Mindfulness
Climate Anxiety
Great article on heat and how it affects mental health:
People often turn to cognitive behavioral therapy, medications or other strategies to cope with difficult emotions. But “when it comes to the climate crisis, those interventions fall apart, because the threat is real,” not just a matter of perception, she said.
Thoughts on Mental Illness and Teen Girls
Mental illness is rising, but teen girls have taken the worst of it. My take is different than most people’s:
Mixed messages about their worth as human beings. Innate worth or no is the soul’s inner ear. You have to navigate the world with it one way or the other, you can’t navigate it by switching back and forth. Modern psychology seems to think a human’s innate worth is axiomatic when it is, in fact, aspirational. Humans having worth was a Judeo-Christian ideal rooted in God’s commandments and was always something one strived towards as a part of sanctification. It was never a given and one could opt entirely out of this.
Modern psychology took the innate worth ideal and made it a centerpiece of their philosophy not realizing that it’s something people had zero incentive to opt in to. The worth of a person with nothing to offer will not be seen unless the person doing the seeing is commanded to do so and obeys the commandment. Outside the Judeo-Christian system, the command still might be there but it’s more toothless because it comes from modern psychology whose rules are optional rather than Judeo-Christian whose rules are commanded. On a more practical level, it means there is a chasm between how people expect to be treated (as if they have innate worth) and how they are treated (as they don’t). The imperative to value people beyond what they offer becomes an unfinanced mandate.
Lack of kindness in the world. A kinder world is worth more than all the therapists in the world. A culture that doesn’t see people as moral agents suffers because it can’t even measure the problem. Modern psychology wants us to believe that humans are basically good and this sets us up for misery when expectations of people’s behavior don’t match reality. Kindness has been conflated with weakness and is discouraged in many circles. The world is more competitive so one must often play dirty to get ahead.
The other issue is the internet amplifies all the existing unkindness. Bullies used to not have access to people once they left the schoolyard but now with Instagram, they have access 24/7. It doesn’t help that a lot of men are checking out of relating to women in a healthy way and finding misogynistic communities like Redpill/Incel.
Mixed messages about being your “authentic self.” It’s like flooring the gas and the brake. There has never been a time when one was expected to conform and be their “authentic self” simultaneously. You can’t have a blank avatar, you must dress it up, but you have to do it in such a way that expresses your individuality while simultaneously appeasing your peers. And navigating ever-shifting norms handed down by an amorphous authority driven mainly by algorithms.
Young people are kept from ascertaining the blowback of being their “authentic selves.” In the past teens would make the calculation to suppress part of themselves to fit in but that doesn’t happen as much anymore. This is because individual expression is the highest good and being closeted is the worst thing a person can be. I think there is some truth to this, but one must make the calculation carefully which many people aren’t encouraged to do by society anymore.
More knowledge. You would think more knowledge would be good, but it’s not. Part of teen girls’ mental illness struggles stem from seeing how women are treated in society, for example, #metoo. Also, being connected online with older generations, they see how tough it is to make it in the world and how hard finding a good relationship is.
Frequent malignant spaces. For all the criticism one could levy against traditional institutions, their spaces (schools, churches, government, etc..), while being easily corruptible, did not have corruption baked in. One can’t say the same about the spaces teen girls frequent. Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are all designed to keep you addicted and feed you content to get you hooked regardless of whether it’s healthy. YouTube algorithms will provide men with misogynistic Redpill content if they start watching Jordan Peterson videos. Internet companies are not held to a higher good like traditional institutions; they are accountable to their shareholders. That’s how capitalism works (something the younger generation is turning against).
Grim collective future. Modern society is exceptionally individualistic which is an unnatural state of being in the context of most of history. This means our entire mental health treatment program is focused on the atomized individual and as long as our future improves things will look up. But humans are communal creatures and deep down know the hyper-focus on the individual divorced from the larger group is an aberration. A lot of mental illness comes from experiencing and reflecting on things collectively. The lack of kindness in the world, the lack of people to look up to, the dying planet, the refugee crisis, the war on women’s healthcare, threats from AI and adversary nations, etc.. All these things can’t be swept away with breathing exercises. Even if one is well off individually this collective miasma is still playing out in the background. Mindfulness and focusing on the present and the individual self will not help much because we were meant for community and a hopeful future, and we have neither.
Therapy Speak
Great article on individualism and modern psychology.
Yet it is precisely that rejection of our communal lives that makes therapy culture — at least the version of it on social media and in wellness advertisements — such an imperfect substitute. The idea that we are “authentic” only insofar as we cut ourselves off from one another, that the truest or most fundamental parts of our humanity can be found in our desires and not our obligations, risks cutting us off from one of the most important truths about being human: We are social animals. And while the call to cut off the “toxic” or to pursue the mantra of “live your best life,” or “you are enough” may well serve some of us in individual cases, the normalization of narratives of personal liberation threaten to further weaken our already frayed social bonds. “We are a relational species,” Dr. Cohen noted, adding that we need connection “to really thrive and survive.”
Christianity and Mental Illness Revisited
As my powers of articulation wane I leave more thoughts about why those who are mentally ill often don’t stick with the faith.
Psychotic breaks often involve what the sufferer perceives to be direct revelation from God and/or experiences of demons/the devil. After recovering one is expected to renounce these experiences as merely artifacts of the mind. But to recant what to you felt like firsthand experiences of the divine is in many ways more difficult spiritually than simple apostasy because you weren’t turning away from something you believed, you were turning away from something you had firsthand experience of (even if it was revealed later to be psychosis, it wasn’t experienced as psychosis or remembered that way in your mind). There becomes a dissonance where people around you are pushing the faith on you yet denying your experiences of God while psychotic. This dissonance, coupled with the fact that renouncing the experiences of God you had while psychotic already felt like an apostasy makes the second apostasy, actually leaving the faith, almost effortless.
There’s a kind of “kinetic materialism” that comes from the experience of mental illness. After my psychotic break I was on so much anti-psychotic medication that for a certain while I had zero inner monologue, no original thoughts, and I hardly talked. My dose was eventually dropped down but that experience stuck with me and gave me a more philosophically materialist view of the person. If a mental illness (or drugs treating said illness) could do so much damage to a person that to the outside observer it seemed like their soul was severed from their body (this blog’s namesake) then personhood must be seated in the confines of the brain and the mind is just what the brain does.
Mental illness makes you less of a good person by torpedoing the machinations of the conscience by jamming the channels of negative emotion that were supposed to be used by your conscience. Instead of feeling shame and guilt when appropriate you are inundated with these negative emotions. You don’t know which guilt to feel guilty over or which shame to be ashamed about. It also prevents you from feeling good when you do good. Treatments for mental illness like SSRI antidepressants generally numb negative emotion and mitigate stress but this can also cause you to lose touch with your conscience because there is not the correct amount of negative emotion to ground you. So it becomes easier to be assertive regardless of the consequences which is a double edged sword because this can be done for good or evil.
God’s absence is felt more acutely than his presence and sickness spreads more easily than health. Mental illness isn’t something people talk about because it smashes their neat little world of votive candles and comfort food. Chaos begets chaos. It can be an intractable problem and in a world where everything is supposed to have a fix this is off people’s map.
Bipolar Bingo
Too hot for Facebook because it uses the S word (not that S word, the S word that involves the rope).
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