Ebenezer Scrooge is notorious for snorting “Bah! Humbug!” whenever the topic of Christmas crops up in Charles Dickens’ 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol. Since no one wants to be thought of as an insufferable tightwad both the name Scrooge and his favorite word, “humbug” float side by side in the toilet. From a different vantage point, one hundred years later, when December’s (and now also November’s) annual bacchanal of mindless spending masquerades behind the spiritual meaning of our most famous holiday Scrooge is a prophet. Christmas is a humbug indeed.
Humbug pays tribute to a high ground value so as to mask the attraction of a lower ground need. It’s dishonest in a “wink-wink, “yeah, we’re all in on it” way. Yet humbug’s universality sets it apart from the ploy of a hoax that creates chaos and serves the narrow interest of a few. Nor is it the same as outright lying. In plain English, humbug is a polite term for bullshit. Ebenezer Scrooge owned a well-oiled bullshit detector.
In addition to Christmas, examples of humbug include:
- “Thank you so much! Receiving this Most Valuable Player award is deeply humbling.” The recipient of outsized recognition is aware that excessive adulation for any one individual diminishes all others. Then, so as to preempt resentment they assert that the award diminishes not you but them. Welcome to humble brag.
- A show or film decrying immoral behavior can make its case with images that goose us into having immoral urges! In a prior era, P.T. Barnum offered the public burlesque shows that he cleverly advertised as moral lectures.
- Abraham Flexner’s 1910 report on medical education in the US hawked “genuinely scientific,” meaning psycho-pharm medicine from Germany to an American public eager to associate itself with sophisticated, European knowledge. Flexner pretended that a wildly popular and not at all unscientific trend toward naturopathic medicine created by an ingenious German homeopath named Emmanuel Felke did not exist. The humbug benefitted his magnate sponsors, masterminds John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
- Psycho-pharmaceutical medicine as I hope to show is another example of humbug.
P.T. Barnum’s Visitation
Phones Taylor Barnum
“Good sir!” the fellow bellowed, “Attend to me at once! It has been long, much too long….!”
How to account for this dream? Perhaps the tryptophane loaded, cheddar cheese sandwich that I scarfed up before bed the other night. There he stood, all six foot two inches of him, bulbous nosed with piercing blue eyes, curly brown locks framing a semi-bald head. Sporting his fabled potbelly. It was Phineas Taylor Barnum himself. “Well hello PT,’ I replied. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“The immanent spirits wearied of me.” he sighed, “If you can imagine! I was dismissed from the Bardo, exiled to the outskirts of Heaven. There I rebuilt my three-story Oriental mansion Iranistan. Amidst the sanctimonious ones it was I who grew bored. It is now a hundred and thirty years have passed since my death. An overlong expanse would you agree? So now I ponder a return.”
“And how is that?” I asked.
“Good sir!” the fellow bellowed, “Attend to me at once! It has been long, much too long….!”
How to account for this dream? Perhaps the tryptophane loaded, cheddar cheese sandwich that I scarfed up before bed the other night. There he stood, all six foot two inches of him, bulbous nosed with piercing blue eyes, curly brown locks framing a semi-bald head. Sporting his fabled potbelly. It was Phineas Taylor Barnum himself. “Well hello PT,’ I replied. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“The imminent spirits wearied of me.” he sighed, “If you can imagine! I was dismissed from the Bardo, exiled to the outskirts of Heaven. There I rebuilt my three-story Oriental mansion Iranistan. Amidst the sanctimonious ones it was I who grew bored. It is now a hundred and thirty years have passed since my death. An overlong expanse would you agree? So now I ponder a return.”
“And how is that?” I asked.
I am not easily beguiled,“ said Barnum, “nor bereft of notion. Clearly, they’ve discovered a new General Tom Thumb.”
“None such found, Barnum.”
“Captured a pachyderm larger than my elephant, Jumbo?”
“Has not occurred PT.”
“Well then, showcased a singer better than my Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale?’
“Try again.”
“Displayed a giant more immense than my Commander Nutt?”
“I give you one last chance.”
“Drat! It has to be they vouchsafed a monkey man hairier than my William Henry Johnson!”
“You float lead balloons Mr. Barnum.”
“Who are these paragons?” shrieked Barnum, growing red in the face. Where be their circuses? Explain their humbug to me!”
“They comprise a posse PT, of which I give you five ringmasters: David Ricks, Pascal Saviot, Emma Walmsley, Albert Bourla and Joaquin Duato. Their circuses are wondrous strange with unfathomable names: Eli Lily, AstraZeneca, Glaxosmithkline, Pfizer; an occasional extravaganza slung with an uncannily humdrum moniker such as Johnson and Johnson.
“Allow me to abbreviate their humbug. For millennia mankind struggled with the stresses of poverty, loss, betrayal, exhaustion and spiritual distress. Then, after your death something remarkable occurred. Together with the arrival of what we call a pharmaceutical industry existential problems came to be monetized. Medicines such as homeopathics and herbs attuned to the human design were supplanted because they were not patentable. In order to buttress their psycho-pharmaceutical nostrums the ringmasters performed a magic trick. Bogus psychiatric conditions were conjured.
