There is nothing new about collective trauma. I would even go so far as to call it the norm of our human condition. Here where I live in Vancouver, we are very sheltered. One of the worst things that has happened in this city in recent years, barring the second Stanley Cup riot in 2011 was the oil spill two days ago in English Bay. Bad enough but not enough to psychologically damage us. There has never (so far anyway) been a terrorist attack in this city. We have never been bombed or occupied by foreign armies. We have not been touched by natural or human made disaster.
One easily forgets that just over a hundred years ago, executions were held in public. Can we envision nowadays something so brutal and horrible as a public hanging or burning at the stake? A spectacle open to and in a way obligatory viewing to all. Life was very cheap and no one thought twice about executing a horse thief, much less beating a disobedient child. Everyone accepted this as normal. Violence and injustice were natural and quietly consented to facts of life. Everyone bore the scars of the brutality de jour. It was our inheritance as human beings. Trauma begot trauma being passed like silver candlesticks from generation to generation.
My parents, typical of their generation, carried along with the violence inherited from their own grandparents, the wounds of the Great Depression and the Second World War. And they were among the lucky ones: they never went hungry and Canada was never bombed or overrun by foreign armies. Still they were wounded and infected by fear of want and fear of war and invasion.
More enlightened members of my parents' generation worked hard in the post war years in order to cobble together a fair, just and educated society. I and my peers were born and raised in unprecedented luxury and peace. Information and education became widely accessible. We were poisoned however by the memory of war which hung over us like a black ominous shadow. The battles of Europe and the Pacific were played over and over again in movies and on TV and in popular literature. We were fed and numbed on the myth of our countries' victory. The violence was turned inward and the sixties became noted for the violent and widespread street riots, anti-war and anti-racism and sometimes anti everything or anti nothing. The trauma didn't really heal, it simply went underground.
In the eighties our governments betrayed their own people and the free market reigned supreme creating a growing economic inequality that still has yet to be staunched. In the nineties they began again to go to war in the Balkans and the Middle East, recreating the violence and fear that had been held in abeyance for a generation. A miasma of fear began to creep and strangle us like a toxic vine. Fear has since become the poison de jour: fear of war, fear of terrorists, fear of plague, fear of environmental destruction: a lingering fear of death and extinction manifesting in a myriad of causes and dysphorias.
If we are going to really understand mental illness then we are going to have to begin by learning how the violence, destruction and fear that has become our collective inheritance has engulfed and influenced our entire society. Our collective health is going to be a manifestation of collective causalities. That a minority of our population suffers from mental health disturbances is going to say a lot more about the rest of us than many of us would care to know about.
We cannot address and treat mental illness realistically without also addressing and treating our collective mental illness as a historically traumatized society. This is worse than a Gordian Knot but we have to unravel it before it begins to strangle us.
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