By Ravi Chandra, M.D., D.F.A.P.A.

Ken Burns’ six-episode, 12-hour PBS documentary series is essential viewing for our American experiment, living itself out in headlines and heartaches across the land. Then and now, values and ideals were advanced like hypotheses and affirmations, and confounded by real-life variables and oppositional forces. The revolutionary concept, that “all men are created equal,” was contradicted by the presence of slavery and ambitions of settlers to possess the continent by eradicating and subjugating Native Americans. Differences with the British crown become irreconcilable, intensified by British disdain and contempt for Americans. Being looked down upon and, in their eyes, exploited, did not sit well with then-British subjects in the 1770s. Fewer, at that time, were willing to look at how they themselves were treating their fellow man. Naturally, Blacks and Native Americans such as Phyllis Wheatley, James Forten, and Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) and Dragging Canoe, recipients and witnesses to grave injuries, were quite aware of what most White settlers pushed aside. 

As it turns out, one white man who was willing to look was the founder of American psychiatry, Dr. Benjamin Rush. In Episode 1, “In Order to be Free”, he is quoted saying, 

“Ye men of sense and virtue, ye advocates for American liberty - bear a testimony against a vice which degrades human nature and dissolves that universal tie of benevolence which should connect all the children of men together in one great family. The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery.”

American psychiatry has an ignominious reputation, though. In the 1800s, Dr. Samuel Cartright (not a psychiatrist, but influential at the time), posited that enslaved Blacks who tried to escape suffered from drapetomania, and that Blacks who refused their tasks were afflicted with dysesthesia aethopica, which caused them to be “lazy.” Psychiatry and America continued to struggle with extraordinary biases, labeling homosexuality a disease until the 1970s. American culture still struggles with the equality of transgendered and other minoritized and marginalized populations, as well as struggling to trust the expertise of physicians in service to them.

Psychologically, what has persisted in American culture is a distaste for being looked down on, yet a tendency to look down on others with contempt, and even, currently, to scapegoat minorities in favor of narrow power structures. The founders would have recognized this as tyrannical and abusive, and it clearly has added stress, conflict, and even extreme division from neurons to neighborhoods to nation.

In Burns’ series, we can see America’s past, but also its present, and potential futures in a scrum of possible threads. The last of the six episodes is titled “The Most Sacred Thing (1780 and onwards),” a nod to the reality that the revolution is an ongoing and vital force, imperiled by paradox, contradictions, and hypocrisies. We remain belabored by personalities and ego, and must name our interests, cultivate our ideals, pick our spots, and use our agency.

The Dalai Lama was once asked what he thought of the French Revolution. His answer holds for our own Revolution: “it’s too soon to tell.” 

It can be fairly said that one lesson of the American Revolution is that violence and factional ambition consumed all ideals in pursuit of their objectives; yet somehow, they live, in us, tattered and bruised. Where these ideals have been deprived and even crushed, we must bring nurture, in hopes of cultivating our humanity, and continuing our American experiment into a better future, less violent than the past. Mental health and social well-being depend on it. 

Burns’ outstanding series allows public memory to shape itself around the living struggle to carry American promise to fruition.

Ravi Chandra is a psychiatrist and writer in San Francisco. You can find him on Substack. His 2025 essay on free speech is available as a pre-print on Cambridge Engage.

https://nativenewsonline.net/opinion/ken-burns-finally-puts-native-people-back-in-the-american-revolution-story-and-it-matters