Embracing a Wide Sky

"Mad Pride is a movement that celebrates the human rights and spectacular culture of people considered very different by our society." - Mindfreedom.org

I've recently noticed a few articles that mention 'Mad Pride'. A Newsweek article spawned a blogpost over at Mindhacks, referencing a New York Times article from a year ago. Today another article appeared which brought the 'mad pride' movement into the limelight.

If you are wodnering what 'mad pride' is, it's been defined as a movement "committed to ending discrimination against psychiatric patients and glorifying madness in all its forms", or more generally, as a movement that celebrates the great range of differences in the human mind.

This movement fascinates me because, had I the wherewithal, I would love to go to law school and, as a lawyer with a Ph.D. in cognitive science, help define the emerging field of cognitive-rights/personhood law. As technology (and psychopharmacology) advance, issues of what is 'normal enough' and what can be mandated to be 'fixed' will only become more common. (You'll probably see a lot of these types of issues discussed in this blog.)

Today it occurred to me to wonder what traditional humanism had to say about mental illness, so I googled 'humanism and mental illness'. I don't know what I expected find - a manifesto of some sort, I guess, that would detail humanism's acceptance of the full range of human mental experience. Nothing of that sort appeared in the top few pages of google results. A paper by Erich Fromm (my favorite humanist philosopher) entitled "The Humanist Concept of Mental Health", (1961) topped the list of results. I've loved everything I've ever read by Erich Fromm, so there will be a blog-writing pause while I read this article...

"What is the normal man, mentally and emotionally speaking? Can he simply be defined as being like the majority? And if the majority is not healthy, would then the individual who is like the majority be a healthy man, or is it possible that the very person who is different from the rest is the healthy one, while the whole society is mad? But is there such a thing as an insane society?" (I love this guy.)

Fromm's paper does not deal with our modern approaches to what we label 'mental illness'. Indeed, he argues for mental health - "Well-being is being in accord with the nature of man." - more than he argues against mental illness, leaving the reader to wonder if he sees any 'goodness' in certain forms of 'madness'. Perhaps there is hope in his parting sentence - "...let us never forget that from the standpoint of the humanist tradition the healthy man is the man who is productive, the man who is related to the world, and concerned with the world, and mental health is never only the absence of illness; it is never only the capacity to function well, but it is a state of mind in which the person is stimulated by the world around him, and hence he can be stimulating to others."

Is this a satisfactory humanist position, particularly if humanism is "a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people" (W)? Or is it important that humanist philosophies take a more pro-active stance to affirm the value of a broader range of mental experiences and a wider sky of human potential? In a time when we are hearing that intelligence drugs could/should be as common as coffee, how important is it for humanist philosophy to support a person's right to reject society's increasing-narrow definition of 'normal', along with the increasing pressure to medicate any deviation from 'normal'?

Here Fromm does not fail us - "man is not made for the state, for the purposes of society, but that the state and society have to serve man." And if "the ultimate goal [of humanism] is human flourishing; making life better for all humans" (W), you may be asking - How does it serve man and society to allow him to function at what we percieve to be a less-than-optimal level?

Think about it. (Better yet, drop comments.) We'll come back to this topic.