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e psikiatrise shqiptare dhe raportin e saj me politiken.
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klasen politike per te klasifikuar elemente te padeshiruar si
paranoiak me fantazi politike(paranoia and political behaviour) apo
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Perspectives - Vol. 4, No. 4 - Disturbed Collective Mental States
William W. Bostock, School of Government, University of Tasmania
As we near the end of the millennium and look back over a succession of human-made calamities, many people are becoming very pessimistically concerned about what the future might have in store. Some are even consulting the works of Nostradamus, the French astrologer and physician of the 16 th Century, for advice on how to prepare for the catastrophes which may await us.
Medical Explanations of Human Catastrophe
It is less common to consult psychiatrists as to advice on the mental health or otherwise of nations and states, though it has been suggested that the Royal College of Psychiatrists of the UK has a role to play in the prevention of war (Haig, 1991), and an editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry has written on the subject of mental illness among political leaders (Freeman, 1991). In fact, throughout the ages, medical people from a variety of subdisciplines have devoted much of their attention to understanding the causes of collective distress as well as that afflicting individuals.
Freud (1957) wrote on the causes of war and recognised the existence of the death wish and the denial of one's own death as part of the process and concluded pessimistically that war cannot be abolished because of the great differences between nations but proposed that individuals examine their own unconscious attitude to death as a start to the process of conflict reduction.
In investigations into the causes of genocide, there have been some very significant contributions from members of various subdisciplines of the caring professions.Collective anxiety neurosis was hypothesised by the psychiatrist Kiev(1973), collective habituation to genocide was discussed by the psychoanalyst Shatan (1976: 122), collective retribution by the psychologist Staub (1992: 164) and collective trauma from the perspective of health care by Myers (1999).
With these and some other very notable exceptions, though, medical people are generally not engaged in debates about or investigations into the causes of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rape and the targeting of children as victims of organised violence. By contrast medical terminology is being used more and more frequently in the description and analysis of these activities.
Non-Medical Explanations of Human-made Catastrophe
The idea of a sickness of society is very ancient. Certain events in the time of Plato (427--347 BC), notably the condemnation to death of his friend and teacher Aristotle led Plato to address this problem: society, and the body politic, are sick. How can they be cured? (Popper, 1968: 160). Plato saw the problem as one arising from democracy or mob rule, leading to disorder, in other words, as a problem of collective behaviour.
In writing of the Nazi genocide and the Stalinist purges and genocide, the philosopher/historian Borkenau used the term collective madness (Borkenau, 1981: 82) to describe a situation of generalised paranoia where there is a 'universal, self-destructive persecutory mania separating man from man' (Borkenau, 1981: 77).
In Rwanda in 1994, a genocide was unleashed by Hutu extremists in which 800,000 people were murdered in one hundred days (Omaar and de Waal, 1999),a rate of killing which exceeded even that of Auschwitz at its worst. One explanation of this paroxysm of hatred has been given as being created through the manipulation of people's collective fears by cynical leaders (Lake and Rothchild, 1996).
Writing on the subject of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, the novelist Danilo Kis identified nationalism as a state of collective and individual paranoia, where collective paranoia is a combination of many individual paranoias brought to paroxysm in a group whose goal is 'to solve problems of monumental importance: a survival and prestige of that group's nation.' (Kis, 1996: 1).
Collective Behaviour and Collective Consciousness
A survey of recent social science literature finds reference to collective dignity (Smith, 1991: 163), collective memory (Takei, 1998), and collective consciousness (Munaayyer, 1999), indicating a revival of interest in collective mental phenomena. Other disciplines reveal a longer but also intermittent interest in the subject of collective behaviour and psychology.
The classic formulation of the concept of collective behaviour was proposed in 1895 by Le Bon (1960) who theorised that in a crowd, the individual's psychology is subordinated to a collective mentality which radically transforms individual behaviour.
A little later Durkheim proposed the concept of collective consciousness as something special (which) must be designated by a special term, simply because the states which constitute it differ specifically from those which constitute the individual consciousnesses.' (Durkheim, 1964: 103n).
Jung also had a similar concept of collective unconscious, and both Durkheim and Jung had in common the idea of collective representations or archetypes which were typically expressed through religion (Greenwood, 1990: 1).
The concept has until recent times fallen into disuse for several reasons. Firstly, collective consciousness seems to mean group mind, or the idea of a hypothetical collective transcendent consciousness or spirit which was assumed to characterise a group or community (Reber, 1995: 323). The obvious methodological problem of how such an entity could be tested empirically has been such as to place it outside modern discussion, and have led one observer to comment that 'there has been practically no research directly assessing the reality of collective consciousness' (Varvoglis,1997: 1). The second type of problem is that if the aetiology of mental illness is physical or biochemical, as appears to be the case (Mental Health Research Institute, 1999),then one cannot say that a collective consciousness, as a new entity that has emerged, can be ill in the same way as an individual can be, in other words, collective mental illness can only be metaphorical.
Collective Mental Illness
In 1973 Cawte proposed the term sick society, referring to a society that has a high amount of psychiatric disabilities, as a result of exceptional stress from ecological and economic hardship, natural and human-produced disaster, disturbance of domesticity, interference with vital strivings and social fragmentation (Cawte, 1973: 365-379). When one considers the health of Aboriginal Australians, then and sadly still now, one can concede that Cawte was justified in describing their society as 'sick', within the terms of his definition, but is one entitled to identify a condition of collective mental illness? Cawte considered this problem and concluded that while it is not unthinkable to describe a culture as abnormal or maladapted in a particular diagnostic sense, the risk of cultural bias is such that it is preferable not to refer to a dominant mode of mental abnormality but simply to refer to a society as having 'a high proportion of members disordered in various ways'. (Cawte, 1973: 365).
