If insanity is a rational response to an insane world, does that explain our current mental health crisis, asks Mark Vernon. And what can we do about it?

The number of people diagnosed with conditions like ADHD and autism is growing rapidly. The increase is confusing. Why so many? And why now?

I don’t doubt that people suffer from such symptoms. Further, I’m sure that while some struggle but continue with their lives, others are utterly debilitated by anxiety and depression.

But still: the rate of increase is striking. By some measures, the prevalence of mental disorders has doubled in the last decade or so. Roughly one in four people are now afflicted to the extent that they seek treatment, and that goes for children as well as adults. So what’s going on?

Answers are proffered: to some, the taboos around inner turmoil have eased; to others the manipulative are learning to play the benefits system. Some blame psychotherapy: the talking cure has taught us that goals such as closure or empowerment are a right. That has obscured the blunt fact that much of life is about bearing scars and embracing the down- not upbeat.

Another possibility has been on my mind. I think it chimes with an Idler philosophy and runs like this. Perhaps the heart of the matter is not that individuals are becoming psychologically unwell, though they are. Rather, the root cause of the distress is a society that has itself grown dangerously psychotic. Mental ill-health is a reaction to an escalating cultural dysfunction.

Think of the symptoms associated with ADHD; the list includes erratic attention, default forgetfulness, pervasive restlessness, wilful riskiness, social nervousness, mood swings. And then consider, say, the effects of being continually monitored by wearable gadgets. Is that not to outsource an inner sense of self to measurable targets and metrics? Does that not cut out what’s felt in favour of what’s rated, fostering habits of anxious checking?

Alternatively, consider the degree to which modern life requires us to engage with bossy bureaucracies. Does that not drain away a personal capacity for cultivating good behaviour? Instead of spiritedness, we are run by codes.

Or again: our world is increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Is that not to have the subtleties of human communication routinely reduced to divisive, binary data: like or dislike, click or scroll, agree or don’t? Such an immersion, over time, seems likely to split in two the communities and psyches forged in it.

Inner life is brutalised by rough externalities and the insight is not new. The maverick psychiatrist R D Laing famously characterised insanity as “a rational response to an insane world”.

Then, a few years back, a clinical psychologist called Louis Sass, published a book that argues modern art looks increasingly schizophrenic. Contemporary painters and sculptors show distinctive preferences for florid expression over emotional depth; they are fixated on the fragmented not the holistic; they have an obsession with power as opposed, say, to transcendence or beauty. Sass drew the implication that modern culture has become schizophrenic and that people diagnosed with schizophrenia are the collateral damage of a wider, fractured milieu.

Another version of the link between inner and outer is even older. Way back in ancient Athens, the philosopher Plato grew worried about the spread of a new technology. He believed it was having deleterious effects on the human soul.

The technology was writing. Pens and scrolls had existed for centuries, though in the mid-part of the first millennium BCE, the tools that had been used to detail taxes and contracts started to be used to record the sacred stories of poets like Homer. Written texts were also encroaching on the rituals and modes of learning that had previously been practised orally: in person, face to face. Wisdom was being systematised with the upshot that insight was morphing into dogma. Nuance was out, popularism was in.

Further, Plato feared that writing was causing people to forget things, even as texts were gathered into libraries. His point was that you can only really know something when you know it directly, from lived experience. Then, it is active in your soul. Inscribing letters on rolls of papyrus, much like dumping megabytes in data centres, teaches you nothing, even as the information accumulates. What looks like progress is actually a regress.

The irony is that Plato was a marvellous writer, one of the best in ancient Greek, but part of his greatness was that he found a way of transcending literary drawbacks. He invented open-ended dialogues in which characters like Socrates ask questions and venture carefully crafted but deliberately flawed answers. His hope was that readers would be simultaneously educated and prompted to discover responses for themselves, by having to inhabit the impasses and conundrums outlined on the page. Philosophy was a therapy for the soul because it didn’t tell you what to believe as if it could present the evidence and arguments for purportedly proven truths. Instead, it cultivated curiosity and readied the individual for inspiration. I think that the best psychotherapy works similarly.

For similar reasons, Plato also loved myths and analogies. He talked about the value of escaping cave-like ignorance and discovering Sun-like truths. His written works are not treatises or manifestos but are rather exercises; they can expand awareness of often hidden possibilities and transforming dynamics. In short, he didn’t reject writing but ensured that it served him – not he it – thereby ensuring that the soulful might continue to thrive.

I think of William Blake as a latter-day Plato. With his customary vigour, Blake engraved: “Nations are Destroy’d or Flourish in proportion as Their Poetry, Painting and Music are Destroy’d or Flourish!” – which is to say that people are destroyed or flourish as societies creak or prosper; as culture dictates or innovates. “All who see become what they behold,” he realised.

Blake is a powerful advocate of the “mental fight” necessary for the cultivation of sanity, even as the “dark Satanic Mills” of concrete thinking threaten to waste us. He might help remedy the suffering born of a pathological society. He offers a therapy for the soul.

This article appears in Idler #102.

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