How often do we come across the term 'mental illness'? These days, almost constantly; it's on the news and in Eastenders; it saturates reports on social statistics and psychological well-being; someone we know will have suffered one, if we haven't suffered one ourselves. And yet, most mental illness, as we are commonly taught to understand it, does not really exist.
This is not to say that the devastating symptoms of the conditions identified as mental illnesses do not exist, of course and sadly they do – it is to state that these symptoms are not indicative of any organic defect; in short, their sufferers are not ‘ill’.
This is not to say that the devastating symptoms of the conditions identified as mental illnesses do not exist, of course and sadly they do – it is to state that these symptoms are not indicative of any organic defect; in short, their sufferers are not ‘ill’.
[Please note, I am referring to common, ‘everyday’ mental illnesses, such as depression, panic / anxiety disorders, self-harming, eating disorders, substance abuse, and so on – I am not referring to severe psychiatric complaints such as schizophrenia and violent psychopathologies.]
By labelling something as an illness, we are seeking to state that there is something going wrong with the person suffering the symptoms – that there is malfunction, disorder and disease, where there should be functionality, balance and health. In short, that the body has failed to produce the appropriate response - and the purpose of medical science is to ensure the correct bodily response take place. Correct reactions and functions are of paramount importance to the healthy person.
So, imagine one was witness, over many, many years, to terrible suffering and pain. Imagine one was forced to watch people being abused, hurt and violated, again and again. Imagine one had endured some of these terrible atrocities oneself.
How would one feel? One would feel deep trauma and distress. One would suffer panic and anxiety, guilt and despair, hopelessness and grief.
Women have been defrauded of a secure and essential social role, that of wife and mother. In exchange they have accepted the role of sex objects and worker drones.
But would one be ill? Surely grief and pain are the correct responses to traumatic situations. Surely these responses – while by no means pleasant – are the correct and thereby healthy reactions to have. And surely, having the correct responses to situations is the essence of empathy, of emotion, of being human.
Not according to modern psychiatry. Read paragraph four again. Panic and anxiety; guilt and despair; hopelessness and grief. These are all classic, text-book symptoms of the alleged medical malady, ‘depression’. They also tend to feature heavily in the diagnostic criteria of every other commonly diagnosed ‘mental illness’.
Now read paragraph three again. Imagine being witness to terrible suffering and pain? Imagine this going on for years and years? None of us need to imagine. It’s happening everywhere, all the time, and to everyone.
We are constantly deluged with statistics on mental health issues to corroborate this - estimates suggest one in five people suffer from depression at some point in their lifetime (1); 400 in every 100,000 people in the UK self-harm (2); ‘at least’ 1.1 million people in the UK suffer from an eating disorder (3); and one in four people will experience ‘some kind of mental health problem’ over the course of a year (2).
Anti-depressants are commonly prescribed to treat all of these conditions - in fact, anti-depressants are routinely used to treat conditions including, but not limited to: depression, generalized anxiety disorder, agitation, obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD), manic-depressive disorders, childhood enuresis (bedwetting), major depressive disorder, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, neuropathic pain, social anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) etc. Some off- label uses of antidepressants include, but are not limited to: fibromyalgia, chronic urticaria (hives), hot flashes, hyperhidrosis (drug-induced), pruritus (itching), premenstrual symptoms, bulimia nervosa, Tourette syndrome, binge eating disorder, etc.
Below is a graph to illustrate the levels of anti-depressant prescriptions between 1991 and 2006.
There are two possible explanations for these incredible figures and their astonishing increases year upon year:- one, that humanity has spontaneously devolved to create a generation of people with deep neurological and chemical malfunctions – i.e. ‘illnesses’ - on an extraordinary, (42) endemic scale never before seen in any other society; or two, it is our society, and not the people in it, that is sick - the people are merely reacting to this societal sickness, and to its deeply damaging nature, in the logical and appropriate way. Having extreme negative reactions to damaging environments, to what is dangerous and what is toxic, is not a sign of illness; it is a vital survival mechanism.
Current society is desperately dangerous and toxically ill - therefore, the deeming of ‘depression’, and other related conditions, as ‘illnesses’ is no more rational or accurate than the deeming of the excruciating pain from crunching a limb in a metal vice as ‘illness’ – and treating it by doping the patient with enough drugs that they don’t feel the pain anymore, rather than removing the limb from the source of its agony.
