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AN AMERICAN IN PAKISTAN: Psychiatry and 9/11

Catherine Mayo

People in the rest of the world need to realise that the Americans are stuck in time. They are reliving 9/11 over and over, every day

It is hard to explain to the rest of the world what is happening in the American mind right now because the people in the US are being ruled by their mental health system. Their consciences do not operate according to moral standards, or religious beliefs. They do things because of the diagnoses they have received from their psychiatrists.

Psychiatry began in earnest with Freud in Europe but it soon became popular among the wealthy elite in the United States. People with too much money and nothing to do found that they could keep from being bored by analysing their own minds. It became fashionable to put on their calendars an hour’s session with their therapists once a week. A whole new vocabulary was created, hundreds and hundreds of books were written. When women got together for lunch after their shopping trips, they had something serious to discuss. They could psychoanalyse their mothers, their husbands, each other, and especially their children.

Psychotherapy in the United States is based on the notion that human intelligence has evolved as far as it can go. This is hard to understand in a Muslim society, because Islam teaches that God created man for the express purpose of increasing knowledge in the world. We all know that knowledge is infinite, and comes to consciousness gradually over time through experience. The American idea that knowledge has limits flies in the face of common sense, but it springs from the logic that once the computer was invented, every possible thought or idea already existed in 0’s and 1’s.

Psychiatry in the United States is never fun, it is always serious. As a result, it becomes a severe taskmaster. If the mind already knows everything it is going to know, then everyone has to work very hard not to lose what they’ve got. The most feared disease in the US is not cancer, it is Alzheimer’s. Entire wings of hospitals are reserved for Alzheimer’s patients. Family members spend a lot of time worrying that it might be genetic, and they, too, might forget everything.

Because of its seriousness, psychiatry soon became important at all levels of society. Insurance systems were set up, so even the poorest could get mental health care without worrying about paying for it. Clinics and mental health hotlines were established in every town. The new societal requirement was to check yourself at all times, to see what your mind was doing. If you were having unusual thoughts, or if you were enjoying yourself, or if you were angry with someone, you immediately called and made an appointment with your therapist.

In the past ten years, an epidemic has broken out in the US. It is a disease called manic depression, a mental illness, sometimes called bipolar. Its definition is: an unnatural condition of the brain which causes a person to have sudden mood swings.

Because psychiatry is so serious, no one realises how funny this is. A human being is made of emotions, and has sudden mood swings all the time. Moods are not centred in the brain but in other parts of the body such as the heart, the hormonal system, the central nervous system. A person without mood swings is — plain and simply — dead.

So you can imagine how widespread this epidemic is. If someone feels hopeless and unloved, or if someone else feels self-assured and full of love, they are sent to a psychiatrist so they can be given heavy-duty drugs to straighten them out. The drugs have bad side-effects, such as convulsions, heat murmurs, difficulty in walking, slurred speech, or depression, so the patients are given more medication to counteract the side-effects.

Then 9/11 came to America. And all the drugs in the world could do nothing about it.

People in the rest of the world need to realise that the Americans are stuck in time. They are reliving 9/11 over and over, every day. Since they are not allowed to have feelings, and since they can’t learn anything new, all they do every day is look at those planes go into those towers.

Human beings have learnt a lot since that day. Knowledge and consciousness have increased by leaps and bounds. The world understands evil in ways it never did before. It understands the clarity of conscience, the importance of morality. Since 9/11, nations in the world understand that their boundaries are important only as cultural divides. Terrorism comes from anywhere and goes anywhere.

Americans think that they already know everything there is to know, and the rest of the world wants to destroy them with their own knowledge. So they hide in their houses, in front of the TV sets, taking pills at scheduled times. Their psychiatrists say that they are doing the right thing, and life is so serious, they’d better not ask any questions.

Cathy Mayo is an American journalist based in Pakistan

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