1. The theme this week is — surprise! — mental health. And we’ll start off with a fascinating piece in the Atlantic claiming that “America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety.” Written by Derek Thompson, the essay begins with the finding that “youth in English-speaking Canada are becoming sadder faster than those in French-speaking Canada.” It turns out that the youth mental crisis that’s been making headlines these past few years — summed up in Jonathan Haidt’s excellent The Anxious Generation — may have a language component. Rates of teen suicidality, for example, are rising much faster in English-speaking countries like Australia and the US than in comparable non-English-speaking ones like Germany and Italy.
To help explain what’s going on, Thompson offers up a helpful typology of “inflations.” The three types of inflation he identifies are diagnostic inflation, prevalence inflation, and negativity inflation.
Diagnostic inflation refers to the explosion of new mental health diagnoses. The number of diagnosable disorders listed in the DSM effectively tripled between 1952 and 2013, which may have produced some unintended consequences.
The expansion of clinical vocabulary risked creating a new set of patients [former American Psychiatric Association chair Allen Frances] called the “worried well” — people with normal human experiences who spent a lot of time worrying that they have a disorder. He and others called this phenomenon “diagnostic inflation” — the slapping-on of more (and more, and more) clinical labels to pathologize everyday sadness and stress.
Next there’s “prevalence inflation,” a term which “psychologists Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews use to describe the phenomenon of people developing apparent anxiety disorders from the sheer ubiquity of concern about anxiety disorders that swirl all around them.”
It might work something like this: People who keep hearing about new mental-health terminology — from their friends, from their family, from social-media influencers — start processing normal levels of anxiety as perilous signs of their own pathology. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews wrote. This can create a self-fulfilling spiral: More anxiety diagnoses lead to more hypervigilance among young people about their anxiety, which leads to more withdrawal from everyday activities, which creates actual anxiety and depression, which leads to more diagnoses, and so on.
Thompson is careful not to let the “hermeneutic of suspicion” obscure the lifesaving breakthroughs that many of these new diagnoses have made possible. “Bringing anxiety and depression out of the shadows has been a societal mitzvah for many,” he writes. “But there is a difference between destigmatizing mental-health problems and popularizing them to the point that millions of young people are searching their normal feelings for signs of disorders.”
The final inflation is something called “negativity inflation,” which refers to how our media has become radically more negative in the past couple decades. Some would lay the blame at the feet of a coarsening political discourse amidst escalating inequalities of all kinds. But from where I’m sitting, “negativity inflation” has a lot more to do with the economics of chasing clicks than the actual facts on the ground.
What sounds like a set-up for an Outside-In conclusion — Those Poor American Teens American-ing Themselves Sick! — thankfully takes a left-turn right at the end. Thompson introduces us to the work of Ethan Watters, whose book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, explores the different ways similar mental distress manifests not only across cultures but epochs:
A simplistic explanation … would be that mental illness is always and everywhere a case of social contagion. That’s wrong. What we call worry and sadness are universal human traits, and many psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, show up around the world. Watters’s most interesting idea is more subtle: Negative thoughts and feelings whisper to us from the subconscious. To make sense of our darkest thoughts, we may pull concepts off the shelf — grabbing whatever’s circulating in our local culture at that time — to articulate and act out our bad feelings. […]
So if you grow up in a 19th-century environment where you are told that stressed people don’t get out of bed, you might not get out of bed, and your doctors might diagnose you with hysterical leg paralysis. And if you grow up in a 21st-century culture in which your phone keeps lighting up with high-arousal negativity, you might explain the inchoate worried gloom you experience on the internet in the patois of the times: I’m sick; I have trauma; this is my disorder.
2. A worthy companion to — and deepening of — Thompson’s article would be O. Alan Noble’s “America’s Mental Health Crisis and the Loss of Meaning” on the Dispatch, in which the good Dr. Noble parses some of the spiritual factors lurking behind the aforementioned “meta-crisis“. He begins by reproducing a stunning quote from Pascals’ Pensées which was new to me:
The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion… And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us from thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death.
Woof. Can’t say that doesn’t register. Noble writes:
Though humans have always had this aversion to contemplation, the structures and technologies of society haven’t always been so intensely and intentionally designed to prevent contemplation as they seem now. Everything in our world calls out to us, demands our attention, inserts itself into our field of vision or hearing. You can’t even pump gas without a screen built into the pump blaring out some video. In a historically unimaginable way, it is not only possible but quite common for modern people to spend the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep engaged with some form of media. Never alone. Never able to contemplate the state of their soul. […]
I believe a major reason for this crisis is that the structures of our environment prevent us from engaging with the tangible world in a way that creates what philosopher Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance.” The experience of resonance occurs when you come in contact with the world and feel your inability to master and control it. You are moved by a scene in nature or a line of poetry, and you engage those things in a way that accepts that they are outside of your control. They have an independence that matters and resonates with you, but it is not dependent on your recognition of such to be meaningful in themselves.
Speaking personally, I’ve found Rosa’s language of Resonance to be profoundly useful when it comes to capturing those things which touch and move us. Basically everything we’re after in life! (Huge thanks to Andrew Root for introducing). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that resonance has a lot in common with grace. Resonance is what Clare Sestanovich was getting at in her incredible recent New Yorker essay that Todd Brewer highlighted a couple weeks back:
People with vague longings like mine are often called seekers. They want to find things: purpose, meaning, truth. Finding, in my own brief life, had mostly looked like striving. Empowering, sure, but predictable, solitary. What I really wanted was to be found.
