According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about
14.8 million adult Americans experience clinical depression in any given year
-- or
about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population over 18.[1] It’s
possible the number is even higher, but even this is sufficient to show that
there’s a mental health crisis in the US, despite the fact that the “mental
health” industry is one of America’s few growth industries in recent years. As someone
who has been diagnosed with a form of clinical depression, I have seen first
hand how such "depression" is often treated by the mental health industry, and
American society in general and have come to some understanding about why
current “conventional wisdom” proffered by the mental health establishment is
ineffective.
I was thus especially happy to read this quote by an unnamed
Rwandan about “western mental health workers.” This quote not only offers a
diagnosis of what is wrong with the mental health industry, but also suggests
an alternative, which could be very helpful here, if we can apply some of this
wisdom to America’s secular, individualistic, commercial society and an
industry still by and in large based on Freudian models (to say nothing of pharmaceuticals):
“We had a lot of trouble with
western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and
we had to ask some of them to leave. They came and their practice did not
involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better. There was no
music or drumming to get your blood flowing again. There was no sense that
everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together
to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgement of
the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast
out again. Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little
rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that
had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave."
~A Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew
Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression. From
The Moth podcast, 'Notes on an Exorcism'.
Many Americans got a taste of the hell of the genocide in
Rwanda from the movie Hotel Rwanda. This
genocide is a direct result of Colonization, or European attempt to control the
population of Rwanda, and other countries in Africa. The most brutal, dramatic
manifestations of the genocide may have subsided, but these “western mental
health workers,” however well-intentioned, are not significantly different from
the “Christian missionaries” who beheld “the white man’s burden” in Africa and
attempted to “enlighten” them into Western ways. Less generously, it’s a form
of cultural imperialism based on a spurious notion of Western cultural superiority
that can be seen in every area of our culture.
The Rwandans have different cultural rituals and believe
that they can heal their own collective wounds as they are manifested in
individuals. They have enough of their own problems after the genocide, and
obviously have no interest in trying to colonize America and impose their own
cultural rituals here, but reading this statement makes me wish they would! At
the very least, I wish to make the authority of this perspective more
permissible and part of a serious discussion on the American mental health
crisis. Mental health is understood not in isolation from physical health;
being out in the sun makes you feel better. Music and drumming get your blood
flowing again, and the spirit flows through the blood. Nor is mental health
understood in isolation from the community: “There is no acknowledgement of the
depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out
again.”
The Western Psychiatric industry makes a little room for “environmental
factors,”
It even sometimes acknowledges that a sick society produces
sick individuals, but it rarely proposes healthy collective outdoor rituals
with drumming as a way to address this societal crisis. Neither does American
secular culture in general encourage this. The “music industry” in America is usually
viewed as entertainment (and it either involves alcohol or drugs, whether legal
or not). Even more innovative programs such as “expressive arts therapy” that
make an effort to combine the power of music with the paradigm of mental
healing often lack that collective, holistic, outdoor, ritual that the Rwandans
prefer, and that should at least be considered a legitimate health-care option
here.
If the Western mental health professionals in Rwanda can be
viewed as a “kinder, gentler” form of “brain police,” this policing is running
rampant in America. We, too are being colonized by such professionals. When the
mental health industry became dominant in America during the 20th
century, for many the “mental health worker” replaced the traditional role of
the “spiritual leader;” but the individual in the dingy room that is based on what
Freud called “the talking cure” is somewhat similar to the Catholic
Confessional. Many believe the health care worker’s an
improvement on that confessional, and on the metaphysics of the church with its
“original sin” and sometimes strict, and unjust, moral codes. Freud’s
“Copernican revolution” is still, in the official reality, viewed as a sign of
progress.
But whatever the failings of the traditional church to
combat what is now called “depression,” at least some churches make much more
room for the kind of healing activities the Rwandans describe. The gospel music
that has characterized the Black Church since Thomas Dorsey brought it in
almost a century ago (contemporary to Freud) has been one way to bring this
Rwandan wisdom in to the largely dominant secular society. But it need not be
restricted to the church. What the Rwandan is speaking in favor of can not
really be understood in terms of the specialization of disciplines and
professions as we understand them: The Psychiatric Industry, The Church, and
The Music (and Culture) industry, need to be combined, to see their common
roots. We need a ritual that serves all three of these purposes in order to
have any hope of getting out of our contemporary cultural malaise, and truly address health issues at the root.
Because we’re all born into, even baptized, into this
individualistic, specialized, fragmented culture, we often have to choose one
of these specialized disciplines to work in—if we need to move beyond it.