By treating a vital psychological mechanism that is intrinsic to human survival as an illness, physicians and psychiatrists are simply seeking to sustain and profit the sick society, rather than to restore or install any degree of wellness – they drug those who suffer the consequences, but they don’t fix the problem.
This happens because – despite the fact treating a healthy psychological response as malfunction is incredibly dangerous to the individual - it is enormously profitable to society. Firstly, and in the most obvious way, anti-depressants are very profitable - they make pharmaceutical companies a lot of money. Over 31 million prescriptions were written for antidepressants in 2007 in the UK alone - a 6 per cent rise since 2005 (1). No company wants to lose 31 million customers, regardless of what they’re producing, or how necessary or even effective their product is – and drug giant GlaxoSmithKline themselves admit that “a majority of drugs only work in 30 to 50 percent of people” (1). Oher estimates and studies are even less optimistic than that. A 2010 study published by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that antidepressants do not work for people with mild to moderate depression – the majority of depression cases. Only in isolated cases of "very severe" depression do antidepressants exhibit any perceived benefits at all, and, even then, they come with so many serious side effects that they are hardly worth the risk (5).
However, further than creating profit for the pharmaceutical companies who know perfectly well how dangerous and unnecessary their products are, the practice of pathologising the person to sustain the societal sickness persists simply to maximize economic output. People who are engulfed in feelings of grief, hopelessness, and despair are not generally very productive or lucrative assets to the workplace. Therefore, the primary goal of a capitalist, consumerist society, and the hugely lucrative pharmaceutical cartels that conspire to sustain it, is to get people, not “fit”, but “fit for work”. Drugging the unhelpful feelings into submission makes this possible, in at least enough cases to make it worthwhile – in the same way that providing a strong enough painkiller for a broken bone would enable someone to keep on using the limb. However, if they took the painkillers for long enough without ever treating the problem, then when they finally withdrew from the drug , the limb would be horribly mangled and dysfunctional – twisted beyond repair.
The aftermath of antidepressants is not too dissimilar - according to one researcher “it is well known among antidepressant manufacturers that their products permanently damage or destroy the emotional existence of those who take them, even after years of being off the drugs.” (6). Antidepressants, like recreational drugs, can cause severe and intense withdrawal symptoms, which, unlike recreational drugs, can last for months, years, or indefinitely - often leaving their users completely incapacitated, and experiencing symptoms far more sinister than those produced by the original complaint (7).
So, in short, although taking antidepressants is overwhelmingly more likely to create illness than it is to treat it, well over 30 million people every year are prescribed them anyway.
Of course, when it comes to dealing with mental ‘illness’, there are also the ‘talking therapies’, but this article does not concentrate on them, as they are almost never the first treatment prescribed by GPs, if they are prescribed at all, and their efficacy is very difficult to measure. Moreover, while a talking therapy is unlikely to have any harmful effects, there is no credible evidence to suggest they have any beneficial effects, either - because, while they avoid the more toxic consequences of drug treatments, they still don’t treat the problem – which is the society, and not the person. They may equip the person with some psychological tools to enable them deal with that society in a way that causes them less pain, but this is not a solution to the problem – indeed, it is merely another way of perpetuating it.
All this leads to the obvious question of why our social and medical systems have been set up this way – why would a sick society producing sick people be created at all, let alone maintained and bankrolled at such colossal human costs? The answer is simple – to benefit the ruling, powerful, financial elite, that control the banks, big businesses and financial institutions that, in turn, control us. Capitalist, free-market economies such as ours are driven by powerful corporations, and powerful corporations are, by their very nature, psychopathic – their only ‘moral imperative’ is to maximize profit, as was clearly demonstrated in Joel Bakan’s award-winning 2003 documentary ‘The Corporation’ 8, which tackled the question of “what would our society be like if it were run by ruthless psychopaths” – concluding that our society is run by them, and so it is like this.
One of the problems of a society run by ‘ruthless psychopaths’ is that their main goal – the maximizing of profit and power – is not and does not reflect human needs, quite the contrary – the concentration and aggressive pursuit of these things by one minority group entails, without exception, the oppression, exploitation and enslavement of the rest of the society they operate in.
