Getting Rid of the Pain Before Answering Its Questions: Psychiatry’s Damage to Self and Culture
“If you get rid of pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it.”
—Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking, 1975.
People come to mental health professionals in pain—the pain of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, inattention, and a variety of other mental pains. Psychiatric “treatment” routinely is directed at getting rid of these pains as quickly as possible so that an individual can “function.”
In this sense, we should be grateful that psychiatric treatment has been such a failure, a reality that has now even been acknowledged by some in the mainstream media including the New York Times, which concluded in 2021: “Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direction, even as access to services expanded greatly.”
Had psychiatric treatment been more successful in getting rid of pain before its questions were answered, the struggle for authentic self and a healing culture could well have been lost; as it is, those of us who care about such are only losing the struggle, but we have not been completely defeated.
Psychiatry’s Damage to the Authentic Self and a Healing-System Culture
Despite establishment psychiatry’s protestations otherwise, the vast majority of psychiatric patients will tell you that their psychiatrist had no interest in the idea that their pains posed valuable questions. The vast majority of psychiatrists provide only “medication management” and refuse to acknowledge that all they do with their “treatments” is numb pain; and most psychiatrists are clueless as to what is meant by a healing culture and how they damage it. The tiny minority of psychiatrists who allow themselves to feel these professional pains are the tiny minority of psychiatrists who become dissident psychiatrists—or quit.
What questions does our mental pain ask? It often asks questions about the lack of love, freedom, power, creativity, or meaning in our lives—questioning us as to whether we are deceiving ourselves about their presence, and questioning us about our failure to act on the truth of their absence. All our mental pains, large and small, ask questions that can lead to other questions.
Our pain of inattention may be asking: Am I being coerced to attend to something that I have no intrinsic interest in? Is that coercion causing the pain of resentment and rage? Is that pain so overwhelming that it makes me want to depress my entire being so as not to feel? Do alcohol and other drugs help me not feel my being? Does depressing my pain cause me to have no energy to pay attention? Does my lack of attention cause the pain of anxiety over the possibility of not being able to survive?
By answering questions that pain asks, one can rediscover one’s true self. One may discover that one’s authentic self actually values inattention to that which one doesn’t really care about; values not hanging around people who coerce attention; values people who love one’s authentic self; values not spending life depressing one’s being to shut down pain; values being whole and paying attention to what one truly care about; and values the pain that compelled questions that allowed rediscovery of one’s true self.
Many of us—not just the poets whom Lewis Hyde discusses in his 1975 essay, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking”—have pain over the nature of our current civilization. Hyde, echoing other widely read public intellectuals in that era such as Lewis Mumford and Erich Fromm, tells us that money and technology have become our “dominant models” for security and liveliness, and have created a false sense of human power. Societal authorities told us that we could control technology, but of course many of us feel enslaved by it. Furthermore, this focus on the power of technology and money, Hyde points out, “has become so inflated as to impoverish other forms of power. . . . A civilization based on [technology and money] puts people out of touch with their creative powers.”
The pain of a dehumanizing civilization filters down to individual lives, directly and indirectly resulting in our pains over the lack of love, freedom, power, creativity, and meaning—pains that get people to see mental health professionals. And so it is tragic when mental health professionals pathologize such pains.
The quote “If you get rid of pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it” is often misattributed to Carl Jung because Jung shared this sentiment. Jung did say, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain” (Contributions to Analytical Psychology, 1928). Also sharing this sentiment was Ivan Illich, who I discussed in 2024 (“The Clinical, Social, and Cultural Harm of an Iatrogenic Psychiatry”).
Hyde’s 1975 essay was heavily influenced by Illich’s then new book Medical Nemesis, especially with respect to Illich’s ideas about culture as a healing system. Hyde notes:
Illich speaks of ‘the health-granting wholeness of culture’. . . . The Native American tribes are a good example: they called their whole system of knowledge and teaching ‘the medicine,’ not just the things that the shaman might do in an emergency. As a member of the tribe it was your privilege to walk daily inside of the healing air.
A culture faces and interprets pain, deviance and death. It endows them with meaning; it illuminates how they are a part of the whole and thereby makes them tolerable. We do not become trapped in them because the culture continually leads out of pain and death and back into life.
