The Censors Are Coming After Mental Health
(Great if the DOD doesn’t whack you, you’ll just get sent to the ‘cuckoo’s nest’ - DD)
In today’s open access to information, any amateur can stuff any claim with enough sweetened pie charts and cherry statistics to make any ideology appear appetizing. Truth has always been hard to come by, but nowadays is obscured by the relatively even ability of anyone with WiFi to pontificate publicly. And then, a pandemic. When the stakes are high, lives are on the line, and suddenly the blase allowance of conflicting ideas becomes a liability. People will die without accuracy.
And so, as legitimate fear seeks the comfort of direction, a new way of talking about medical information appears. Attach a prefix, dis- or mis-, and good ideas shall trump the bad. In a utopian world where absolute truth is decipherable, we are surely obliged to separate fact from fiction. But in a corruptible world, it’s worth remembering that medical patients (though not psychiatric ones) are encouraged to seek a second opinion in matters of life and death.
Human beings, no matter how credentialed, are fallible participants in the mysteries of life, and doctors institutionalized with narrow sets of knowledge can therefore make errors of judgment. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re limited. All of us, and our certainties, are subject to revision.
Given that, the question becomes, who is certain enough of…