Abstract
One of major challenges facing contemporary psychiatry is the insufficient grasp of relationship between individual and collective mental pathologies. A long tradition of diagnosing “mental illness” of society—exemplified by Erich Fromm—stands apart from approach of contemporary social psychiatry and is not perceived as relevant for psychiatric discourse. In this Perspective article, I argue that it is possible to uphold the idea of a supra-individual dimension to mental health, while avoiding the obvious pitfalls involved in categorical diagnosing of society as suffering from mental illness. I argue for an extended notion of public mental ill-health, which goes beyond the quantitative understanding of mental health as an aggregate of individual diseased minds captured in statistics, and which can be conceived as a dynamic, emergent property resulting from interactions of individual brains/minds in social space. Such a notion, in turn, presents a challenge of how to account for the interfacing between individual minds/brains and the collective mental phenomena. A suitable theoretical framework is provided by the notion of epidemiology of representations, originally formulated by cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber. Within this framework, it is possible to highlight the role of public (material) representations in inter-individual transfer of mental representations and mental states. It is a suitable conceptual platform to explain how the troubling experiences with causal or mediating role on mental health, to a significant degree arise through a person's direct interaction with material representations and participation in collective mental states, again generated by material representations.
Highlights
Ladislav Kesner*Reviewed by: Assen Veniaminov Jablensky, University of Western Australia, Australia Michele Balola, Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada (ISPA), Portugal
In a provocative study devoted to the “pathology of contemporary western society,” psychoanalyst, sociologist, and humanist philosopher Erich Fromm presented a sustained argument about why Western society should seriously question its collective sanity [1]
It is timely in that most of Fromm’s observations about the “pathologies of normalcy” and the “social character of contemporary man” sound all too familiar six decades after his book was first published. They strike a chord in our time as the media and public discourse have become increasingly saturated with views like Fromm’s, Epidemiology of Representations with many thinkers trying to comprehend the great waves of irrationality and negative emotions that are flooding the public space and social media
Summary
Reviewed by: Assen Veniaminov Jablensky, University of Western Australia, Australia Michele Balola, Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada (ISPA), Portugal. A long tradition of diagnosing “mental illness” of society—exemplified by Erich Fromm—stands apart from approach of contemporary social psychiatry and is not perceived as relevant for psychiatric discourse In this Perspective article, I argue that it is possible to uphold the idea of a supra-individual dimension to mental health, while avoiding the obvious pitfalls involved in categorical diagnosing of society as suffering from mental illness. I argue for an extended notion of public mental ill-health, which goes beyond the quantitative understanding of mental health as an aggregate of individual diseased minds captured in statistics, and which can be conceived as a dynamic, emergent property resulting from interactions of individual brains/minds in social space Such a notion, in turn, presents a challenge of how to account for the interfacing between individual minds/brains and the collective mental phenomena.
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