How does psychiatry, which desperately attempts to be a part of what Hyde calls “medical civilization,” kill culture as a healing system? Hyde, echoing Illich, tells us that in contrast to a healing-system culture: “Medical civilization reacts in the opposite way: it tries to attack, remove and kill these things. With this the citizen becomes separated from his own healing and interpretive powers, and he and the culture begin to pull apart and wither, like plants pulled from the soil until both become dust.”
Psychiatry’s Drug Dishonesties: Sins Against the Authentic Self and a Healing-System Culture
Psychiatry’s dishonesties about their drugs’ effectiveness and adverse effects are well known to Mad in America readers. However, psychiatry’s duplicity about the nature of their drugs has perhaps created a more profound sin for self and culture.
Psychiatric drugs are psychotropic or psychoactive drugs, which means they are chemicals that act on the central nervous system’s neurotransmitters and alter brain function to affect emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. Alcohol is a psychotropic drug, as are psychiatry’s so-called antidepressants, so-called antipsychotics; and so-called mood stabilizers. There is much hypocrisy about psychotropic drugs with respect to some being labeled as medications while others are labeled negatively.
It is a rare psychiatrist such as Joanna Moncrieff who is truthful about the nature of these drugs (see her “Models of Drug Action,” 2013), and for her truth-telling, she has been vilified by establishment psychiatry. Moncrieff tells us that rather than correcting an abnormal brain state, psychiatric drugs “induce an abnormal or altered state. . . . modify the way the brain functions and by doing so produce alterations in thinking, feeling and behavior. Psychoactive drugs exert their effects in anyone who takes them regardless of whether or not they have a mental condition.”
Neither Moncrieff nor any other prominent psychiatric drug critic I’m aware of are anti-drug, as she makes clear that “the psychoactive effects produced by some drugs can be useful therapeutically in some situations.” So, if individuals are so agitated that they fear they have lost control over their behavior, are incapable of any dialogue, and only want to reduce their agitation, then a calming psychotropic drug, at least temporarily, can be humane.
In the 1970s, when Big Pharma was not in control of societal narratives about psychotropic drugs, there were more attempts at honesty about them, and Lewis Hyde’s 1975 “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” is a thought-provoking essay about both the allure and dangers of alcohol and other psychotropic drugs. He begins by reminding us:
Alcohol has always played a role in American letters. Those of our writers who have tangled with it include Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, Hart Crane, Jack London and Eugene O’Neill, to name a few. Four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature were alcoholic.
Hyde then quotes Carl Jung from his correspondence with one of the founders of Alcoholic Anonymous, Bill Wilson. Jung told Wilson that he believed the “craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness . . . . You see, ‘alcohol’ in Latin is spiritus, and one uses the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison.”
For Hyde, “a spirit is something larger than the self, and . . . it has the power to change you. It alters your Gestalt, your whole mode of perception and action.” Not only alcohol but psychedelic drugs such as LSD can be what he calls “spirit-helpers” because, while they are not agents of maturation, “They do have power: they can show the novice in a crude way the possibility of a different life.”
The allure of chemical spirit-helpers is their induced change of consciousness, but genuine spiritual seekers ultimately desire this experience without the help of the chemical because they intuitively know that “especially in this civilization,” as Hyde points out, the risk of the chemical is that you will “stay with the material spirit . . . stay at its level . . . [and ] not grow.” Hyde concludes that for a person who becomes an alcoholic, “the drug is no longer a spirit in the sense I have used, or if it is, it’s a death spirit, pulling him down into itself.”
“Alcohol has many uses,” Hyde notes, “It is a relaxant and social spirit; it has always been used as a ceremonial spirit; it is a medicinal, a sedative hypnotic and an anesthetic.” However, alcohol, in today’s world, is not labeled as an anesthetic, which is a term now primarily reserved for those drugs that are used during surgery to shut down pain sensations. Neither are any FDA approved psychiatric drugs labeled as anesthetics. Ketamine, which is officially a “dissociative anesthetic,” is not FDA approved for any psychiatric use but is currently used “off-label” for these conditions. Ketamine enthusiasts, attempting to take advantage of the current allure of psychedelic drugs, will routinely call it a psychedelic rather than its official designation as a dissociative anesthetic.
