome. You exhibit maladaptiveness because you are suffering from a chemical imbalance, we treat your imbalance to cure you of your ‘madness’.

This changed with psychology. By the addition of new dimensions to the etiology, psychology therefore saw the need for new methods of treatment as well, to attempt the therapy of that cause which psychiatry never once considered as a cause even. We today take it almost for granted that all mental problems have a psychological basis (save for genetic disorders like Down Syndrome), but it would be anachronistic thus to judge psychiatry based on our modern views. We should bother to think that back in the Middle Ages which prescribed supernatural origins of madness, the emergence of psychiatry was a revolution of the etiology. There is an irony in this process - when we today consider psychiatry to be inhumane because of psychology, our earlier ancestors would have seen otherwise and determined psychiatry to be humane because of supernaturalism. Even lobotomy in its earliest days were seen as humane, whereas today it is subject to much debate. We claim that something is humane - okay, but humane to what?

Previously, I would have stopped here and treated our conception of “human rights” as something fixed. Psychiatry would be inhumane, because it neglected psychological roots of illness. Now I question, really? To say something like that would be a classic anachronism. Psychiatry did not neglect so, but it simply did not set out to do so by its own design. Psychiatry was unholistic, but this “missing gap” of human madness did not exist until the much-later rise of clinical psychology. How humane is something would be indirectly judged by how holistic it would be - but if we now take a second look at this, we must observe that even as one field of knowledge acknowledges more aspects of madness than the other, both are holistic. Humanist forms of thinking may have remained constant throughout this time, but humanist truth definitely did not.

We have heard occasionally that “we are smarter than our ancestors” - we have scientific theories that are reliable, massive skyscrapers that a single glance cannot contain, civilizations that still remain too complex to understand. Yet is it necessarily true, or is it just another anachronism? They may have been as smart as us, only that the design of their circumstances and knowledge of that time did not allow them the dream of such. Yet if you would place them into our world of today and have them recognize the intricacies of our world, they may easily do as we do today. It is the truth of their times that render them different.

Therein lies the problem with trend analysis - especially of ideas. Perhaps across a period of two years or five, we could still isolate a phenomena and command in economic terms, ‘ceteris paribus!’, to assume all other factors remain constant, for proper study, for the independent variable we set as criterion may not have changed much. Yet when we compare across decades and centuries, suddenly we realise that many small changes along the path of the independent variable have led to a major paradigm shift already, affecting our “fair test” with inconsistent variables.

When academic scholars examine the history of ideas, unconscious anachronisms such as this may have crept in. Of course, it really does not matter much - the ways of thinking about an idea may not be synonymous with its truth. After all, all meaning is up to us to define. To arrive at some knowledge is better than arriving at no truth. And yes indeed, I find that with this, no certain knowledge, or truth, can be possible. It is not a mistake by any human, but it is rather ingrained with the Universe - our methods and tools of information-gathering and interpreting are limited in the isolation of variables. Where variables can never be isolated, and even independent variables always changing, it is I feel to a certain extent even an understatement to say that it is but only complex. It is not complex, for “complex” may still connote a massive causality and feedback that although daunting, can still be figured out assuming infinite time, but impossible in this case connotes an inability to figure out any causality even, when every step is technically an anachronism. Given this, how can any truth about human ideas be possible from our perspective? I approach with extreme skepticism with any trend-spotting that masquerades as truth, as I suggest, perhaps if God exists, on the highest level, perhaps the latter would be the only one to know the truth apart from knowledge.

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