Recognising that, and the fact that explicitly oppressive regimes always crumble through opposition and revolution, 20th century Western world controllers realised that, in order to keep hold of their wealth and power, they needed to control covertly; in other words, they needed to carefully guide, programme and manipulate people to be blind to their own oppression and enslavement, and to instead, become entirely complicit in it. As author and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) put it, "none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
This analysis, however, one that points to a malevolent unseen force as the root of all societal problems, is rejected by most people – even when they are in the deepest throws of anguish and pain because of it – as they believe they could never possibly be controlled in this way, nor would such a thing be allowed to happen in a ‘civilised’ society. They believe they live in a liberated, liberal society, where they are free and able to make their own choices and choose their own lives. But they believe this simply because - as with most other false beliefs our fabricated society is founded on - they have been told to believe it. If this were true, if people had real freedom of choice and personal liberty, then why would so many be choosing lives that are making them so unhappy?
Everybody in developed nations is indoctrinated and brainwashed from birth to believe in the myth of freedom and choice. They are bombarded with mind-bending propaganda from the mass media, from advertising, from popular culture, political ideologies, government messages and more, all of which are there to ensure people think and behave in the way societal rulers want them to. As stated in the book ‘The Age of Manipulation’ (Key, Madison Books, 1992; p95):
“We have been manipulated, and continue to be so… We think we are free, but only because we have been conditioned to think so. We believe that we think freely, but the parameters have been defined by other than ourselves.
[People] are, generally, unaware of the extent to which they are manipulated, managed, and conditioned by media, governments, leaders, and institutions that serve the vested interests of their political-social-economic systems.
Remarkably, virtually everyone in developed countries desperately tries to believe that they are immune to indoctrination. They think they think for themselves and readily know the difference between truth and falsity, fantasy and reality, superstition and science, fact and fiction. Technologically sophisticated cultures are conditioned to accept belief systems, behaviors, and values that would have been rejected out of hand by their stone-age predecessors. Primitives would instantly sense the obvious threats to survival and adjustment, or simple nonsense, inherent in many of the treasured beliefs of modern society.”
Then consider this paragraph from the 1958 preface to Aldous Huxley’s ominously prophetic Brave New World:
“Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses."
Huxley’s worst fears have been confirmed by numerous powerful authority figures for decades. Walter Lippmann, an American intellectual, writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner brought forth one of the first works concerning the usage of mass media in the developed world. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann
compared the masses to a "great beast" and a "bewildered herd" that needed to be guided by a governing class. He described the ruling elite as "a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." The ”bewildered
herd" has its function: to be "the interested spectators of action," i.e. not participants. Participation is the duty of "the responsible man", which is not the regular citizen.
compared the masses to a "great beast" and a "bewildered herd" that needed to be guided by a governing class. He described the ruling elite as "a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." The ”bewildered
herd" has its function: to be "the interested spectators of action," i.e. not participants. Participation is the duty of "the responsible man", which is not the regular citizen.
Mass media and propaganda are therefore tools that must be used by the elite to rule the public without physical coercion. One important concept presented by Lippmann is the "manufacture of consent", which is, in short, the manipulation of public opinion to accept the elite's agenda – to repeat von Goethe, “none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
It is worth noting that Lippmann is one of the founding fathers of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most influential foreign policy think tank in the world. Some current members include: Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Hilary Clinton, David Rockefeller, and the CEOs of major corporations, such as Nike, Coca-Cola and Visa. (9)
To give some perspective on just how powerful, distorting, and controlling media messages can be, consider the case of Fiji. Fiji was a nation that traditionally had little exposure to Western culture (it didn’t even have electricity until 1985), where the fuller figure was celebrated. The preference for the build of both sexes was a robust, well-muscled body. Slim women were seen as weak, nobody dieted, and eating disorders were unheard of.
In 1995, television arrived. The Fijians had just one television station, which broadcasted programmes from the UK, US and New Zealand, such as Seinfeld, ER, Melrose Place and Xena: Warrior Princess.
By 1998 – just 38 months later - Anne Becker, a Harvard anthropologist who has studied Fijian eating habits since 1988, found that there had been an extraordinary rise in disordered eating patterns. Now, 74% of teenage girls now felt they were “too big or too fat”, 15% reported vomiting to control weight, and while "nobody was dieting in Fiji 10 years ago, an alarmingly high percentage of adolescents are dieting now." (10)
If one station via one medium can have this impact in as little as three years, imagine the potential impact of hundreds of stations and countless mediums over a whole lifetime.
