Well, remember also, that “mental health” is a huge, enormously profitable industry in the US. We put four-year-old Timmy in a preschool classroom and try to force him to sit still and learn to play the violin, or conjugate Japanese verbs. In a sane world, any child who didn’t fidget under those circumstances should be checked for a pulse. But we get out the big rubber stamp that says “MENTALLY ILL: ADHD” and pump him full of speed. Ding! goes the cash register. Count that money, Chumley.

All of this is hard-sold to us, pushed by the agitprop box in the living room, not just by television commercials for prescription drugs but also by this stuff getting written liberally into the script of damn near everything on TV since the 1990s. That makes being dependent on your daily dose “normal,” because the fictional characters on TV do it too. That makes parenting-by-pill “normal,” because the fictional characters on TV do it too. It’s a hundred Sunday supplement articles, and pop-psychology paperbacks, their online equivalents, saying “Unleash the creative power of your multiple personalities!” and “Embrace your autistic gifts!” and “Unlock the creative wellspring that is depression!”

Looking through an encyclopedia or a textbook of clinical psychiatry from around 1970 is sobering. “Autism” was only the label for a tiny, tiny number of severely disturbed children who never learned to speak, communicate, dress, or feed themselves, for example. “ADHD” wasn’t stuck on every fidgety kid whose lazy parents failed to discipline him. The very concepts didn’t exist a century ago.

I believe that there are two major underlying causes driving this phenomenon. The first, and by far the more significant, is the Gramscian social Bolshevism of the far Left. A culture of self-reliant individuals would object to Scientific Socialism. So, they seek, in nihilistic fashion, to destroy every pillar of our society. They declare the sane, normal, and honorable to be insane, and champion disgusting people and practices as normal. Out with the responsible, self-reliant individual. In with the bleating hind-gut fermenters that can’t function from minute to minute without Prozac in the drinking water, who for their own good and the good of society require constant supervision by the compassionate Nanny State and could never be trusted with guns, or letter openers, or a book of matches, or…

And they’re the ones writing the scripts for the soap operas and the sitcoms and the “reality television” shows that people Krazy-glue their eyeballs too for half their waking lives. These are the people who still, more than twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down and all the world got to see the horrors of the Gulag and the Lubyanka, still openly express admiration and nostalgia for the Soviet model–which model included as a feature I get the impression they especially like, state psychiatrists labeling anyone who disagreed or objected as a madman who had to be imprisoned to protect public safety.

Secondarily, and by a significant amount, this is all tremendously profitable for Big Pharma and the Therapy Racket. Everyone, everywhere, is mentally ill! It’s an epidemic! Have you had your PILLS today? Will that be cash or charge? Ding! goes the cash register.