50 years ago, mental health was mostly ignored. Today, it’s a major issue. 50 years from now, mental health will be taken as seriously as physical health. The alternative centrist, approaching the midpoint of the 21st Century since the reign of Augustus, makes provisions for the mental health challenges of the future.
A point lost on most today is that ‘psychiatry’ is made up of two words, ‘psyche’ and ‘iatros’, which mean ‘soul’ and ‘healer’. A psychiatrist is supposed to be someone who heals the soul. They are not meant to be someone who prescribes pills and little more. Today’s psychiatrists are primarily concerned with preventing people from freaking out and damaging property. The vast majority of them don’t even believe in souls, let alone have any way to heal them.
As a result, some of those who have been through the mental health system, or who look at the rates of depression and anxiety today, ask if psychiatry has any value at all. One can readily concede it has value sedating people who might kill themselves or someone else in the next 24 hours. But it has much less value in taking the vast numbers of mentally ill people from outpatient treatment to good mental health.
The alternative centrist approach to mental health wouldn’t change much when it came to acute mental healthcare. When it came to chronic mental healthcare, however, a major change in attitude would be made. The approach of the past was that people can take care of themselves; psychological concerns are too subtle to be important anyway. This attitude reflects a grosser, cruder, more vulgar and more ignorant age.
In the time of the alternative centrist, it will be understood that the concept of health applies to all aspects of the human being, from the least subtle to the most. Thus, mental health is as important as physical.
Applying our Aristotelean maxim “the starting point is the fact”, the fact is that most mental health problems are caused by trauma. Another fact is that the chemical imbalance narrative was promoted by pharmaceutical companies who wanted people hooked on their products. The alternative centrist approach to mental health is fully trauma-informed.
The difficulty is that the three Establishment positions have created a system which is inherently traumatising. This has been by design – trauma breaks people, making them unwilling and/or unable to fight back, thereby securing the Establishment’s control. The alternative centrist system is necessarily anti-trauma.
Not creating more trauma is the purview of the other alternative centrist approaches. Fixing the trauma already created, however, is the basis of the alternative centrist approach to mental health.
According to this approach, mental healthcare is the equivalent of maintaining the psychological infrastructure of the nation. This makes it an essential spend, and not a luxury. Thus, the alternative centrist is happy to spend money sorting it out. This will mean, alongside the existing spend in training psychiatrists in acute mental healthcare, also training mental health practitioners about conditions like PTSD and C-PTSD. These traumatic stress-based conditions are rife in the Western World, and their accumulated effects over the past century are the chief reason why our society currently resembles a mental asylum.
The alternative centrist frees up money for healing trauma by not spending it on hopeless cases. This will involve euthanasia for the incurably feeble-minded. Anyone so mentally disabled as to be a permanent burden will be given a dignified death. This will also include those suffering from a dementia, a hellish condition with no cure. Doing this implies a complete rejection of Abrahamic morality (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Religion).
This approach of euthanising the hopeless cases, in order to free up money to spend on those with hope of a decent life, is similar to the alternative centrist approach to law and order. Herein it can be seen that alternative centrism is far from being a weak compromise position like establishment centrism. Alternative centrism actually achieves the goals of both the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left here (viz. order and freedom) specifically by avoiding the middle ground. This would not be considered cruel, and would not violate the Fourth Rejection, because it would be considered merciful.
This proposed massive expansion of the mental health apparatus would occur not so much in a clinical sense as an everyday spiritual sense.
Absent the Abrahamic influences, there is no need for the alternative centrist state to separate psychiatry from spirituality. Without the danger of mental healthcare practitioners trying to convert vulnerable patients to Abrahamism, the emphasis could fully be on the healing of the soul. The patients would be encouraged to see their conditions as primarily spiritual phenomena, and not personal failings.
The teaching would be that abuse, neglect and nihilism damage the soul. The ten major forms of adverse childhood experience would be learned and taught as part of the fundamentals of mental healthcare. This would extend to schooling: young students will be taught the basics of mental health and mental illness, so they can recognise it in themselves and others. They would also be taught not to see mental health as a taboo subject.
Healing of the soul, in the alternative centrist conception, is based on forming quality relationships. The first step is a relationship with the true self. Patients and students alike would be taught that the true self, more fundamental than either body or mind, is a fragment of God consciousness, and that each one of us is an expression of divinity (again, a complete rejection of the Abrahamic approach). From there, they would be encouraged to interact with the rest of society on that basis.
The alternative centrist psychiatrist would teach that consciousness is the prima materia and that its natural state is one of perfect bliss, and therefore there’s no reason to be afraid of anything, because all suffering is temporary. Healing trauma is, to a major extent, a matter of unlearning false ideas about oneself and about reality. The alternative centrist mental healthcare worker would encourage meditation, self-inquiry and other spiritual practices.
The alternative centrist state would put a lot of money into psychedelic research, recognising it as a trend of the future. At time of writing, there are regularly new breakthoughs in psychedelic medicine: the most recent is the potential for using LSD to treat anxiety. A 2024 Nature article wrote that “The clinical investigation of psychedelic medicines has blossomed over the last 5 years.” Less harmful alternatives to the common pharmaceuticals, which themselves often have horrendous side-effects, are desperately needed.
As per the alternative centrist approach to recreation, communities for mental health support could be expected to form naturally given the universal basic income. In situations where this was impossible, the Ministry of Mental Health would try to make it possible.
Because the alternative centrist approach to welfare involves a UBI, psychiatric patients would no longer need to see their psychiatrists as enemies. Under the existing system, psychiatric patients are dependent on psychiatrists to get approval for disability payments, and as such have to be extremely careful about what they say to them, suspicious that the psychiatrist is looking for reasons to deny the claim. The UBI would allow the patients to be more open with what they told the doctors, leading to better mental healthcare and a better society overall.
A UBI would also alleviate a great deal of work stress, the misery of which itself causes trauma, and so the alternative centrist approach to welfare has flow-on effects to mental health.
In short, mental health would be taken as seriously as physical health by alternative centrists. The taboos against talking about it would be shattered.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
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For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms! https://linktr.ee/vjmpublishing
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