Funny how psychiatrists are absolutely inspired when it comes to
mappingsexual dysfunction, but fail to chart the strong emotional bond we
have with the natural habitat. It's time for an environmentally based
definition of mental health. So the next time you're feeling down, take
yourself off to the woods for a few days.
I recently attended a meeting of the International Rivers Network,
a San Francisco-area environmental group. The featured speaker was Dan
Beard, head of the U. $. Bureau of Reclamation. After detailing the ways
in which big darns have devastated natural watersheds and riverine
cultures, he ended with an appeal: "Somehow we have got to convince
people that projects like this are crazy." There was applause all
around.
"Crazy" . . . In the presence of environmental horrors, the word
leaps to mind. Depleting the ozone is "crazy," killing off the rhinos is
"crazy," destroying rain forests is "crazy." Our gut feeling is
immediate, the judgment made with vehemence. "Crazy" is a word freighted
with strong emotion.
Inflicting irreversible damage on the biosphere might seem to be
the most obvious kind of craziness. But when we turn to the psychiatric
literature of the modern Western world, we find no such category as
ecological madness.
The American Psychiatric Association lists more than 300 mental
diseases in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Among the largest of
DSM categories is sex. In map ping sexual dysfunction, therapists have
been absolutely inspired. We have sexual aversion disorder, female sexual
arousal disorder, hypoactive sexual desire disorder (male and female),
gender identity disorder, transient stress-related cross-dressing
behavior, androgen insensitivity syndrome, fetishism, transvestic
fetishism, transvestic fetishism with gender dysphoria, voyeurism,
frotteurism, pedophilia (six varieties), and paraphiliac telephone
scatologia.
Granted, the DSM bears about the same relationship to psychology as
a building code bears to architecture. It is nonetheless revealing that
the volume contains only one listing remotely connected to nature:
seasonal affective disorder, a depressive mood swing occasioned by
seasonal changes. Even here, nature comes in second: If the mood swing
reflects seasonal unemployment, economics takes precedence as a
cause.
Psychotherapists have exhaustively analyzed every form of
dysfunctional family and social relations, but "dysfunctional
environmental relations" does not exist even as a concept. Since its
beginning, mainstream Western psychology has limited the definition of
mental health to the interpersonal context of an urban industrial
society: marriage, family, work, school, community. All that lies beyond
the citified psyche has seemed of no human relevance--or perhaps too
frightening to think about. "Nature," Freud dismally concluded, "is
eternally remote. She destroys us--coldly, cruelly, relentlessly."
Whatever else has been revised and rejected in Freud's theories, this
tragic sense of estrangement from nature continues to haunt psychology,
making the natural world seem remote and hostile.
Now all is changing. In the past 10 years, a growing number of
psychologists have begun to place their theory and practice in an
ecological context. Already ecopsychology has yielded insights of great
value.
For one thing, it has called into question the standard strategy of
scaring, shaming, and blaming that environmentalists have used in
addressing the public since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. There is
evidence this approach does more harm than good--especially if, as
ecopsychologists suggest, some environmentally destructive behavior bears
the earmarks of addiction.
Take consumption habits. In ecopsychology workshops, people
frequently admit,their need to shop is "crazy." Why do they buy what they
do not need? A common answer is: "I shop when I'm depressed. I go to the
mall to be among happy people." Buying things is strictly secondary--and
in fact does little to relieve the depression.
Some ecopsychologists believe that, as with compulsive gamblers,
the depression that drives people to consume stems not from greed but
from a sense of emptiness. This void usually traces back to childhood
experiences of inadequacy and rejection; it may have much to do with the
typically middle-class need for competitive success. The insecurity born
of that drive may grow into a hunger for acquisition that cannot be
satisfied even when people have consumed so much that they themselves
recognize they are behaving irrationally.
If the addiction diagnosis of over consumption is accurate, then
guilt-tripping the public is worse than futile. Faced with scolding,
addicts often resort to denial--or hostility. That makes them prey for
antienvironmentalist groups like the Wise Use Movement, which then
persuade an aggravated public to stop paying attention to "grieving
greenies" and "ecofascists" who demand too much change too
quickly.
As every therapist knows, addictive be-harlot cannot be cured by
shame, because addicts are already deeply ashamed. Something affirmative
and environmentally benign must be found to fill the inner void. Some
ecopsychologists believe the joy and solace of the natural world can
itself provide that emotional sustenance. Some, therefore, use
wilderness, restoration projects, or gardens as a new "outdoor
office."
