Illness or Injury?
What is the difference between injury and illness? Could it boil down to who is doing it and who is being done in? Who is the referee? Is the rule book written in Farsi or Swahili?
Local factors make several public health issues relevant to the mental injury or illness question.
In fact, there are too many factors to know for sure if a problem is an illness or injury.
Pollution Causes Illness or Injury
Industrial pollution. People are literally being poisoned by industrial operators. Rachel Carson gives a pretty good rundown of this in her book, “Silent Spring.” We are organisms susceptible to injury, and a bunch of it is diagnosed as mental illness because it isn’t well-understood. Our metabolic processes have a whole bunch of chemical communication and triggering systems that get set off at the wrong times for the wrong reasons
Geology. Energy feels different around different geological features. Artifically-changed geology often produces a whole range of pollution, some chemical and some electromagnetic.
Limestone and crystalline quartz, lead and zinc, naturally-occurring water-carved caverns, and an unusually large amount of played-out underground mines where Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas meet are mapped in detail at the Joplin MO Public Library.
I think there is some kind of field-effect disturbance here on a continuous basis that is only noted elsewhere during earthquake activity and plate techtonic shifts. Vulcanism causes some of this same sort of distress. These Earth changes have mood and metabolic consequences.
Human Environment Issues Are Health Issues
A pizeo tweeter in your high-fidelity stereo system is basically a crystal that an electromagnet is squeezing to put out sound we can hear, and other sound we can’t, that disturb bats, dogs, and other critters.
Medication Treats Illness
We don’t know how all these factors interact –how they contribute to adverse emotional effect, that psychologists call mood disorder, “mental illness” — “affect” that psychiatrists medicate. The wrong criteria are being analyzed.
Corporate noise. The perceptual “noise” corporate merchandisers bombard us with injects a lot of dishonesty into the environment. We are constantly spending psychic energy trying to screen the noise, never succeeding completely.
Meanwhile, we are trying to operate a body that supports a spirit and mind that depend on a lot of these same very sensitive, subtle chemical and electromagnetic systems. The technologies we’re using have unintended consequences — if they are indeed unintended. I’ll leave that discussion aside, not go ideological.
The point is, we are immersed in phenomena that human beings have not been exposed to very long, and a lot of it is being diagnosed as illness instead of trauma from various profit-making enterprises. These are big ideas, not often considered health-related. but they are.
The question is what, and how much, can we stand? Who benefits?
Power Is Another Factor
The other question is, “Who is claiming a monopoly on the use of force?” What is considered violence, and what is simply the collateral damage of ordinary business, industry, and commerce?
I don’t think the proper distinctions are being made, or that the cause and effect chains are well-mapped. Who are ganged up together Who is buying unfair influence and gaming the system. Sorting it out the truth is more difficult when some people are intentionally causing confusion to take unfair advantage of the injured.
Somebody has to connect more of these dots without being made into a scapegoat. When the emperor is nekkid, saying so can get your butt kicked, locked up, and medicated or shocked into a state of insensibility.
They are saying, “Shut up about this. You are making the risk to our investments unacceptably high.” They don’t want the beans spilled. Some of the butt-kicking is very subtle and sneaky. Diagnosis sometimes involves this, instead of truly medical or biological factors.
A lot of stuff we do to make a living that has unforeseen consequences. Those who are competing to be “in charge” like to keep secrets, so that they aren’t punished for misbehaving or being callous and indifferent.
It is worse if they are actually bullies or psychopaths. who enjoy and feed off of the distress of others. The important thing is to realize is we’re playing “for keeps,” and some people play rough.
Somebody with only a hammer starts thinking everything looks like a nail. What is in your toolbox?
What do you think causes illness or injury?
Wordworks Blog Author: Edward Duff
Edward Duff worked as a policy analyst for NAMI Missouri for 20 years until he met Robert Whitaker and read Anatomy of an Epidemic. He is now on break from online media but is working to connect trauma survivors in Joplin with spiritual communities. He is also working to create an epistimology or worldview that explains why and how certain beings chose to benefit from other people's suffering.
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