These mediums have been able to so effectively dominate and manipulate Western thought because there has been a simultaneous dismantling of all the traditional systems that had previously guided and influenced people. For example, while 50 years ago, over half of people regularly went to Church, now that figure stands at less than 5% (11). While communities used to be integrated and social, now more than 50 per cent of people don't talk to their neighbours and 40 per cent wouldn't even recognise them if they saw them in the street (12). Household sizes have declined year on year, from an average of nearly five people in 1900, to just over two-and-a-half by 2000 (13), with single-occupancy households increasing massively to number 6.8million in 2006 - and projected to reach 10.9million in 2031. By this time, single household occupancy will outnumber any other kind of household in Britain (14).
This trampling and dismantling of the home, the family, the community and the Church as places to seek advice, gain knowledge, and generally socialize and interact, has left the way clear for mass media programmers to dominate people’s thoughts, value systems and behaviours. By doing this, they simultaneously destroy people’s traditional, stable social roles and identities – instead turning them into individualist consumer addicts: addicted to money, goods, clothes, TV, cars, houses, holidays, cosmetics, cosmetic surgeries, alcohol, drugs, whatever, doesn’t really matter, as long as they spend, spend, spend. The wealthy elite cannot, after all, make money if people do not keep buying things - and they cannot control people’s spending power without harnessing and manipulating their needs.
However, people do not need to buy things – much less be addicted to them - to satisfy any of their true needs. Needs with a price are manufactured by the people who set that price - human beings are quite capable of creating everything they need to live well and productively without buying a thing; they’ve managed it for thousands of years.
Therefore, to ensure people willingly abandon productive, fulfilling, communal lives, and become addicted individualist consumers instead, they have had to be re-programmed – in other words, separated from their real needs and the (free) ways of satisfying them, and then aggressively offered false, fake alternatives instead – which cost money. To make that money, they have to enter the privatized workforce (even the public sector is private in this sense), where they work for the corporations and cynical systems that have already enslaved them, thus further contributing to the success and profit of the ruling elite while simultaneously destroying their own power.
The modern, urbanized, privatized world we currently inhabit is an anomaly and a catastrophe. Historically and across all cultures and civilizations, people have lived and worked together in relatively small, integrated, functional groups – families, communities, places of worship and so on, that were, to a large extent, self-sustaining and self-regulating. These provided people with a sense of belonging, direction, stability, a moral code, a clear place and function and value, and everything else that humanity needs to thrive. Then, in the latter half of the twentieth century, a so-called ‘social revolution’ took place, and families, communities, and religions all broke down at once and irretrievably - taking most social and moral codes with them.
In her social history “Farewell to the East End”, Jennifer Worth recounts how the rapid social changes of the 1960s were “life shattering” for many, as they had to endure the tearing apart of the extended families and communities that had “provided the unity and been the strength of life for generations.” (Orion Books, 2009; p312)
During this time, traditional roles and values were quickly stigmatized as being deeply oppressive – renowned 1960s author and revolutionary feminist Betty Friedan called the family “a comfortable concentration camp” (http://www.wendymcelroy.com/sexcor/marr.html). Thus, people were encouraged to abandon traditional family lives and family-orientated communities, and seek completely new, unknown ways of living instead – something that they did with dizzying speed. Jennifer Worth notes that, during her career as an East End midwife, births per month dropped from around 100 in the 1950s to just four or five by 1964. People everywhere were subject to inordinate pressures to leave the families and communities they had been born into in order to ‘succeed’ – that is, in order to become money-controlled consumer addicts instead; profitable, taxable and controllable quantities.
Major challenges to this intended dysfunctional dystopia would have come from the strong, functional units of the old society - the family, the wider community and the Church, units that had always and indelibly shaped and sustained people - therefore, these had to be broken down and discredited, systematically and irrevocably removed from mainstream existence. This was achieved with quick and brutal efficiency, thus creating deep instability, terrible emptiness and desperate psychological need in all people – which consumer giants were only too eager to fill with goods, gadgets, cars, houses, holidays, clothes, cosmetics, alcohol, and so on; quantities all embedded with the glittering promises that they would fill the gaping psychological chasms left by the devastating and total maceration of society.
Everyone fell for this very quickly, because human need is intense, emptiness is unbearable, and consumerism is addictive – so, rather than a society full of integrated, functional adults living productive and fulfilling lives, we now have a society of stunted, isolated, brainwashed addicts, hopelessly enslaved to their manufactured needs and completely unable to so much as identify their real ones, much less meet them.