These specialized disciplines, however, can all become “these dingy little
rooms:” the office cubicle or heroic artist’s studio, the individual coffin
buried in private property you must pay for, the private authentic, “real”
self, with an “internal” problem that might be part of his salient character,
or essence. All of this keeps us
divided, fragmented, an alienated from each other, and thus ourselves. It’s
grounded in a false consciousness. Can we operate “in” this world without being
“of” it; I tried to.
I tried to start from music and drumming, music as drumming,
music as drumming and dancing. Of course, I couldn’t do it alone. Of course,
one doesn’t have to do it alone. That won’t help; that won’t really be music.
In contemporary America, however, we call a “singer songwriter” a musician the
same way we call a psychiatrist a mental health expert—both without drums, and both
laboring alone. This might do some good for some people, and I’m not suggesting
we ban it from this country. But I do think there are many of us who, like the
Rwandans, would like to ask them to leave and stop being so damn paternalistic
in speaking for a “norm.” We would like the option of “alternative” medicine,
even if this “alternative” is ancient wisdom of the oldest culture on earth, a
culture that has been threatened by hostile outside forces, been subject to
cultural rape, and yet still preservers!
What the Rwandans propose is, in American culture, threatening
to both the “mental health” industry and the music industry. This is one of the
reasons there are so many depressed musicians; however well-known they are,
they still are not permitted much of a context in which to present themselves
as healers, or at least part of a healing process, and at their most "fun." The highest most profound
purposes and functions that music can have can easily get lost because of an
individualistic definition of what “music” is, and what the "self" is.
Sure, the vast majority of commercial popular songs today
still make room for drums and dancing. Even this, however, is often created by
electronic machines in dingy rooms, and recorded or broadcast. Real drums are
harder to find. Musically, this was sold as “progress.” It’s cheaper to make
music on your computer; it’s less likely to “disturb the neighbors” And it can
even sound just as good. I don’t quarrel with any of these assessments. Except
when it becomes an industry standard, just like you can only get Obamacare for
western mental health care; they don’t cover “body workers” such as cranial
sacral, chiropractors, and masseuses, who have at least done more good for me
personally (and many others) than pharmaceutals have. I am enough of a product of American society
to find a Rwandan drum circle somewhat alien (I don’t really crave to be part
of the social scene based on what some white Burning Man types call “ecstatic
dance)” but I do hold up Soul Train
in the 70s as superior to American Idol
in more recent years, in part because Soul Train was less individualistic and more embodied.
In 20th century mass-culture, America never
really had a ritual like the ones Rwandans describe, but the rituals of what
Nelson George refers to as the “rhythm and blues world” (circa 1950—1975) came
close. The music was closer to, and much more integrally, a part of the
culture, and more connected to the “social body.” And, today, even with the
synthetic, isolated, drum beats, such dance music can still touch the
collective soul in a deeper way than other forms of music being pushed. I’ve
seen the power a recent pop smash like Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” can have in
bringing together, however momentarily, a wide group of people that transcends
specialized “niches” the music industry usually pushes.
When I got into music, it was with the mission and purpose
that we could at least bring more of this back, to use music as a force to
bring people together. Yet, in Hollywood, I became a terrible heretic to music
and to mental health and even a traitor to my body, when I became known as a
“singer songwriter.” Of all the musical roles, “singer songwriter” is perhaps
the stiffest, the most like what the Rwandan describes as the “western mental
healthcare professional”-- at least it was for me. This doesn’t mean that I can’t
find some pleasure, and health in the singer songwriter (the ability to make
one, or many cry, with a heartfelt ballad is nothing to be sneezed at), but I
saw firsthand how being cast in this role can be as destructive to mental
health as the state-hired health care professionals were. This is not a coincidence. And if I wouldn't be surprised if they asked the singer songwriters to leave for the same reason.
I am not saying that in order for music to truly have any
power we must aspire to exactly the same kind of drum circles that one can
still find in contemporary Rwanda. We are a different culture; at its best,
America produced a music culture that combined elements of African music with
elements of European music. “The singer songwriter” is much more a Euro
invention of white America, but it can be brought much closer to the African
paradigms, and if one feels a deep, authentic, need for drums and dancing to
get the blood flowing, we should be able to include it—especially if we’re
going to be called musicians (but even if we’re going to be called mental
health workers, teachers, preachers, or other culture workers).
And this is only one aspect of what I learn, and admire, and
long for, from this man in Rwanda. Seriously, I wouldn’t mind if this view
“colonized” America; it wouldn’t be colonization however. The Rwandan isn’t
telling the colonzing shrinks (or music professionals) that they’re wrong, they’re just asking them to
leave. If they continue to speak for us, and tell us what’s supposed to better
for us (despite the testimony of our senses), I wish they would leave here
too…or can they change? Can they understand the damage they do? Can they give
us an alternative that doesn’t rob of us our heart-beat, especially if they
sincerely believe they are trying to help us (and I’m willing to grant they are
sincere).