The problem of value judgements about behaviour also applies at the individual level. The precise nature of the link between mental state and behaviour is the age-old philosophical and moral as well as psychological question of responsibility, which is likely to remain unresolved. Another way of looking at the same problem is to say that antisocial behaviour may not be a result of illness ' harm to societyshould not be part of the definition of mental illness, because to include it would open the door to saying that, for example, all rapists and all those who oppose society's aims are mentally ill'. (Collier, Longmore and Harvey, 1991: 314).
The Cause of Human Catastrophe: Evil Intent or Mental Illness?
In his book about one particular type of human catastrophe, Staub wrote that 'any genocide might be seen as a form of insanity" (1992: 91) and went on to observe that the participants are generally found to be normal by the conventional standards of mental health, concluding that the problem was one of evil. But if we deny that a collectivity can have mental illness and argue that human catastrophe is caused by evil thoughts, then we must accept that the deliberate starvation, torture and murder of, say, children, is normal behaviour.
The answer to this problem of 'bad or mad' is to accept the need for responsibility, with consequent war crimes tribunals that do not let evil go unpunished, but also to seek explanation in the influence of what can be called collective mental states, and see human catastrophe as a product of a complex interaction between evil intentions and a disturbed mental state.
The full range of human thought processes, emotions and responses, including aggression, as examined and hypothesised by psychologists, is accepted as a starting point. Wherever there is a collectivity, there will be a collective mental state, as large numbers of people share similar ontologies and emotions including fear. Le Bon, (1960) called this process contagion, on the analogy of an infectious disease., but this theory has its critics who saw collective behaviour as either a product of convergence or of a special set of norms that may emerge (Mitchell, 1968: 31-32). While it is tempting to use medical terms such as paranoia, psychosis, or schizophrenia to describe a collective mental state, this should be resisted in favour of non-medical terminology.
While remaining within the constraint of a non-clinical terminology, it is possible to develop a range of plain-English descriptors for a collective mental state. In addition to those already proposed (fear, anxiety, memory, consciousness, habituation to genocide, trauma, grief, guilt, retribution, paranoia and madness), one could propose a simple five polarity schema of:
(1) security or insecurity, from Borkenau's persecutory paranoia (1981: 76) or Lake and Rothchild's collective fear of the future (1996: 1)
(2) elation or depression, that is, an expanding or contracting sense of the future state of key values, with reference to the pervasive melancholy referred to by Shatan (1976: 113)
(3) realism or delusion, noting that although delusion is a symptom of schizophrenia when found in individuals (Mental Health Research Institute, 1999), that does not exclude it from being held by a group or community
(4) inclusion within or exclusion from the collectivity through the redefining of boundaries in a process that can ultimately lead to ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide (Staub, 1992)
(5) non-habituation to violence or habituation to violence, noting Shatan's collective habituation to genocide (Shatan, 1973).
Thus without using clinical terminology it is possible to describe in plain English the collective mental state of a community both relative to other communities and also in terms of changes to itself at an earlier time, and that condition could be summarised as either adjusted to its circumstances or disturbed.
The Consequences of a Severely Disturbed Collective Mental State
We have noted that from time to time human societies enter periods of collective madness which can quickly lead to human catastrophe characterised by large scale organised violence. Given that there will always be persons of evil intent, a well-adjusted collective mental state has some immunity from the extreme form of behaviour that involve violence. But when a collective mental state is severely disturbed, it is possible for these persons to seize power and translate their intentions into actions, particularly through fear and panic. The disturbances may already be present in large measure or be augmented from small beginnings. The disturbances may be ones of insecurity, crystallised as fears, or conversely of extreme security in the form of complacency leading to vulnerability, extremes of elation or depression (not unlike the bipolar disorder in individuals), extremes of hyper-realism or cynicism or delusion, extremes of exclusion or inclusion which can quickly become exclusion, or of extreme habituation to violence or a very sheltered non-habituation to violence which can suddenly turn to violence through shock. These patterns seem to be a common feature in the early stages of the Third Reich, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and the Rwandan genocide.
Conclusion
As we prepare to enter the new millennium, the ever-increasing frequency and magnitude of human-created catastrophe creates cause for concern.
Though much of the causality is a problem of evil and must be treated by punishment and retribution like any other crime, there is also an aspect of causality through disturbances to collective mental states which are described by a varied of terms such as collective paranoia, collective madness or genocidal mania. But this cannot be called a problem of collective mental illness because, as noted above, there is no collective mind except in a metaphorical sense.
The first dimension of the problem must be dealt with by police, armies, tribunals and jurists, however, the failure of official agencies such as the United Nations to act in the cases of Somalia, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda (Harff, 1995) shows that official channels are often grossly inadequate.
In the case of the second dimension, specialists in mental health have a major role to play. This could be as leaders of a multi-disciplinary global task-force which could also include, as well as psychiatrists and psychologists, social scientists, historians, philosophers, journalists, lay members of the public and persons with imaginative artistic insight such as poets, novelists or cinematographers, so that the emergence of disturbed mental states can be recognised and documented. If these states can be calmed before they reach dangerous levels of instability, it would be possible to reduce collective susceptibility to evil intent. In view of the urgency of the problem, the Internet and other forms of electronic communication are appropriate for persons wishing to participate in this task.
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