The Lunatic is in My Head (piece on Tuscon, Arizona shootings)

As long as treating the symptoms rather than the disease is easier or more profitable or more likely to maintain the status quo for those in power, that is the course that will be taken.

I often wonder why "The Race for the Cure" is not "The Race for the Cause".

I fully expect acts of this nature, with the concommitant reactions you write about, to continue and increase as the things we have come to expect do not materialize. The realization that much of what we have been conditioned to believe is pure fiction is a powerful awakening.

MarkM

That is a very powerful insight, and very well stated.  Thanks.

Travlin 

Well done.  Thanks for writing and sharing this.  Sadly, I think this and attacks like the Florida school board shooting and the Texas IRS incident are going to be more common as people struggle with our situation.

Tim

Agreed that America as a whole is delusional and this is fueled by the delusional and manipulative mainstream media.  i agree that these incidents will increase in frequency as the economy gets worse.   However, there have always been people on the "edge" and it will always be that way.  I remember my grandfather talking about a boy in his high school that took an axe and murdered his whole family. 

6 people died on that tragic day.  But lets also keep things in perspective.  On average, about 100 people die everyday in auto accidents in the US.  Even thought we're at the end of the age of cheap oil, on a daily basis my car and other drivers are the biggest threat to my health.  It still blows me away everyday when I get on the road how recklessly, mindlessly, carelessly, and agressively people drive.  So, just remember to drive safely. 

Just my two cents,

Brian

...Thus, in a world of profound economic collapse, fewer people can afford mental health services, yet as a result of personal and societal economic meltdown, more need them than perhaps at any time in our history since the Great Depression. Psychotherapy and psychiatric hospitalization as we have known them are becoming increasingly difficult to access and within the next decade may well become non-existent—a gargantuan reality rarely addressed in media discourse about “mental health stigma” and “mental health treatment.”

The Madness of Industrial Civilization

The larger issue unaddressed because it is un-named and willfully unexamined, is the paradigm of industrial civilization itself. Historians note that civilization began with sedentary, agricultural communities which evolved into cities. Cities are by definition, communities that are not self-sufficient and depend on external venues for resources. Increasingly, cities became non-agricultural and dependent on other communities and nations for their survival. Disconnection from the land base facilitated what Thomas Berry calls a “use relationship” with nature and other members of the earth community, including humans. Once relationship devolves from relatedness to using the other, we are well on the road to madness because relatedness means seeing, appreciating, valuing the innate qualities of the other. Use inherently means not seeing the other and its/his/her attributes but objectifying the other and perceiving the other only in terms of how the other can benefit oneself. Such is the essence of dysfunctional relatedness.

Supplanting relatedness, use became the modus operandi of modernity and particularly of growth-obsessed, profit-driven industrial civilization. That which profit could acquire—stuff, possessions, and power replaced relatedness as the essential elements of meaning and purpose. These, it was assumed, would bring unprecedented happiness and fulfillment. Yet myriad studies in the 20^th and 21^st centuries indicate the opposite. The level of satisfaction and sense of well being in a society does not increase with the level of growth or economic prosperity.

...

In fact, I would argue that as growth-driven civilizations decline, the madness engendered by use relationships and the vapid meaninglessness of acquiring possessions and power are increasingly laid bare. Industrial civilization is inherently crazy-making, and Jared Loughner is merely another poster boy for its paradigm.

Yet in our mental health discourses, we fail to consider what Derrick Jensen beautifully observed, long before the Tucson massacre:

"I’m continually stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely unquestioned. Even more disturbing is the fact that these beliefs are somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human: perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what we do...."

When I was a psychotherapist in private practice in the 1990s, I learned that 80% of mental health clinicians who had spent precious years and resources training to become psychotherapists would leave that field within five years of entering it. I have no idea what the statistics are for this phenomenon in 2011, but I do know that given America’s economic meltdown and the inability of states, counties, and cities to fund mental health services and the inability of individuals to pay for it out-of-pocket, the psychotherapy profession is becoming an increasingly thankless one.

As the collapse of industrial civilization exacerbates, I anticipate epidemic levels of depression, suicide, and indiscriminate violence. Human beings blindsided by society’s and their own unraveling will be desperate to be heard, comforted, and reassured that they are not alone....

The Ultimate Oxymoron: Industrial Civilization And Mental Health