Jeff Rogers
Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence is a one of a kind album by the progressive group Dream Theater. This band is composed of the worlds premier musicians. For those who follow music, Dream Theater is one of the few bands that makes odd time signatures, odd instrumental tuning, and the juxtaposition of musical styles and techniques ranging from classical to metal standard. Dream Theater's overwhelming complexity extends past just musical, most of their work extends in the range of 8 minutes. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence is just one song on an album with a running time of 54 minutes. It is in this time that Dream Theater explores the topic of mental health. Each subsection of the song flows fluidly into the other and explores bipolar disorder, PTSD, schizophrenia, post-postpartum depression, and dissociative personality disorder through the common motif of a silent struggle that is for a large part shunned by society. Dream Theater does a masterful job at using such an epic to provoke very tangible questions over how we treat others that suffer from such an mental unrest. For each disease a story is told and accentuated by powerful and dynamic music. Dream Theater is not a Christian band, however, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence has a prophetic conviction to all that listen openly. Such a prophetic message is best seen in the song itself, "Hope in the face of our human distress helps us to understand the turbulence deep inside that takes hold of our lives. Shame and disgrace over mental unrest keeps us from saving those we love." In this I see hope for a significant yet so marginalized population group and although progress has been made, this album shows the hope for a people that has been forced into a war in their own head. This vivid, fruitful, and humane picture which sheds the false identity of a sinful and evil mentally ill and articulates a prophetic and redemptive future of hope and restoration of the full humanity that the mentally ill are due.
Thanks for sharing about Dream Theater's album, Jeff. Music is an interesting form for commenting on mental illness, especially given recent highly-publicized shootings that involve the mentally ill. These incidents highlight society's shortcomings in terms of services and reveal our general prejudices toward the mentally ill--in large part, because they're not perceived to be "productive" members of a society that prioritizes one's economic contribution.
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