By Hyde’s definition of anesthetic, one can label all psychotropic drugs, including alcohol and psychiatric drugs, as anesthetics. One of his most thought-provoking points, at least for me, is about the word anesthetic:
‘Anesthetic’ does not just mean a thing that reduces sensation. The word means ‘without-aesthetic,’ that is, without the ability to sense creatively. The aesthetic power, which every human has, is the power which forms meaningful configurations out of all we sense and feel. More than that, it makes configurations which are themselves lively and creative, things which, like art, begin to exist separately from their creator and give meaning and energy back to all of us. If this power were not free and active a human being would die, just as he would die if he lost the power to digest his food.
Many poets, other writers, musicians, and other artists would agree with Hyde that some psychotropic drugs such as alcohol and LSD and even heroin, at least initially, can be “spirit helpers” that showed them, as Hyde put it, “in a crude way the possibility of a different life”; however, with regular usage, turned them “more and more into the drug and its demands,” and so became a “death spirit.”
The major psychotropic drugs used by psychiatry—so-called antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors; so-called antipsychotics including first-generation typicals and second-generation atypicals; so-called mood stabilizers which include anticonvulsants; and so-called anti-anxiety drugs which include benzodiazepines—are also, by Hyde’s definition, anesthetics. However, unlike alcohol, LSD, or heroin, I have never heard an artist or anybody else describe their Prozac, Cymbalta, Thorazine, Zyprexa, Depakote, or Ativan as a “spirit helper.”
So, why are psychiatric drugs so prominent in our current civilization? The most obvious but by no means the only reason is that psychiatry’s drugs make psychiatry’s partners in Big Pharma very wealthy. However, there are other reasons why psychiatry and societal authorities favor these drugs. While psychiatric drugs have obvious long-term physical dangers for many individuals, their short-term dangerous consequences are less obvious to society than that of a drunk driver, a heroin overdose, or a psychedelic bad trip. Most importantly for societal authorities who wish to maintain the societal status quo, psychiatry’s drugs do not threaten them precisely because they, unlike some other psychotropics, do not help people see “in a crude way the possibility of a different life.” Psychiatric psychotropic drugs are the perfect drugs to douse out the flames of rebellion.
Hyde concludes that, “The widespread use of alcohol and other central nervous system anesthetics is directly linked to a decline in culture. The wider their use, the harder it becomes to preserve, renew and invigorate the wisdom that a culture should hold. . . . It is a sign that the culture has lost its health-granting cohesion.” He offers the example of Native American cultures:
U.S. society has ignored the pain of what it has done to Native Americans, and perhaps the karma for so doing has been to create a dehumanizing civilization for U.S. society in which the spirit of not only alcohol but other anesthetics have moved in. Most Americans are living—or more accurately surviving—only with the aid of anesthetics, which include not only chemical ones but non-chemical ones as well.Here were cultures rich in spiritual life and healing power. The Indian, cut off from the sources of his own spiritual strength by the European tribes and unwilling to adopt the gods of his oppressors, was left with an empty spiritual space, and too often the spirit of alcohol moved in to fill it. The Europeans were all too happy at this and often shipped the liquor into the dying Indian villages.
The 2024 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) examined the use of psychiatric drugs among U.S. adults, and reported that 19.3% of adults took them in the past 12 months. And the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) reported that among Americans 12 and older, 58.3% used tobacco, vaped nicotine, used alcohol, or used an illicit drug in the past month. While cannabis remains illegal under U.S. federal law, by 2024, because of its legalization in many states, there were already 15,000 cannabis dispensaries in the U.S., and it was reported that 42% of people who say they’ve used cannabis in the past month state that they do so daily or near daily.
Along with psychotropic drugs, many more Americans are using non-chemical anesthetics, a major one being so-called “social media.” Pew Research Center’s poll “Americans Social Media Use 2025” found that approximately half of U.S. adults report visiting YouTube and Facebook at least once a day, 37% reporting visiting Facebook several times a day, and 33% who say the same of YouTube. For many Americans, and much of the rest of the world, looking at a phone, laptop, television, or other screen is their major non-sleeping activity, and while all of this screen viewing may not qualify as an anesthetic, much of it does.
To dull the pain of their dehumanizing civilization, Americans are offered a wide array of anesthetics. The U.S.A.—the United States Anesthetized—can be defined by its widespread use of anesthetics which, as Hyde puts it, is directly linked to a decline in a healing-system culture, and “a sign that the culture has lost its health-granting cohesion.”
While psychiatry is not the only spoke in the societal anesthetic wheel, it is a major one that not only damages the ability to find one’s authentic self but also damages the capacity of a society to have a healing-system culture.
This first appeared on Mad in America.
