Hue Act

Yesterday's meeting of the Eden Prairie Book Club was unexpectedly interesting--with two new people who had many interesting things to say about Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness--a book that I also much enjoyed.  In one of the stories (Dimensions, I think) a man kills his three children and is committed to a mental hospital--and the children's mother, years later, visits the mental hospital several times, interacting with the man without rancor.

It seemed inconceivable to me, that any mother could relate with her children's murderer in this manner--so I was surprised when the two new women both said they found it plausible.  A club member who counsels traumatized women described how she has observed severely abused women return to relationships with their tormentors:  'They're not able to think rationally about their situations,' she said.

Are they in fact not able to think rationally?  (I'm thinking here of crazy people of either gender.)  Were they to unreservedly describe their own reasoning processes, what specific oddities would you expect to observe?  Randomly-dispersed logical errors, resulting in grave self-damage--or just inexplicable leaps into disaster?  Perhaps one might expect such people to unwittingly aim for some dystopic result? 

Perhaps I'm misdescribing the book club participant's explanation (of how her patients' might return to super-messed-up relationships), though it seems an oversimplification to conflate severe dysfunction with 'excessive random errors in rational sequences'.  Even a mentally-ill person's internal monologue must have some degree of pattern and sequence.  And the description, diagnosis and categorization of mental illness vary immensely by culture, of course.

A constant feature of this country's social intercourse is what might be described as psychic McCarthyism--in which people with little-to-no scientific knowledge diagnose mental illness in others, so as to disempower those challenging conventional wisdom and/or to lay claim to their own exemplary normality.  Psychic McCarthyism also impels one to thrust oneself forward--as mental health's shining paragon--as people do here, constantly. 

To return to a favorite theme:  We're hierarchical primates and we're status-obsessed. (Though I doubt this insight could be applied to bloggers; we tend toward innocence.)

Do people in other societies immerse themselves in psychic McCarthyism less--or differently--than one does, here in the Land of the Free? 

How might we address this problem--individually or collectively?

**

It was a clan that didn't always enjoy one another's

company but who made sure they got plenty of it.

                      Alice Munro