The U.S. Disconnecting & Numbing Epidemic: The Culprit and Our Options

In the U.S. in 2022, 49,476 people died by suicide, and there were approximately 1.6 million suicide attempts. Not included in suicide statistics is the even more common U.S. “death of despair” of drug overdose death, numbering 107,941 in 2022. While most of us are not attempting to kill our pain in a manner that puts us in the emergency room or the morgue, the majority of Americans are less dramatically trying to disconnect from painful lives.

It is convenient for apologists of U.S. society to see those of us overwhelmed by our pain—anxious, depressed, dissociating, or in some other way having difficulty functioning—as suffering from a “mental illness” and in need of “treatment.” However, the more that Americans have bought the idea that there is an epidemic of mental illness which requires greater access to treatment, the more fucked up we are all getting, and the more we enable a fucked up society to become increasingly more so. Not only is psychiatric treatment—which for most patients means psychiatric drugs—not helping many of them while making some feel even worse; we have also been sidetracked from examining what it is about society that is fucking up so many of us, and we have been diverted from pursuing those nooks and crannies that have yet to be dehumanized.

First, how are the majority of us today disconnecting from our painful lives? Next, what is the core source of our painful lives? And finally, what is a path that makes more sense than increasingly more mental health treatment?

Using Drugs to Disconnect

One way to disconnect from our emotional pain is through psychoactive drugs, which includes not only cannabis, alcohol, and illicit hard drugs, but a wide array of psychiatric drugs. Drugs are by no means the only way we try to disconnect, but I will begin with them.

Recently reported in the journal Addiction, a 2022 U.S. survey revealed that there are now “more daily and near daily” cannabis users (17.7 million) than there are such high-frequency alcohol users (14.7 million). While far more people continue to drink alcohol than use cannabis, the median alcohol user reported drinking 4 to 5 days in the past month compared to the median cannabis consumer who used it 15 to 16 days in the past month; and cannabis users were 7.4 times more likely than alcohol drinkers to use it on a daily basis.

While there is little hypocrisy among alcohol and cannabis users about trying to disconnect from their unpleasant realities to feel better, there is enormous hypocrisy when it comes to psychiatric drugs among some users and most prescribers, who would rather call these drugs “medication,” even though these drugs are in the same psychoactive category as alcohol and cannabis.

Thankfully, there are a handful of non-hypocritical, non-bullshitting psychiatrists such as Joanna Moncrieff, co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network and author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2008). Moncrieff points out, “Psychiatric drugs are psychoactive substances, like alcohol and heroin. . . . Alcohol helps to reduce social anxiety not because it corrects an underlying biochemical imbalance, but because features of alcohol induced intoxication include relaxation and disinhibition.” Moncrieff explains that psychiatric drugs—rather than correcting an abnormal state in the manner of insulin for diabetes— “induce an abnormal or altered state,” and are in the same category as alcohol.

Just how many of us are using psychiatric drugs? In 2020, it was reported that 16.5% of U.S. adults were prescribed psychiatric drugs; so out of a U.S. adult population of 258.3 million in 2020, 42.6 million adults were taking the edge off with prescribed “medication.” This total does not include the millions more Americans under 18 put on psychiatric drugs, often to make their inability to adjust to an alienating school and other surroundings less painful for their parents.

Disconnecting By Other Means

Today, much of the U.S. economy is fueled by buying and selling that which disconnects us from painful realities. For many of us, our “drug of choice” is not an actual drug.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), during his lifetime, saw religion serving as the major drug of choice, as he famously said about religion in 1843: “It is the opium of the people.”

With the rise of the corporatocracy and the loss of power of both the Mafia and the Catholic Church, “deadly sins” such as greed, lust, and gluttony have been legalized and commercialized, not only providing huge profits for the corporatocracy, but also providing the ruling class with other non-drug disconnects for those individuals who are turned off by organized religion.

Gambling—the buzz of betting, winning, and losing—is one of the most powerful ways to disconnect from how fucked up we feel about our lives. Statista reported in 2023, “The gross gaming revenue of the gambling industry in the U.S. reached almost 53 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, growing significantly over the 2020 figure.” Problem gambler statistics include: two million American adults meet severe gambling criteria; four to six million American adults meeting mild or moderate gambling criteria; and Americans in their early twenties are the fastest-growing group of problem gamblers (one study of college students estimated the percentage of “disordered gamblers” to be 7.89%). Once upon a time, Americans had to get off our asses to be a problem gambler, but now all it takes is a smart phone to place bets.

