Psychiatry’s expectation for constant positivity leads to the suppression of outrage toward oppression and the dismissal of trauma caused by society
- Another indication of the growing preference for left hemisphere cognition
- The right frontal lobe has a depressive stance, where as the left shows undue cheerfulness, thus those who neglect the right hemisphere are egged on
- expectation for unrelenting cheerfulness
One major marketing scheme deployed by the pharmacology industry is the social construction of an ideal emotional state that every ‘normal’ individual is expected to experience. As the psychologist Edith Weisskopf-Joelson put it: “our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment.” For example, in the biological theory of mental illness, depression is only a genetic chemical imbalance, and in cognitive behavioral therapy, depression is only ever really considered to be caused by cognitive distortion.
Today this same ideal can be found everywhere—from televised entertainment to billboard advertisements and so on. The ‘happy’ and ‘depressed’ binary is used to create social pressure leading people to feel isolated or out of place for not happily accepting their environmental conditions on a daily basis. Being “too negative” is frowned upon and ridiculed— regardless of its complex nature and the reasons behind it. As Joelson states: “Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.”
Despite being emotionally fluid by nature, people are expected to fulfill the civilized role of unrelenting positivity. This normalized obsession with positivity plays a key role in fostering obedience through suppressing emotional responses of outrage to oppressive forces. The obsession with—and normalization of—constant positivity also encourages people to overlook the trauma caused by society on a daily basis. But because modern society requires wage-slavery and commitment to continue, these forms of trauma are trivialized and written off—usually followed by something like “that’s life” or “it is what it is”.
References
-
Flower Bomb. (2020). Descending into Madness. The Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/flower-bomb-descending-into-madness-an-anarchist-nihilist-diary-of-anti-psychiatry.
-
Frankl, Victor. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning Chapter 2 Logotherapy In A Nutshell (p. 126). Boston, MA: Beacon Books.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Politics / Psychiatry Status:⛅️