This Curious Moment in Time

From snake pits, to primitive psychosurgery, to a failed program of deinstitutionalization, America's attempts to meet the needs of the mentally ill have been a tragic failure. In the last decades, those most in need of care have been shoehorned into a medical–industrial system that reduces human suffering to the simple operation of neurotransmitters for which they are handily supplied expensive pharmaceuticals touted as “treatment.” When a new model of psychiatric care took hold in the Reagan and Clinton eras, it was care that was more “managed” for financial gain than individual need. It has become commonplace to hear mental health professionals speak about patients in the dehumanized terms of a cash business, wherein poorly trained “telephone operators” or physicians with no patient contact meagerly dole out “benefits” so long as they remember their yearly bonuses are pegged to their degree of limiting services.

If this was not a perverse enough history, we now confront a new moment in our society's approach to the mentally ill. Increasingly, mental illness has become entertainment. Television and the Internet have created tens of millions of voyeurs, who look without being seen, enjoying the perverse pleasure of watching people in need of psychological care exhibit their illnesses now, ostensibly, for the entertainment of others. The phenomenon

encompasses a myriad of starlets whose erratic behavior is revealed to be related to the presence of serious psychiatric illnesses—but such revelation does nothing to stem prurient fascination in the tabloids or on the Internet. On so-called reality programming, young women vie to marry a man they do not even know. When they are eliminated from the competition, even after the first several hours, they collapse in tears displayed for the camera. Invariably, they confess their conviction that this was the man they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with. Thus, television becomes the modern equivalent of Charcot's amp