Porn? Worldmetrics.org reports that “Pornography is a $12 billion industry in the United States,” and, “The global porn industry is estimated to be worth over $97 billion,” a global industry that many Americans are enriching. Worldwide, worldmetrics.org reports “10% of adults admit to internet sexual addiction”; and in the U.S., the average age of first exposure to porn is eleven; 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites; and 200,000 Americans are “porn addicts.”

Overeating may top the list of non-drug ways Americans try to disconnect from the pain of our lives. While obesity is sometimes the product of an unlucky slow metabolism (sometimes caused by psychiatric drugs), most obesity results from overeating in order to kill our emotional pain—including the pain of loneliness and boredom. How obese are Americans? Assessed between 2017 to 2020, the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults 20 and over was 41.9%, and the prevalence of severe obesity was 9.2%, according to the CDC, which notes: “This means that more than 100 million adults have obesity, and more than 22 million adults have severe obesity.” An increasing number of us eat to kill our emotional pain, then become obese, which damages our physical health, which causes us even more suffering.

Shopping? “Compulsive buying” is routinely defined as uncontrolled urges to buy with resulting significant adverse consequences such as bankruptcy or a spouse demanding a divorce. Using this definition, a telephone survey found 5.8% of Americans qualified for compulsive buying. And millions more Americans, without significant adverse consequences, are buying shit that they don’t need in order to divert themselves from their dissatisfying lives.

Two of my personal favorite disconnects are spectator politics and spectator sports. The best spectator-politics buzz of my life was the 1973 Watergate Hearings, but spectator politics doesn’t seem to have the diversionary value it once had for me. And spectator politics can often increase pain, which I first experienced as a kid when the televised Vietnam War resulted in great anxiety about a future of either getting killed in a war that seemed to have no end, fleeing to Canada, or becoming one of those miserable male teachers in my school avoiding the draft. Luckily for me, when I was thirteen in 1969, my favorite New York City sports teams—the Jets, Mets, and Knicks—suddenly transformed from futile and frustrating to champions; and the buzz they provided made them my “gateway drugs” that began a lifelong “drug addiction” to using spectator sports to disconnect from painful realities.

The above list of non-drug ways of disconnecting is by no means a comprehensive one. From playing video games to watching gamers play video games on YouTube, the list of diversions in our consumer society is damn near endless.

The Source of the Pain We Are Disconnecting From

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were many prominent thinkers dissecting our increasing dehumanization. A small sample from this group of well-known authors who immediately come to mind include: Erich Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, E.F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jerry Mander, John McKnight, and Wendell Berry.

Back in that era, the misery caused by capitalism—the prioritizing of profit over life resulting in human beings feeling alienated—was a given; and so original thinkers were delving into just how dehumanization was playing out throughout society: from technology, to schooling, to healthcare, to transportation, to the mass media, to neighborhoods and communities, to architecture and urban planning, and to every aspect of our lives. Back then, it was not all that radical to conclude that we are increasingly being forced to become machine components alienated from our humanity so as to fit into a large machine.

Lewis Mumford, in this two-volumed The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970), details the origins and the scope of the “megamachine”: a social and bureaucratic system that functions impersonally like a gigantic machine. To make the megamachine work efficiently, people are dehumanized to be machine cogs, and Mumford describes the structure that makes it possible for authoritarian control over large populations be it in a labor machine, a military machine, a school machine, or a healthcare machine.

My experience is that while alienated young critical thinkers nod in intellectual agreement to a neoliberal capitalist explanation for their malaise, they resonate emotionally to the idea of being forced to be dehumanized cogs so as to fit into a particular machine within the megamachine.

There are of course different experiences of the megamachine.

There are those of us who simply cannot fit into any labor machine, becoming homeless or institutionalized in a prison, mental hospital, or in some other way.

Then there are those of us who are able to adjust and adapt enough to fit into a money-making machine so as to not end up on the streets, but pay the price of alienation from our humanity. Some of us experience that alienation in anxiety, depression, dissociations, and various ineffectual rebellions, which today are commonly called “mental illnesses.” While others, in denial of their alienation, become capable only of relationships with machine-like people, incapable of a truly loving human relationship, including with their spouse and children.

Then there are the most fucked up of all. These are the control-freaks atop of hierarchies who are running large machines within the megamachine. We’re talking about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. We’re talking about the most frighteningly fucked up machine-like individuals in society.

To be sure, a handful of Americans have lucked into a way of obtaining money that is somewhat outside the direct control of the megamachine, but most of them are aware that their lucky deal can be eliminated at any time by the megamachine. Moreover, they likely experience the pain of other components of the megamachine (for example, the healthcare machine); and they would be incredibly lucky not to experience the pain of the megamachine’s crushing of an unlucky family member or close friend.

