Commentary: Staving off society’s collective breakdown

Mental disorder is not always that easy to identify.

All people have their quirks, their good days and their bad days.

So, if things starts to go over the edge, it may not be that obvious. Sometimes, it just seems to people themselves, or to friends and family, that something is up, that something seems wrong.

Somehow.

Is that happening to us as a nation?

A long time ago, which is to say in the 1970s, the commissioner of mental health in the city of New York, a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. J. Herbert Fill, wrote a fascinating book, unfortunately neglected, titled “Mental Breakdown of a Nation.”

In it, Dr. Fill argued that a neighborhood, city or nation does experience some lethal behaviors. Time-worn examples are a wronged husband violently confronting his wife’s lover or a murder in a robbery gone bad. The public gets used to that sort of thing, and comes to ignore it. It seems natural and unavoidable.

But, he proposed, someone going into a restaurant and machine-gunning to death perfectly innocent patrons is qualitatively different, a huge jump up in level of psychopathology.

He pointed out the larger danger — that people won’t notice that a line has been crossed, that the behavior isn’t just someone’s bad day, but rather that it represents society actually starting to mentally break down.

Naturally, diagnoses are more plentiful than treatments. But social science does offer a few suggestions for improvement:

• First, recognize that there is a serious social problem.

• Second, recognize that big problems start as little problems — defiance in school, bullying, sarcastic gossip, serious conflicts on the job, aggressive language and threats.

• Third, encourage and endorse common-sense mental health — hard work and responsibility, respect for others, kindness, generosity, cooperation, courtesy and negotiation of differences through discussion.

Dr. STEVE DAVIDSON is a clinical psychologist in Newport Beach.