So many times this year we have encountered situations that have caused us to invoke the causal claim that, instead of pointing to something external from the source, or outside of the perpetrator's consciousness, we just say (to cover ourselves) "it's a mental health issue," and thus it must be ridiculous to suggest any contrary causal claim. Individual consciousness is a fragile thing; it doesn't take very much at all to cause upheaval in what is intended to be a "normal" development pattern.
If a college outcast lashes out against a house full of party goers, because, maybe he resents the pleasure and fun that those more socially accepted, popular kids are having, instead of pointing to the social caste system that inherently develops throughout the teenage years into early adulthood (for example), we just say... "well, it's a mental health issue." It is an interesting paradigm, one in which we are expected to understand the behavior of individuals based on a normative mental health condition. Are we even equipped to understand what a concept like mental health means? We live in a world where arbitrary norms are created based on qualities that society deems acceptable at the time. At some other time in history that normative claim was probably fundamentally different. Think women's rights and civil rights in general.
Are societal norms objective or normative claims, or are they arbitrary based on the current but ever changing zeitgeist? If social norms are arbitrarily created based on perceived value, then we are, without consideration, excluding large swathes of people from this "club" because they don't perceive societal norms in the same way. Then we are shocked when something extreme happens. We are so shocked that instead of trying to understand what might have caused the "issue" we marginalize the perpetrator and reduce the problem to "mental health."
When are we going to stop and ask the hard question... WHAT IS MENTAL HEALTH? What does it mean to be mentally healthy? Once we ask that question, we are going to have to confront some of the fundamental societal claims that just might turn out to be fundamentally problematic. We expect people to adhere to norms, then we turn around and exclude them from the very systems that exude those rules as norms in the first place. Undoubtedly, we can learn a great deal about what is wrong with society when we first examine the marginalized and undervalued. Some are there because of true mental health problems, indeed. Brain chemistry is a complex paradigm. But brain chemistry isn't a paradigm that exists in a vacuum. We aren't all, in an absolute sense, responsible for our brain's chemical and neuronal development.
Mass shootings, for instance, are horrific events that consume public consciousness when public consciousness is made aware of them. Many times, the causes are reduced to "mental health." Maladjusted people lash out against society because they weren't nurtured or prepared for societal interaction. But what does it mean to be prepared for social interaction? If there is even one discontinuous thread in a person's consciousness that causes them to resent society for ANY reason, it doesn't seem farfetched that even that one thread could cause an extreme reaction when there is so much inequity and materialistic shortsightedness to react to. We live in a society where the mainstream media forces down our throats what people ought to be doing with their lives, what they ought to look like, and what they ought to believe. Millions of people spend their entire lives unhappy because they are forced to try to live up to the exceptionalism portrayed by money mongers and media groups. Public consciousness is saturated by a capitalistic media culture that deliberately marginalizes large groups of people based on perceived normative value claims. Interestingly, we are then shocked when someone who doesn't fit the criteria for exceptional humanness lashes out against society because they never saw an outcome that would yield them that kind of acceptance. If all it takes is one thread of discontinuous development to cause an extreme reaction, then why is it a surprise when someone goes off the rails and unleashes hell on some socially accepted venue?
We are so quick to invoke "mental health" as the issue without defining what mental health consists of in the first place. For example, we live in a society where marriage is considered a social norm. As a result, everyone makes it their dream of young adulthood to find a partner to marry. Indeed, there are many financial and social benefits to marriage. But isn't there something awry, when marriages by a large percentage end up dysfunctional, and end up as a result in divorce? It doesn't take much time to examine the "mental health" literature to come to the conclusion that broken homes and split parentage is large cause of psychological dysfunction in children and young adults. This is just one primary example of what might cause a discontinuity in mental health, and yet, this is a social norm that we, as a whole, stress as a good thing; indeed, an admirable thing.
What of poverty? Societal inequality is a huge issue today, because it is becoming increasingly clear that a society driven by capitalistic incentives creates unreasonable demands on such a competitive society. As a result, there are large swathes of people that are left out of this incentive structure and are forced into potentially detrimental psychological territory. Again, if all it takes is one traumatic event for a psychological complex to react unfavorably to the society, then indeed, the marginalized and disgruntled are certainly prime for such extreme reactions.
I don't want to get caught in the trap of reductionism. It's very easy to reduce causal claims to outliers and extremes. Mental health is much too complex and dynamic than that as an issue. There are, indeed, cases where individuals grow up in what appear to be perfect developmental conditions, but end up on the wrong side of the normative value divide. What explains these cases? If a single trauma can cause upheaval in mental development, then it isn't enough to reduce all extreme issues to mental health, without pointing to the problem of mental health and specifically attempting to understand the cause.
The brain is so much more complex than our ideological biases can ever imagine. If one thinks society should be a certain way at the expense of certain people, it might be time to examine more closely what one calls "normal." And if one cannot agree on what normal is, then the onus is on all of us to think more closely and clearly before we start invoking the causal claim for ANYTHING as "mental health."
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