On melancholia, lack of rebellion - not speaking the truth (lying) deforms the man...

Karin Johannisson, professor in History of Ideas at the University of Uppsala, spoke in an interview on the Swedish TV the other night apropos her last book on melancholia that she thinks the lack of rebellion is striking in today's society. Yes, where’s the wrath?

Is it strange if people are depressed (melancholy), exhausted, burnout if they have to keep quiet, if they aren’t allowed to rebel or protest at the state of affairs?

The Swedish author Henning Mankell spoke in the morning-sofa on his last book about Kurt Wallander, also in an interview on Swedish TV, about the 60-year old man as distant or reserved (his home site). And apropos politicians that

”Not speaking the truth [lying] deforms the man.”

Karin Johannisson has also contributed to an anthology with the title (in my amateur translation from Swedish) ”The Power of Diagnosis: On Knowledge, Money and Suffering.”

About this book you can read:

The psychological suffering is extensive in the millennium shift Sweden. Burnout, stress related tiredness syndromes, depression, self damaging behavior, overweight, anorexia, Asperger syndrome and ADHD are only some of the names.

The stronger the medicalization, and making human beings psychological and social problems psychiatric, the more the biomedicine is given the preferential right of interpretation when those conditions occurs and makes so that those explanations (biomedical) are seldom called in question.

In the book researchers and clinical practicians meet around controversial questions concerning psychological suffering and the treatment that is offered.

“Is burnout a disease? How do new forms of psychological suffering arise [and from where does psychoilogocal suffering come?]? What’s normal respective divergent behavior? Has the space for what’s normal become narrower? How is a diagnosis created? Is ADHD a scientific diagnosis? Is there an oscillation movement between putting emphasis on inheritance respective milieu as causes for psychological suffering? Is medicine (pills) cheaper than psychotherapy? Is it the money that governs the creation of new knowledge? What sort of conditions favor researcher-cheating and how are the researchers’ integrity preserved?”

The editor Gunilla Hallerstedt sketches in the introduction the last decades’ changes in the society, the new forms of psychological suffering and ways of talking about them.

Karin Johannisson asserts that the diagnosis’ is working as a comment to the society, a limit for what’s seen as normal, reasonable and acceptable.

A head for a psychotherapy unity in Stockholm, Sigmund Soback, asks what sort of help all those sick, as those who became outburnt, depressed and severely stressed during the years 1998-2003, get, numbers that increased five times those years (among people under 35 years these numbers have increased nine times. Are people, and especially young people, weaker today?).

And what does evidence based treatment on the psychotherapy field mean?

According to Eva Kärfve, associate professor in sociology at the University of Lund, the biological outlook on man has been dominating for many centuries; the explanation to characteristics and peculiarities has been “inheritance by blood.” How does this come through in the view on divergences and when diagnosing?

Aant Elzinga, professor emeritus in Philosophy of Science, is reflecting from the other contributions in the book and shows how the world of science, entrepreneurs and politics are enmeshed in each other.

Yes, who writes the history? Who has the power to do this? And what does this power want to create? From where do those ideas in the power come? Is their outlook on man and society "right"?