Their supposed curability with the industry’s dubious but patentable chemicals was proclaimed. The erratically acting pharmaceuticals engendered ever more dire medical conditions that burdened the afflicted with shame. To alleviate the stigma a dogma was propagated that the mentally ill require medicating with ever more of the ‘new and improved’ concoctions. Dependence on the drugs became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Ringmasters skilled at sustaining the rigamarole are handsomely rewarded.”
“Indeed a most marvelous humbug,” Barnum declared, “Regale me about these chemicals. How are these new medical conditions known?”
“An example is the first and later “generation” of neuroleptic medicines, also called anti-psychotics. If I tell you their names your head will explode. As for the conditions they are many. We have psychosis, schizophrenia, dysthymia, bi-polar one, bi-polar two, bi-polar three, bi-polar four and bi-polar five, cyclothymic disorder. The new conditions are tallied up in a well-regarded volume, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is now into its fifth edition and counting.”
“An opportunity beckons,” he exulted. “I shall mount exhibits,” he continued: “Half-reptile, half-lunatic, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Neuroleptoserus! And here in the next booth, halfways joyous, halfways melancholiac, ‘The Bifurcate, Bi-polar Man.’ Beside him–if I have this right—The Unfortunate Dysthymia, a woman who cares for absolutely nothing!”
“One rejoices to hear that death has not dimmed your imagination PT. However, showmanship such as yours no longer flies. The afflicted are too many. I fear they better qualify as ‘exhibits’ themselves, than customers.”
Absorbing this news Barnum’s face fell and his presence within my dream receded.
The next night brought forth another and darker dream. A melancholic P.T. Barnum gives himself over to modern-day psychiatry. Having been prescribed the anti-psychotic, haloperidol Barnum reacts with agitation and uncontrollable restlessness. This prompts a return to the psychiatry office.
“Look here Ed, Barnum’s boomeranged,“ his doctor, Sid says. “Must be akathisia. Better switch to a second-generation neuroleptic. Maybe we should have used that in the first place.”
“I know what you mean,” his colleague Ed replies. “They all balance the neurotransmitters, so I’m told. Be a good fellow and rummage through the drug barrel. Hope we’re not yet clean out of asenapine, clozapine, iloperidone, lumateperone, lurasidone, olanzapine, paliperidone, quetiapine, risperidone and ziprasidone. Wait! That hot little rep who dropped by the other day, which one was it she recommended? Oh, and by the way Barnum, I surmise that your insurance has elapsed so this will be coming out of your pocket.”
Given risperidone, Barnum is advised everything will be fine and that he can retreat to the peace and quiet of his sepulcher. Like a dutiful zombie, Barnum trudges back to his grave only to find himself spinning uncontrollably within it. Back to the psychiatric office he schleps.
“Aw crap, I thought this might happen!” Ed says, “Rotten luck. You’ve got Tardive Dyskinesia Barnum, too much damn dopamine signaling in the brain! Bad idea to take you off the ‘ole risperidone though. A little TD never killed anyone. Try not to get all worked up. We’ll just lower the dose. Go on back to your crypt and chill out Mr. Barnum.”
Barnum complies and the rolling over in his grave abates. But now mysteriously, he has contracted Tourette’s Syndrome for I hear him repeatedly, sputtering “Humbug! Humbug! Did didd didd didd…ddastardly…hhumbug!” I woke up before finding out if he ever makes it back to the psychiatric office.
By way of comic relief…
Forgetting poor P.T. Barnum for the moment, here is an entry from the Compendium of Madness Perspectives, extracted from the Appendix of Sane Asylums, the Success of Homeopathy Before Psychiatry Lost Its Mind.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sane-Asylums/Jerry-M-Kantor/9781644114087
Meshugeneh Antecedent to this Yiddish term is shigaon from Deuteronomy, meaning crazy. It expresses the common biblical theme of retribution due to deviating from the word of God. Later in that section, God says that the Jewish people will become m’shuga after a foreign people steals their crops and abuses them. Talmudic rabbis saw madness as a legal issue. They held that someone who is mentally incompetent — a category known as a shoteh, derived from the Hebrew word for wanderer or vagrant is exempt from most religious obligations. He or she can neither marry nor bear witness. Maimonides described the shoteh is someone who runs around naked or throws rocks.
Some Talmudic sources equate madness with sinfulness. The sage Reish Lakish for example, says that a person only sins when the spirit of shtut — madness or folly — descends. The Talmud describes a shtut as someone who goes out alone at night or sleeps in a cemetery But Oy! So as to obtain learned counsel a devout Chassid may prostrate himself on the grave of a deceased sage. If while doing so he falls asleep is he messhugeh? (See also the Meshugass section in Chaim Yankel’s Heymischer Homeopathy, The Schmendrick’s Guide to Remedying Yiddish Yiddish Kvetches)
Meshugeneh
Behold! In my dream, tomorrow the Messiah did not come
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