Prose Poem on the Society for the Care and Protection of the Dysfunctional

The overuse of involuntary incarceration in psychiatry must be linked to the fact that psychiatry is rarely used to offer people any services that are very helpful, or that most people will all that readily want. Most people recognize when they are being offered anything that is useful to them because what is useful to us usually also increases our happiness and is desired.

For example, offer someone the opportunity to learn about something they find interesting. Either because they already are or because they say they find it appealing when shown it. To find something interesting is by nature to find it an object of enjoyment; that is partly what it means.

Psychiatric hospitals and hospital wards are apparently not meant to be places where anything much happens, or is allowed to happen, that the people kept there would find very interesting.

This must be why, for example, they generally do not have a library. In fact, almost any resource a psychiatric patient might ask for, they will be told it is too expensive. I found this to be true with writing paper. Which, at a few cents per page, is considerably less expensive than many things people there are provided with, and which insurance, drug companies, doctors, and the hospital administration bill for.

Activities that are provided the patients, if any, are usually of a disciplinary kind. Their function is to instill discipline, keep order, and make it clear to the patients that they are subjects of management, treated with suspicion, watched, their behavior carefully controlled.

Mental health services are to various therapeutic practices, ideologies, and elixirs what organized religion is to "spiritualities," of the kind marketed in the self-help psychology field of the publishing industry, its second largest division in the United States after female erotica. This makes sense no doubt because the United States is a business society, and religion and spiritualities, which popular psychologies shade into or a form of, are useful in enable people to participate activity in their self-management as workers and citizen-subjects whose job, one engaged in with eager willingness, is to enjoy things marketed as interesting tasks, things to do, which keep us from boredom and loneliness, and also are a use of the mass media of the online world that is now 24/7 for something like lifelong education.

What if we had mental health services instead of education? Well, they'd still have us have schooling for kids so that they could get good jobs to make enough money. But any kind of problem would not be anything to think about, nor are problems interesting, or if they are the expert thinks about the problems about you and then tells you what you need to do, to satisfy your serious needs and problems, since you are lacking, or something like that, which is why you've been called out, but it's not like a mere worker would ever be invited to study anything you'd really find interesting, your job is to do your job and if you got some kind of fucking problem then there must be some treatment for you. If you're middle class the treatments get more various and interesting and maybe your kids will get music lessons and maybe it is congruent with that somehow, and that's nice. But the poor people, you know, they're not very smart, or reliable, just look at them. Locked in this place where their intrinsic tendency to behave the way they do is brought out for all to see.

Lifelong education is perhaps not only a noble idea but a happy one. What if having "problems in living," which is one definition that has been offered as to what "mental illness" really is, were not only universal, but a good thing, and what might motivate many of us not to go to a doctor to be given the right pills to optimize our functioning or performance at tasks whose character is not much in question perhaps because the interest they have for us is not much at all, -- and instead the thing to do was see a movie or read a book and think about it?

But who wants to think about anything? People don't think about popular music, we just "like" it.

In the joint Bob met Nancy and he said do you like this band and she said yes and I like that one too and he said yes and then they said hey we're a match, and so they got together and they spent a whole evening together believing that they were liking the same old or new song.

Or what if people had to do boring things all day long somewhere except when something goes wrong somehow and then it is blamed on the person, who, if the machine breaks down with them, then they say they have broken down at the machine, in the machine, with the machine, and then they are sent to a place of detention where they are made to be totally bored, until finally, sufficiently chilled and dumbed down and dulled, they are ready to go back to working the machine? You might surely need love or sugar or coffee or some little trick or device or something to get through it all, you might even dreamy of that, lying awake at nights, dreamily, and maybe that works, unless