Unsurprisingly, severing people from what they really need, and forcing them to clamour for things they don’t, has had catastrophic effects on human wellbeing. Despite what we have been led to believe regarding the benefits of prosperity and affluence, study after study has shown that, far from material wealth making people happier, or even maintaining the status quo, it progressively makes them unhappier. Past a certain point, the richer a country and its individual people become, the unhappier they get. A Gallup poll has shown that Britain is less happy than in the 1950s – despite the fact we are three times richer. The amount of people claiming to be “very happy” has fallen from 52% in 1957, to just 36% by 2005 (15).
The United States is the richest nation on Earth, and below is a graph from the Washington Post, illustrating happiness trends from 1970 to 2000:
Although there is a slight incline in the mid-nineties, the facts are clear: the populations of the richest, most developed nations on earth are unhappy and becoming unhappier. As the BBC puts it, “the story of wealth failing to translate into extra happiness is the story of the Western world” (16). This is why so many who live in West start to sense that, far from their feelings of unhappiness and dissatisfaction being a bit of a blip or a temporary malaise, there is something much bigger, and much darker, going on. Many start to feel increasing feelings of panic, or anxiety, or hopelessness, or despair – at which point, they are promptly told by their GP that they are ‘ill’ and need to be ‘treated’.
This response from the medical community and from society at large is a necessity to maintain the current social (dis)order: in other words, to maintain the control and agenda of the very wealthy, very powerful people, who demand our unquestioning and lifelong servitude; and will label us ill and drug us into compliance if they don’t get it.
To really understand what is going on in any given situation it is always useful and often imperative to ask the question – who benefits? Clearly, what is going on in current Western societies it not benefitting the huge majority of people who live in them; the only strata of society that truly benefits from the current social order is the wealthy elite of the world; the bankers, the financiers, and the big business owners who dominate the world’s resources and therefore run the show. They orchestrate the rest of society to serve their own ends, and for no other purpose. That is why they label dissent from these ends as ‘illness’.
It seems pertinent to mention at this point that, of these engineered and inevitable mental ‘illnesses’, those who suffer them most are women, as illustrated by the below graph:
This is no coincidence or unexplained anomaly – as, fundamental to the bankers’ dismantling of society was the dismantling of the family – which meant the complete dismantling and re-engineering, of women, who had, until forty years ago, devoted themselves entirely to the family - and had done so for the whole of human history.
Therefore, women had to be powerfully re-programmed to believe that their traditional roles in society as vital lynchpins of families and communities had actually been horrendously ‘oppressive’, and that the only way they could achieve the ‘empowerment’ they so desperately needed was by abandoning all traditional values and aggressively pursuing a career instead (i.e. by becoming money-controlled consumer slaves). This has, within less than two generations, led to a society ravaged by unprecedented social disorder and interpersonal chaos - endemic divorce, one-parent families, mass abortions, rampant STDs, dysfunctional children, and an enormous incline in mental ‘illnesses’ – amongst women particularly. This was always the obvious consequence of ‘feminism’ and ‘women’s lib’, as, as Dr. Henry Makow, author of “Cruel Hoax: Feminism and the New World Order” (Silas Green, 2007) has stated:
“[m]odern women are the victim of a monstrous hoax perpetrated by the bankers and their lackeys in media, government and education.
Women have been defrauded of a secure and essential social role, that of wife and mother. In exchange they have accepted the role of sex objects and worker drones.
Feminism was promoted for the purpose of de stabilizing society, and creating dysfunctional people. Stunted people can be brainwashed and manipulated. Feminism masquerades as a movement for women's rights, [but] in reality, feminism is ruthlessly opposed to femininity, masculinity, heterosexuality, the nuclear family and children.
The result of feminism is massive social and psychological dysfunction.” (17)
The result of feminism is massive social and psychological dysfunction.” (17)
This is not to ‘blame’ women for all social ills, nor to suggest that women shouldn’t have careers if they want them, or indeed that men aren’t suffering enormously too (the above graph demonstrates that they are hardly immune) – it is simply to state that, from the perspective of diagnosed mental ‘illnesses’, women are suffering most, when this has not always been the case. A report by B P Dohrenwend in the American Journal of Sociology shows that while, prior to 1950, for every 7 men diagnosed as mentally ill, only 2 women were similarly diagnosed, after 1950, the ratio changed to 22 women for every 2 men (18).