What Are Our Options?

Sadly, it is quite realistic to be hopeless about dismantling the megamachine. Even during a time in U.S. history when the megamachine was nowhere near as technologically and militarily powerful as it is today, when Native Americans were far more cohesive and talented warriors than any group is today, they had no chance against machinery that has no shame about genocide, and had they continued their fight, the result would have been total genocide.

Certainly, a few times in U.S. history, political activism has made life within the megamachine less horrific. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, when financial impoverishment was causing severe pain for many people, New Deal legislation made the financial lives of some of them less painful. And during the 1960s and 1970s, the activism of Ralph Nader and Nader’s Raiders resulted in less physically dangerous surroundings through the creation of theOccupation and Safety Health Act, Environmental Protection Agency, Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, Safe Water Drinking Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and other health and safety measures.

However, throughout U.S. history, the megamachine has only grown in scope and power, and its destructive impact on us has been both direct and indirect.

The dehumanizing impact of the megamachine is direct when, for example, workers are fully aware of simply being replaceable machine cogs who receive nothing of value in return for their efforts except money to survive in the megamachine. The impact is direct when, in addition to the labor machine, we suffer alienating dehumanization in various other machines such as in a school machine and healthcare machine.

The megamachine’s horrors are also indirect. One of the few positive developments in my mental health profession is increasing awareness of the powerful relationship between “adverse childhood experiences” (such as emotional and physical abuse and neglect) with later emotional and physical difficulties. However, the seldom-asked question in our society is why so many parents are abusing, neglecting, and otherwise traumatizing their children? Abusive and neglectful parents are themselves almost always products of the megamachine’s violence (including its wars, layoffs, and other traumatizations), resulting in powerlessness, resentment, rage, substance abuse, and little frustration tolerance in parenting, which results in adverse childhood experiences.

Big Pharma and their partners in psychiatry have successfully sold a biochemical, individual-defect story of our malaise, which has made billions of dollars for drug companies. This narrative also enables the megamachine to go unchallenged. The “mental illness” explanation for suffering is today the cultural norm, and those remaining critics of the megamachine’s destructive impact are now, unlike the 1960s and 1970s, pushed far to the margins of society.

Moreover, the mental health machine has been an abject failure when it comes to helping people. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002-2015, acknowledged in 2011, “Whatever we’ve been doing for five de­cades, it ain’t working. When I look at the numbers—the number of sui­cides, the number of disabilities, the mortality data—it’s abysmal, and it’s not getting any better.” And in 2021, New York Times concluded that psychiatry had done “little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress. Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direc­tion, even as access to services expanded greatly.”

Mental health machine “treatment”—be it biological, chemical, electrical, or behavioral techniques—is aimed at adjustment to the megamachine. Psychoactive drugs are the only treatment employed by the overwhelming majority of psychiatrists, while a few of them also use electroshock. And most of my psychologist colleagues offer techniques such as cognitive-behavioral therapy to help people adjust to the megamachine.

So, if dismantling the megamachine any time soon is unrealistic, what makes sense?

First, it helps to recognize the reality that the megamachine—directly and indirectly—results in painful alienation from one’s humanity and life in general, and this pain fuels anxiety, depression, suicidality, and other compulsions to disconnect and numb ourselves. To the extent that we do not deny, shame, or pathologize our disconnections as well as the pain that fuels them, we have a better chance to be accepting, loving, and wiser with ourselves and others.

Of great importance, it is helpful to acknowledge that while it is difficult to remain fully human within the megamachine, it is possible not to be completely damaged by it. To accomplish this, we can embrace “harm reduction,” an idea that comes to us from social justice advocates who recognize that, given the nature of society, illicit drug use will continue, but that there are less dangerous ways of using such drugs (for example, sterile syringes rather than dirty ones). Harm reduction can be applied to both drug and non-drug disconnects. Furthermore, not only is it helpful to embrace this concept for ourselves, by helping others navigate their machines with the least dangerous disconnects, we will feel more fully human.

Finally, while we can be realistic about the domination of the megamachine, we can also recognize that hidden nooks and crannies of non-machine life remain. We may have become so beaten down by the megamachine that we lack the energy to find those hidden cracks in which there are gems of humanity and life, so many of us need to acquire the energy required to keep seeking. If we keep searching, my experience is that we will eventually discover others who can energize us to keep looking, and when we find such people, we must value them. If we then find those nooks and crannies in which life remains, we can connect and restore some of our humanity, and we can become further revitalized by energizing other seekers.