SOCIOPSYCHOSIS

SOCIOPSYCHOSIS

Definition:
Sociopsychosis reflects the spiritual malaise that permeates society as a whole. It is the pathology not of individuals, but of communities, nations and, indeed, historical epochs. Alternative terms are socioneurosis, ethno-pathology, sociatry (now used principally for the study of institutions for social care, like hospitals and ASYLUMS) and sociopathology (not to be confused with the study of the sociopath or psychopath).
Although starting as an investigation into personality disorders of the individual in society, sociopsychosis has now developed into a vast study of the unhealthy attitudes communicated to individuals by a sick society. This is based on the belief in the reciprocal relationship between the ills of the individual and of the society in which he lives. According to certain psychiatrists, a hospital, for example, can be treated as a sick organization, and modern society has many features of a hospital writ large. Individuals become almost helpless victims of a combination of circumstances, political, national and sociological, that are no longer within their power to change. In the words of a London graffito: 'Do not adjust your common sense; there is a fault in society', and it is this fault that represents the sociopsychosis with which we are now becoming familiar.
The chief sociopsychotic symptoms may be indicated by a brief analysis of the main areas of social collapse. Statistics for this purpose are mostly taken from America, and sometimes more specifically from California, on the ground that the problems of California today become the problems of the rest of the USA tomorrow, and of Europe the day after.
About 30 murders are committed in the United States every day. Lesser crimes of violence, such as kidnapping, assault and mugging, and crimes not necessarily involving violence, such as burglary and shoplifting, occur at the rate of 10 every second. In 1972 over 2 million guns were legally sold in the USA, 75,000 of them in California alone.
Growing alcoholism, drug addiction and drug abuse are an almost universal problem in the developed countries. The highest users are to be found among women with high family incomes and with two or three children. America has 7 million confirmed alcoholics and 50 million occasional or part-time drinkers. There are 100,000 acute alcoholics in England and Wales, and about 2 million on the borderline. Of the 7500 people killed on British roads every year a substantial proportion are the victims of drunken drivers.
There is no evidence that the developed nations are becoming markedly more healthy. The last five years have shown that the life expectancy of the average adult American male has declined, and is expected to decline still further. Health improvement appears to have reached its peak and has now leveled off. The trend applies to the rest of the Western world as well. People are no longer getting healthier. Coronary heart disease, the direct result of stress, is the largest single cause of death and disablement in the West. Mental illness remains endemic and DEPRESSION epidemic in the affluent society. Suicide is high among the causes of death.
The problems of ergonomics, of man and his working conditions, are increasing rapidly. These center around job satisfaction, labor-management relations, absenteeism, alcoholism, strikes, social leveling and class envy. As machines take over and more and more working men become redundant, the problem of what is to be done with them will increasingly engage the thoughts of governments. Along with the benefits of expanding production and prosperity loom the problems of the general environment which are important contributory factors in sociopsychosis: environmental pollution, overpopulation, overcrowding, noise.

