Heroes Not Zombies

Don’t you hate it when people judge you? And don’t you hate it when people assume they know all about you because they’ve stuck you in some pigeon hole? You know the kind of thing. I mentioned in another post sitting on the train recently next to two men who spent the whole journey dismissing huge swathes of humanity – doctors they said were only interested in one thing – money; Iraq was always a hell-hole, now it was just a hell-hole with less buildings; everyone who lives below the Mason-Dixon line is an in-breeder……and on and on and on. These are not uncommon conversations.

One way we function as human beings is to focus on part of reality, classify it and judge it. We do that to try and get a sense that we understand the world and we also do it to try and control our experience of reality. The thing is this strategy brings loads of bad side-effects. For a start, generalised judgement stops thought. Once you judge a whole class of something, you stop thinking about it. By that I mean you stop seeing, stop hearing, stop experiencing the context-sensitive reality of the individual member of that “class”.

I find this way of thinking very, very disturbing. I understand why it’s there, and I know that human beings are incapable of experiencing the totality of experience as it is. We can only perceive and experience aspects of reality at any given moment. But when we are not aware of the enormous down-side of this human function then we are no longer living in the real world. Instead we limit our experience of reality to our pigeon-hole set. We see everything through the thick discoloured lenses we’ve made for ourselves.

This happens in all areas of life. In Medicine, it happens with diagnoses. How sad it is to see people classified as a “case of X” and how much more sad it is to meet a person who can only see themselves as a “case of X”. When we squeeze every patient into a tightly defined diagnostic box we stop seeing them as who they are. People with mental illnesses experiences this a lot. Once they’ve been given a “diagnosis” they often find that all of their experience is interpreted by the doctors as part of that diagnosis. This is what leads to bad and dangerous prescribing. I recently saw a patient who had suffered from a variety of symptoms for the last couple of years. He was investigated at the outset of the illness and given a particular diagnosis. The diagnosis was wrong. But despite the fact that every time he saw his doctors he told them that certain treatments weren’t working they wouldn’t listen. The doctors said they were prescribing the right medicine for his problem. But they weren’t! Luckily, he got sicker and ended up with other doctors and a different investigation which revealed the true diagnosis. Since getting the appropriate treatment for that condition he’s not in a wheelchair any more.

We also stop experiencing the reality of the rich uniqueness of every human being when we classify them according to race, religion, accent, or life-style. It’s sad and it’s such a stupid way to live. Next time you catch yourself, or somebody else, saying that “all X are Y”, challenge them. All X are never all Y! And if you think they are, you’ve lost touch with reality.