This fact that this catastrophic reversal of mental health statistics correlates so precisely with the rise of ‘women’s liberation’ in the West cannot be ignored when evaluating their current position, and why they are now so unhappy. And they are unhappy – according to a study published in the American Economic Journal in 2009: “More than 1.3 million men and women have been surveyed over the last 40 years, both here and in the U.S. and in developed countries around the world. Wherever researchers have been able to collect reliable data on happiness, the finding is always the same: greater educational, political, and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women, as compared to men. “(19) The UK Guardian published an article on this same subject in 2009, stating that “according to several significant studies, women's happiness relative to men's has declined in the last 25 years. This includes women of all age groups, and it is evident in many countries, particularly in the US and the UK.” (20)
This, of course, goes against the grain of every single politically correct notion and understanding of life we are indoctrinated to believe from birth, but as the research clearly shows – the findings are always the same. So why? Why are women, in light of all their modern opportunities and ‘liberations’, now so much unhappier than they once were? This answer is simple - they are unhappy because women’s ‘liberation’ is a nonsense and a lie.
Women, for the most part, have been ‘liberated’ to become replaceable workers and exchangeable sexual commodities. They have forfeited the deeply respected traditional roles that guaranteed them a lifetime of stability, identity, and social worth, in exchange for becoming, mostly low-level, worker drones (since, irrespective of their qualifications, women everywhere are concentrated in entry- and middle-level positions (21))), while their personal lives reflect the carnage strewn chaos of modern life - in 2009, 195,743 women had abortions (22), meaning that, of viable pregnancies that year, nearly 30% concluded in abortion (23).
In that same year, some 383,349 women were newly diagnosed with STDs – not including HIV - a 38% increase from the year 2000 (24), with Britain having overall the highest proportion of single mothers in the European Union (25).
Despite the politically correct rhetoric, being a single mother has been shown to be disastrous for women and children. A report in the journal Psychological Medicine showed that lone mothers have rates of depressive episodes three times higher than any other group; that poverty, social stress and depressive disorders cluster in the lone mothers’ group; and concluded that “[as] lone mothers are increasing in number… their high rates of material disadvantage and depressive disorder may have considerable implications for psychiatric and social policy.” (‘Lone Mothers, Social Exclusion and Depression’, Targosz et al, 2003). The fact that such environments are damaging to children is obvious, but the reality is that they are catastrophic. Reports show that: 63% of all youth suicides, 70% of all teen pregnancies, 71% of all adolescent chemical/substance abusers, 80% of all prison inmates, and 90% of all homeless and runaway children, come from single mother homes (B. Bennett; The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators; New York, Broadway Books, 1994). A 1998 paper entitled ‘Father Absence and Youth Incarceration’ showed that the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is if they were raised by a single parent (Harper and McLanahan, 1998). In short, the scales are weighed against children of single mothers from the day that they are born - according to a report by the National Office of Statistics published in 1999, babies born to single mothers are even more likely to die. (40)
Daughters of single mothers are, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly more likely to become single mothers themselves – and thus the cycle begins again.
All in all, women’s ability to achieve a sense of contentment and fulfillment with their lives is being eroded with terrifying and bewildering force, and these forces are taking control earlier and earlier – a study of 15-year-olds conducted in Scotland in 1987, 1999 and 2006 recorded concern at the 1999 results, which showed that the incidence of common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and anhedonia (loss of capacity to experience pleasure) had significantly increased for girls from 19% to 32%. The increase for boys was much smaller, at only 2%. But the 2006 set of results were even more dramatic - girls by then were at a staggering rate of 44%, or nearly one in two (West and Sweeting, 2006).
To sum, women are gradually shattering as functional, fulfilled people. Where they were once indispensable, they are now expendable; where they were once respected and valued, they are now objectified and discarded; a dire situation they embrace and perpetuate, even as it destroys them, as they are told they don’t ‘need’ men anymore – that men are oppressive / unreliable / unnecessary etc, and, instead, they should seek fulfillment in career, friends, booze and shoes - because these things make them ‘autonomous’, ‘independent’, ‘empowered’, and all the other nothing buzz-words that have been successfully used to market women’s own destruction to them in just a couple of generations.