Entertainment, once a rare and occasional part of life, is now the daily pabulum of the people, giving them their needed quantum of sports, violence and pornography. There is no relationship between entertainment and morals. The culture heroes of today are the entertainers, many of whom lead lives of sordid glamor, and who are often drug addicts, psychopaths and sexual perverts. Advertising is blatantly sex-oriented. Fashions are designed to keep sexual tensions very near the surface. Some types of clothes with tight pressure on the sexual and anal regions are a constant stimulus to mild eroticism.
In most Western countries today abortions are fast becoming commonplace and may soon be had on demand. It is usually done by having the uterine contents aspirated under strong negative pressure, or suction. Where the operation cannot be legally performed, illegal 'back-street' abortions continue. In the USA about 1 million women undergo illegal abortion every year, of whom about 5000 die as a result. In Western Europe (excluding the UK), some 350,000 illegal abortions, and in the UK about 100,000 cases, are carried out annually. In addition about 200 dead babies are left in London dustbins each year.
Moralists point out that the increasing recourse to abortion is symptomatic of a sociopsychosis, forming part of the pattern of permissiveness, pornography, obscenity and sexual degradation of a decadent culture. Abortion caters mainly for the promiscuous. In the advanced countries, half the number of women involved are unmarried. Those who are well off usually request abortion for trivial social or cosmetic reasons. There is, say the moralists, obviously a growing cynicism and a hardening of personality in the woman who seeks on demand what amounts to virtual infanticide, and who submits to having the growing entity within her 'extracted by a vacuum cleaner', 'squeezed out like a boil', 'slaughtered in a conveyor-belt abattoir', or 'thrown into the w.c. like a piece of disposable tissue'.
Promiscuous sexual relations, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, adultery, wife-swapping and homosexuality are now accepted as part of the pattern of society. The number of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children is rising steeply. About 7 per cent of all children born in the USA today are illegitimate. One-fifth of all brides and one-third of all teenage brides in the USA are pregnant before marriage. 1 in 4 US marriages ends in divorce: in California the ratio is 1 in 2.
The first casualties of this situation are the children. In the break-up of family life the children suffer most. Every hour 5 infants in the USA receive severe injuries at the hands of their parents. Every day 2 or 3 children under five are killed by their parents. In the UK 12 children suffer non-accidental injuries inflicted by their parents every day, as a result of which at least 1 dies and 1 is permanently injured.
Teenage affluence has not improved the quality of the young. There is growing conflict with parents and society. In the past five years the incidence of hooliganism, mugging, sexual violence, burglary and shoplifting, mainly among adolescents, has risen by more than 50 per cent. There are Teenagers Alcoholics Anonymous in several major cities in the USA, and over 1 million youthful users of marijuana, LSD and similar drugs. Unaccountable DEPRESSION is rampant in certain strata of youthful society. More than 2000 college students, and 1000 boys and girls of high-school age in the USA commit suicide each year.
VD (venereal disease, chiefly syphilis and gonorrhea) has had a phenomenal rise in recent years. Its effects on the individual are so widespread that almost any disease subsequently acquired will be aggravated because of it. [t is a permanent guest once it gains entry, and when the obvious external symptoms vanish, its ghost continues to haunt the individual, and by blood-spread is the ultimate cause of many groups of symptoms that continue to smolder underground and crop up in one form or other throughout life.
During the period immediately following the Second World War it was thought that VD had been brought under control, but by the mid-1960s there was a sudden and inexplicable reversal which caused widespread alarm. It was found that the prevention of its spread became impossible, because in a permissive society contact tracing of infected persons was a virtually endless task. Every minute of the day two people in the USA were catching VD. Over 1 million new cases of syphilis and gonorrhea were being reported annually. It has now become pandemic there.
The situation continues to deteriorate both in the USA and elsewhere, and some authorities doubt if its spread can ever be arrested now. The Antibiotics that were once successful in the treatment of VD are gradually becoming ineffectual because both the gonococcus, the microbe causing gonorrhea, and the spirochaete of syphilis are acquiring resistance to them. Teenagers constitute a third of all cases of gonorrhea in the USA, UK and Scandinavia, largely because of the relaxation of moral codes, the spread of indiscriminate, irresponsible, and misleading sex information, which tends to arouse curiosity, allay fears and appease conscience.
Since 1970 the control of infectious syphilis in all parts of the world has been eroded by a great resurgence of new cases. On a world scale the incidence of gonorrhea has aisp risen, from 60 million cases recorded in 1957 to an estimated 230 million in 1972. A WHO report states that gonorrhea has 'reached almost epidemic proportions in Europe'. In the middle of 1976 a new strain, causing 'beta' gonorrhea, appeared in the USA and UK, which is totally immune to penicillin. At present it seems to respond to the more potent Antibiotic, spectinomycin, but doctors warn that in time it may develop resistance to this too. If so, we have as yet no drug to cope with the situation. The hope of 'conquering' VD has now virtually faded.
The generation gap has produced an unprecedented generation conflict, in which the adult world has capitulated all along the line. Many elders envy the permissiveness of youth and imitate or attempt to imitate their life-styles and mores. One of the slogans of the early youth brigade was: 'Don't trust anyone over 25', later advanced to 30 as the slogan-makers grew older themselves. Little attempt is made by elders to counter arguments against morality. The upshot is a growing absence of parental and social disapproval of wrong behavior. According to sociologists of so-called advanced thought, obedience is demeaning, authority is tyrannical and all feelings of guilt and shame, for whatever reason, are festering sores. The real four-letter concepts in their view are discipline, self-control, morality, duty, self-respect.
Throughout history a rapid decline in moral standards has been one of the evils of affluence. Men it would seem are unable to cope with material prosperity. Confronted with a bewildering choice of contradictory values and a multiplicity of standards, people find themselves in a state of confusion and turmoil. Many thinking people become disenchanted with material progress, and regret the loss of faith in a great spiritual reality. But no solution of the downward trend is at present in sight, and according to them the prognosis is gloomy.

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Reference: Felstein, Ivor, Sexual Pollution: the Fall and Rise of Venereal Disease, David & Charles, London,1974. Frank, L. K., Society as the Patient, Rutgers University Press, 1948. Halliday, J. L., Psychosocial Medicine: a Study of the Sick Society