MILL'S ON LIBERTY AND TODAY'S PSYCHIATRY

John Stuart Mill was a man remarkably ahead of his time, a man who, more than any other, foresaw the danger that we face today. Actually we should say the Mills, because by his own admission, John's wife Harriet was the indispensable co-author of his most famous volume. Everyone is familiar with the following famous dictum-- including the chief enemies of liberty today, the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC):

"The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind is warranted, either individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forebear because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, or right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." (On Liberty, 1859, p. 68: all quotations are from the Penguin Classic edition, published 1985).

Of course the Mills recognized exceptions, such as children and those peoples who had not reached the stage where they were capable of governing themselves (being in this respect people of their time, they naturally had a paternalistic view of non-Western civilizations and to some extent, non-English-speaking ones). Raul Jean Isaac and Virginia Armat, authors of TAC's handbook Madness in the Streets, say that although Mill did not specifically mention the mentally ill, "he would be horrified to be cited as a source for the doctrine that society has no right to intervene on their behalf."[sic](p. 338) But they are wrong, and pointedly ignore the passage which proves it. What would have most horrified both John and Harriet Mill is TAC, whose view of mental illness represents a regression to the ideas which governed the administration of Bedlam, that the mentally ill are subhuman creatures who above all have to be controlled. Look at how Isaac and Armat describe what they call "the mentally ill": "Try engaging in 'free and equal discussion' with the individual convinced that aliens from outer space are talking to him from under the living room sofa." This is a description of psychosis, which the Mills would indeed recognize as an exception, and which they refer to in another passage as "delirium"(p. 166). But psychosis is a state of mind, not a diagnosis or a permament condition, and not at all synonymous with mental illness. There are many people who would be diagnosed as mentally ill today who have never experienced psychosis in their lives, and many others who have experienced it perhaps only once or twice and are now not only completely rational but capable of outstanding achievements. To these people the Mills would have accorded the full rights described in their famous passage. But TAC would not, and it is a fact that psychiatrists routinely describe as "schizophrenic" or "bipolar" many people who are not suffering from delusions and hallucinations. Therein lies the danger.

The brilliance of On Liberty lies in a fact that has puzzled many readers from the time it was written. The Mills lived in what was, in comparison to most previous civilizations, a relatively free and open society. They themselves seem to acknowledge that the possibility of a purely governmental tyranny rearing its head once again in the English-speaking countries is remote. And there is no way that they could have demonstrated, as indeed no one can demonstrate, that the consequences of a purely social ostracism-- that is to say, impediments placed in the way of one's career goals, a diminution of income, hurt feelings etc.-- can possibly compare to the imprisonment, torture and execution that government is capable of meting out. Why then did they show such terror of the power of society over the individual? The answer can be found in part in a factor to be discussed below, and in part in one obscure sentence which occurs early on in the essay. As they say of their own era, "In England, from the peculiar cricumstances of our political history, though the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, the yoke of law is lighter than most countries of Europe, and there is considerable jealousy of direct interference by the legislative or executive power with private conduct, not so much from any just regard for the independence of the individual as from the still subsisting habit of looking on the government as representing an opposite interest to the public. The majority have not yet learned to feel the power of government as their power, or its opinions their opinions. When they do so, individual liberty will probably be as much exposed to invasion from the government as already is from public opinion." (p. 67)

This is what they feared above all, and what makes On Liberty sound, as one critic said, "as if it had been written from a prison cell" instead of a comparatively free and open society. The Mills foresaw the very situation we are in today, in which democracy has persisted for so long that people no longer look upon government as a potential threat but rather as their protector, and its will as their own. And well did they foresee that in such circumstances, whether through deliberate manipulation (for the public may in fact be wrong to feel that it has control over its rulers) or by succumbing to public prejudice, government would become inseparable from that prejudice. In such a situation, all the terrifying tools of coercion which only government can wield are put in service to enforce that conformity which was previously maintained through social ostracism alone. In this regard it is important to note that the very definition of the most prevalant form of mental illness is noncomformity. According to the American Psychiatric Association, "personality disorder" is defined by "an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior which deviates markedly from the expections of the culture of the individual who exhibits it." The more severe illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are characterized by a criterion which was once objectively definable, psychosis, but as we have seen that is a state of mind and not necessarily permanent. Furthermore, the range of criteria which are now used to establish that a person is psychotic is so broad as to be ludicrous. Such prevalent phenomena as a belief in the conspiracy theory of JFK's assassination or 9/11, or ESP or reincarnation, or that one has a special mission, are now taken as indicators of psychosis. But what makes these beliefs different from the conventional views concerning the events in question or the belief in a single omnipotent God or in heaven? Merely the fact that they are minority opinions. Indeed, the term "idiosyncratic" has entered the psychiatric lexicon as being practically synonymous with mental illness. This is precisely the situation that the Mills feared.

