Petr Skrabanek Quote: Health, Politics & the Danger of Healthism

"Competition forces the development of new markets. The goal must be to turn all healthy people into sick people, i.e., people who consider themselves to be in need of therapeutic, rehabilitative, and preventive manipulation by experts, both chemically and psychologically, for as long as possible in order to be able to “live healthily.” This is already working quite well in the area of physical illness, but even better in the area of mental disorders, especially since there is no shortage of theories according to which almost all people are unhealthy. What is questionable is the analogous transfer of the concept of illness from the physical to the psychological. Some examples: a) The sensory organ of fear, responsible for signaling as yet unclear threats, is unpleasant but vitally necessary and therefore perfectly healthy; only the wrong way of dealing with fear (e.g., defense, repression) can make you ill. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, fear was recognized as a market niche and a number of new, independent disease entities were constructed – with many wonderful healing possibilities for grateful patients." Klaus Dörner

""Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”" Aldous Huxley