Why they're crazy in the red states

The author of the story linked below drew himself a map of the United States according to suicide rates. He found that states with lower rates correlated almost exactly with the blue states, or the Democrat/ Gore-voting states in 2000. The states with much higher suicide rates tended to be the red GOPer/Bush-voting.

Did the author conclude therefore that GOPers are crazy? No, that would be more the kind of thing we'd say. He does point out that more people are likely to own guns in these states, which makes suicidal impulses easier to turn into suicides. But his major conclusion is that these are the states where mental health care is less available or stigmatized, or both. He points out that as on most health issues, the Bushies talk a progressive game but they fail to finance and support mental health services and their accessibility.

Boston.com %2F News %2F Boston Globe %2F Opinion %2F Op-ed %2F A suicide map of the US

Though this is probably a more reasonable analysis, we'd like to push it a bit further. There are plenty of people in this country who still regard psychological problems not as health matters but as evidence of character weakness, lack of manly courage, and symptoms of irresponsibility.

Everyone fears the prospect of losing the daily certainty of an accurate sense of reality. So denial is natural, not only of mental illness but even of any psychological influences at work in the "normal" person. The idea that one is either entirely and always sane, or else one is entirely crazy, is held by many people who may even deny they believe this.

This probably has something to do with a prevalent idea of sanity as functionality: in other words, if you can do your job, you're sane. If you can't, you are insane. There is no in-between.

And for millions of Americans, there is in fact no in-between. If you can't do your job (or jobs), sooner or later (usually sooner, if not immediately) you are cast out of the mainstream and into the street. You may as well be insane. You may as well be dead.

But there are also millions of Americans who do their jobs, who even look quite competent, yet wreak havoc on themselves, their loved ones, and in the case of those with powerful positions and/or involved in politics, on many other people, on in fact the entire planet---when they act in ways they may be convinced is rational, but in fact has a strong component of irrationality in perception, analysis and/or motivation.

So much of our political life, and a great deal of our national policy, is driven by emotions triggered by unconscious factors that appear to the people involved to be entirely rational. In general we have so little psychological self-knowledge that even to question our motives or actions is profoundly threatening.

In this the blue states, smug in multisyllabic rationalizations and stubborn two dimensional, machine-thought, are no more immune that the red states, smug in their virtuous ignorance and hypocrisy. So red and blue alike drip with the blood of the innocent.