There is a very good reason why the issue of mental illness rarely arises in On Liberty. It is not just the fact that psychotherapy as we know it did not exist in the Mills' day: Sigmund Freud was only three years old when the book was published, and would not begin to publish his own works until decades later. But then, the victimization of those so unfortunate to be labeled "mentally ill" had begun long before, and has little to do with the pioneering work of Freud and his successors, which is being abandoned by modern psychiatry. And the Mills had every reason to fear that they too would become victims. In the first place, John Stuart Mill had suffered a nervous breakdown at age twenty, as a result of the demanding and soulless education forced upon him by his Utilitarian father, James Mill. Furthermore, the Mills lived in an era when women who did not conform to the rigid code of behavior expected of them were being stigmatized and punished as "hysterical", a fact of which Harriet Mill was no doubt most keenly aware. The Mills in effect recognized that "genius is next to madness"-- that the people who had done the most to further the progress of Mankind were for the most part possessed of characteristics which could easily, then as now, be labeled "mental illness". If they were mentally ill, their illnesses were inseperable from their originality of thought. And the Mills placed the highest value upon originality. "Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through this tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained." (p. 132)

Above all, the Mills possessed two characteristics which are as essential to human progress as they are liable to stigmatization. Firstly, they were independent thinkers, being temperamentally loners. As the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of On Liberty says of them: "whether at home or abroad, they were almost entirely withdrawn from the literary , social and political circles they might have been expected to frequent. In his Autobiography, Mill explained why a person of a 'really high class of intellect' would choose to have so few relations with 'society' as to be 'almost considered as retiring from it altogether': Society, he said, was 'insipid'; it discouraged serious discussion; it was 'useful only to social climbers, while those already at the top could do no more than comply with the customs and demands of their station'; worst of all, it was 'debasing to the intellectual, whose feelings, opinions and principles could only be lowered by contact with it.'" That he was describing his own situation is evident from his concluding remarks: "All those circumstances united, made the number very small of those whose society, and still more whose intimacy, I now voluntarily sought." (p. 20). Secondly, as we have seen, the Mills were able to foresee dangers which their contemporaries-- even some of the most prominent among them-- were unable to recognize at all, and which in fact only became readily apparent a century or so after On Liberty was published. What would a doctor-- then or now-- say about people who shunned the company of others and worried about dangers no one else could see? At the very least, they would have been diagnosed with what we today call a schizotypal personality disorder, and at the worst with paranoid schizophrenia. Thus they did not fear the mentally ill so much as they feared the way that the concept of mental illness could be used to enforce obedience and conformity.

The proof of this is in a passage conveniently ignored by Isaac and Armat. Defending individual eccentricity, the Mills wrote, "But the man, and still more the woman, who can be accused of 'doing what nobody does', or of not doing 'what everybody does', is the subject of as much deprecatory remark as if he or she had committed some grave moral delinquency. Persons require to have a title, or some other badge of rank, to be able to indulge somewhat in the luxury of doing what they like without risk to their estimation... for whoever allows himself too much of that indulgence incur the risk of something worse than disparaging speeches-- they are in peril of commission de lunatico and of having their property taken from them and given to their relatives." In a footnote they add, "There is something both contemptible and frightful in the sort of evidence on which, of late years, any person can be judicially declared unfit for the management of his affairs... all the minute details of his daily life are pried into, and whatever is found which, seen through the medium of the perceiving and describing faculties of the lowest of the low, bears an appearance other than the absolutely commonplace, is laid before the jury as evidence of insanity, and often with success; the jurors being little, if at all, less vulgar and ignorant than the witnesses, while the judges, with that extraordinary want of knowledge of human nature and life which continually astonishes us in English lawyers, often help to mislead them. These trials speak volumes as to the state of feeling and opinion among the vulgar with regard to human liberty." (p. 134). Reading these words, one can have little doubt that not only would the Mills have opposed TAC absolutely, but that their entire philosophy regarding liberty and the sanctity of the individual was based upon opposition to precisely the sort of intrusion upon human freedom which TAC advocates.

The result of laws to inflict dangerous treatments and penalties on people for psychiatric reasons, in our own time as the Mills', is the emotion which always surrounds witch hunts-- terror. It is obvious to anyone who knows the power that the threat of being judged insane can wield, both in their time as in ours, that On Liberty was written against a background of this very fear, a fear so deep and unmentionable that the Mills could only bring themselves to allude to it once in the tract, and extensively only in a footnote (if the longest footnote in the book). That terror is spreading today, as TAC and its followers latch on to the public hysteria whipped up by western governments in the wake of 9/11. Recently I had a discussion with a leader in the Movement Against Psychiatric Assault about a piece I had written which he thought was injudiciously worded. He warned that it would make people think that I am mentally deranged, and that if people found out that he had given his approbation to it, "People will think I'm crazy too." I could not help but recall that moment when Edward R. Murrow was considering doing his famous program against Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts. He asked his colleagues for their opinions as to whether he should proceed, and one by one they enumerated the personal factors which might put them in jeopardy if he did, to wit, "I was involved in leftist activities in college," "My brother-in-law is a Communist," etc. Murrow pondered their comments and said, "The fear is right here in this room. We go on the air tonight." It was a moment of profound moral courage, and one that is needed more than ever today. It is time for the better portion of mankind-- those capable of original thought and creation-- to take up the struggle where the Mills left off over a hundred and fifty years ago. It is time for us to make public our greatest fear-- not just for ourselves but for Mankind. It is time for us to point out that the witch hunts now being initiated by TAC and its followers are potentially more dangerous than McCarthyism. They have claimed to be the protectors of society-- let them be exposed for what they truly are: enemies of the Western tradition of political liberty, democracy, and civilization itself.