Men, meanwhile, are told they don't 'need' to commit to women either, given the mass availability of casual sex; where a lifelong commitment was once required for access to sex, now a conversation is not always a prerequisite. The sex industry is rampant, pornography is everywhere, and a study quoted in Newsweek concluded that "the burgeoning demand for porn and prostitutes is warping personal relationships and endangering women and girls." (26) This demand has led to a dizzying proliferation of services so commonplace that many men don't see strip clubs or lap dances as forms of prostitution. "The more the commercial sex industry normalises this behaviour, the more of this behaviour you get," says Norma Ramos, exeuctive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).Perhaps most destructively of all, however, is that men are taught that, in the long-term, women don’t ‘need’ them anymore anyway - because women can make their own money, have their own homes, and even produce their own children; an idea perpetuated by many phenomenally successful ‘independent women’ throughout the fashionable media (27), with the press saturated with similar such headlines: “Men could be completely sidelined,” according to the Daily Mail.
“Women to Self Create,” blared a headline in Australia’s Daily Telegraph.
“Men beware!” began a story on one U.S. news Web site (28) – and so on.
This situation is disastrous for both sexes, and for any children their unstable unions may produce, as it makes the sexes untenable to each other as long-term partners, and unreliable as committed co-parents to their children. Marriage rates in 2008 were at their lowest since records began (29), 135,994 divorces took place (30), and nearly one in two children were born outside of marriage (31). While some couples may claim cohabitation is a sufficient statement of commitment, the report ‘Cohabitation in the 21st Century” (Hayward and Brandon, 2007) has shown that cohabitation is fragile and generally short-lived; less than 25% of cohabiting couples last five years, with almost half separating by two years. Where children are concerned, cohabiting couples are more than ten times as likely to split up than married couples before their child is 16; just 7% of them are still together by that stage (32).
If cohabiting couples do go on to marry, the report shows they are 60% more likely to divorce than couples that have not lived together, with the marriages lasting for less time. Between 1960 and 2000, the divorce rate rose by 502%. (33)
The dire effects of this instability and breakdown show themselves most severely upon the children – a study by the Department of Health in 2008 showed that children from broken homes are five times more likely to suffer from mental difficulties than those whose parents stay together, and are more likely to do badly at school, suffer poor health, and fall into crime, addiction and poverty as adults; this is across all social groups and at all levels of parental affluence - the findings say that whether parents stay together is as or more important than whether the home is poor, workless, has bad health, or has no one with any educational qualifications. (34)
A 1988 study found that, when compared to children from homes disrupted by death, children from divorced homes have more psychological problems. (35)
To sum, and as William J. Bennett writes in "The Broken Hearth”: "Most of our social pathologies, crime, imprisonment rates, welfare, educational underachievement, alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, depression, STD's, are manifestations, direct and indirect, of the crackup of the family.” (Broadway Books, 2003; p.4).
Distorted modern rhetoric about freedoms, choices and entitlements do not come close to reflecting the fractured reality of family and marital breakdown – fractures that do not heal. As one thinker put it:
“What about my happiness? What about my rights? What about my freedom to get on with my life? What about finding that right person for me? Even my job, my retirement plans and my investment plans have a contingency plan, a "Plan B." So why not my personal life? I deserve something better than what I have now. Divorce offers me an option, a way out! Or does it?
Think about the disruption of family ties, of family legacy. Think about the financial disruption of the family income when often there is just enough to get by when the family unit is together under one roof. And probably the most devastating consequences of divorce are the emotional scars that will last a lifetime for your children as the family unit breaks up. Despite statements that ‘the kids will get over it’, long term studies show that those scars last a lifetime. “ (36)
Of those who make claims such as ‘children would rather be with one happy parent than two unhappy ones’ they are conspicuous by the fact that they are almost never the children themselves. Children may be happier to be free of homes where serious spousal abuse occurs, but research shows that ‘abuse’ (defined as either emotional or physical) is cited as a reason in just 17% of divorce petitions. (37) More divorces occur because of ‘family strains’ (37) than they do abuse.
Moreover, not only does divorce, almost without exception, cause profound and lifelong damage to children, but the perceived benefits it will bring to adults almost never materialize - a study by the University of Chicago concluded that there is “no evidence that unhappily married adults who divorced were typically any happier than unhappily married people who stayed married." (Waite et al, 2007). Indeed, they often become unhappier – the study found that divorced spouses drank 7.3 days per month versus 4.7 days for those unhappily married, and they drank more per day. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that an unhappy marriage can be turned around – the study found that of those who first rated their marriages "very unhappy" but stayed married, five years later 80% said they were happily married. Of the "unhappy" group, two-thirds became "happy."
The fact that modern society is so blasé about divorce and single-parenthood – often encouraging and championing such situations – when they rarely benefit adults whilst almost always profoundly scarring children, is a stunning indictment of how sick our society is. As the social revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela put it, “There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."
Moreover, the carnage caused by these fragile and unstable relationships does not stop with the children or adults involved. The trends infect the whole of wider society, and, in particular, young people at the beginning of adulthood. If they do not come from a broken home themselves – which 40% of those born 1982-1992 do (38) – then they have witnessed countless examples of “broken homes, re-formed homes, never-formed homes” and been told that such arrangements are not merely acceptable and bearable, but normal and healthy - which means, according to the body Pew Research, ”they are repeating that pattern; perhaps even more.” (38)
The abandonment of traditional values and commitments means young adults are suspended indefinitely in a bizarre state of arrested development, where the rituals and practices that signified adulthood and maturation in every other society, have been abandoned. In 2005, just 38% of people had finished studying, left home, got married, had a child, and become financially independent by age 30 - compared with 71% in 1960. (39)
This means that emotional maturity beyond the insecure, immature level of the teenage rarely happens in either sex. Thus, young women and men avoid growing up - in the same way that they avoid all other natural, healthy, and functional orchestrations of human society. These avoidance strategies have had their obvious, and inevitable, repercussions.
Again, to reiterate, this is not to state that all people must or should get married and have children – merely to state that, for an extremely long time, most did, and most societies where this happened functioned fairly well and had far less disorder and chaos than we have now. Indeed, commitment, family and stability were considered profound, sacred social rites that were honoured and respected. Therefore, if these arrangements are going to be as comprehensively discarded and condemned as they have been, something substantially better – more functional, more conducive to fulfillment and happiness – must be instituted in their place. It is quite plain to see that this has not happened - the opposite has. Now, there is no such thing as ‘profound, sacred social rites that are honoured and respected’ at all. Instead, people are degraded and devalued from cradle to grave, programmed to behave in ever more degenerate and destructive ways - which leave them weak (easy to control) and empty (desperate to consume and feed their addictions).
The nucleus of current social ‘values’ is essentially that people are worthless – they are not worth emotional protection or psychological stability; stable families or undisrupted childhoods; honoured commitments or reliable supports; and they are definitely not worth self-respect. All social messages affirm and re-affirm this constantly by continually barraging people with messages that twist their minds into those of relentlessly insecure, grasping, brainwashed consumers, who are only as worthy as the next pay cheque, or purchase, or number on the scales Current social programming eschews and denies the critical importance of stable, balanced, safe environments for all adults and children – ones which value people and recognize their worth, by guiding them towards productive lives and protecting them from things that will damage them. Traditional cultures - truly civilized ones - embed these things in every aspect of their society – they are its building blocks and its cornerstones.
However, a child born in the modern, ‘progressive’ world is overwhelmingly more likely to: have an unstable childhood, live in a single-parent family, develop emotional problems, underachieve at school, abuse drugs and alcohol, self-harm, become eating disordered, contract STDs, have an abortion or use prostitutes, fall into crime or poverty, never marry or get divorced, become a single-parent, experience clinical depression, and end up living alone, than they are to live a happy and fulfilled life.
So, in the end, there is no ‘mental illness’ – for women, men, or children. There is just a sick society of twisted, tortured individuals who are suffering terribly and perilously. This is a fairly bleak diagnosis of our society, but that is not the same as a bleak diagnosis of the people in it. The society is sick, terminally so, and needs complete and fundamental reconstruction if it is ever to recover – and the more people that begin to understand this, and understand the true causes of their unhappiness, the more scope and likelihood there is for this change. What exact shape that change needs to take is not entirely clear, but as one thinker put it:
“By returning to traditional values, we escape prostituting ourselves to money, career and television. We give up the globalist lifestyle and determine our own destiny. We refuse to give up our freedom. You can sense it lingering in the air: the slow but growing resistance against our modern way of life and its tedious, stupid and corrupt side-effects. The walls are cracking and people are fleeing their caves of enslavement. We are returning to our traditions, acknowledging what people have known for thousands of years: without roots, no trees can grow.” (Alex Birch) (41)
© 2011
Referencing:
3. http://www.disordered-eating.co.uk/eating-disorders-statistics/eating-disorders-statistics-uk.html
31.
33. http://www.2-in-2-1.co.uk/ukstats.html
35. Robert E. Emery, Marriage, Divorce and Children’s Adjustment” Sage Publications, 1988.
41. , http://www.corrupt.org