The way I read Sestanovich’s words is that she was longing for meaning and belonging and love that she wasn’t responsible for generating or extending or even locating herself. I once was lost but now am found, and so forth. Noble connects the dots in his conclusion better than I could:
When we follow the wisdom of Socrates and Pascal, and when we experience the world through resonance, we discover that existence itself is a miraculous gift. And that gift has a Giver who desires us to know Him and believe in Him. We discover that the crisis of meaning can be overcome by connecting to the real world and understanding our need for a savior.
3. Before we move on from our complicated internal lives, I had the pleasure of watching Inside Out 2 this past week with my boys, and while I share some of the plot-related reservations that Justin Chang surfaces in his New Yorker review of the film, I was still pretty thunderstruck by the #lowanthropology turn in the final act. That, and the many inspired visual puns (sarcasms, puberty demolitions, nostalgia trips), are worth the price of admission. The best Pixar I’ve seen since Soul.
The filmmakers’ chief innovation is to endow Riley with a burgeoning Sense of Self — a radiant metallic flower that springs from the depths of a shimmering underground grotto, where Riley’s most important, life-giving memories are nested, like floating water babies. This wild blue yonder is a bit too Tree of Souls from “Avatar” for my taste, but it does establish a set of moral and dramatic stakes that build intuitively on the first film’s: the suppression of what we perceive as bad in favor of the so-called good. “I’m a good person,” Riley’s Sense of Self tells her, and not incorrectly; Riley is compassionate toward strangers, loving toward her friends and family. But what of all her pesky not-so-great memories of regrets and failures, the ones that counteract her idealized assessment of herself? Joy, it’s revealed early on, has been absent-mindedly discarding them for years, effectively repressing them. […]
In the antic final stretch, the movie tries to land on a different takeaway for Riley and the audience: if the celebration of striving has its pitfalls, the fetishism of virtue (“I’m a good person”) is no better. It’s a truth so inarguable that you almost can’t believe it’s the story’s conclusion rather than its starting point. Yes, we all contain multitudes.
In other animation news, Laika Studios announced this week that it’s producing a stop-motion adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s magnificent Piranesi!! This is major. And hearing Clarke’s own excitement only amplified my own. Praise God. (Now please, please, pleeeeease get back to work on the Jonathan Strange sequel).
4. Next, as summer kicks into gear and the pace of life slows ever so slightly, the Cut published an excerpt of Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s forthcoming The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning that should be required reading. Possibly even as a means of pondering those questions that Pascal claims we divert ourselves from asking. The title of the excerpt is “My Job Was My Life. Then I Got Fired” and it touches on a number of our favorite themes, e.g., human doings/human beings and the false promises at the heart of most little-l laws, in this case the injunction that Thou Shalt Make It (or Else). Great stuff:
What’s inescapable to me now is how thoroughly I had bought into certain myths about what it means to be a woman who is “getting ahead at work.” I told myself I was loving it. I was like a coach who couldn’t stop giving pep talks: “This is awesome” or “I’m so happy to be here.” And sometimes it was even true. If work meant sacrificing everything, then I’d sacrifice.
Then the pandemic hit. And as scared as I was in that first pandemic month, isolated in my apartment, I started to notice some changes. My joints hurt less. The bags under my eyes had started to fade, as did the constant feeling of dread I’d had every night before going to bed. I noticed that in the Zoom window my face looked brighter. My body was communicating that it liked the forced break from hustling. I began to wonder if there was more to life than this career I had fought to build, this job I had killed myself to get. […]
Years after [getting my first bad job review], I kept obsessively going over the day when I got fired, again and again. In therapy, I’d be raging, blaming everyone for what happened — and then I gradually started to see the complexity of the situation. I started to see what I couldn’t see then: I had also not been thriving in the position. And that was OK. […]
“Making it” is a myth to me not because I didn’t make it. I did make it, and I’m still making it; I’m still on the hamster wheel. I still work too much. I still have a hard time doing all the things that need to get done, let alone being able to think about the bigger picture. I have long been in a prison of my own ambition, stuck without a narrative for moving forward. I’m slowly starting to find my way out. But it means accepting that success looks different than I thought it would.
5. While rest of the world loses its sense of humor, Reductress stands tall. “Woman Brings Running Shoes on Vacation in Case She Has Time to Become a Completely Different Person” is my recent fave of theirs, but “Wow! This Woman Has Never Not Taken It Personally” is pretty funny too. The New Yorker‘s “Self-Help Books from Ancient Times” also made me chuckle. My favorite recent humor discovery, though, has got to be the Forbidden Toys Instagram account, a few deranged examples of which adorn this post.
6. I’ll let Nadia Bolz-Weber take us out on an appropriately devotional note — albeit one that, er, resonates with the ambition-fueled nervous breakdown Mukhopadhyay describes above. It comes to us via her recent sermon on the parables of Mark 4, “Too Small to Fail“:
In our first parable, Jesus says that the kingdom is like if someone just sort of tosses some seeds on the ground and goes to take a nap. And while he’s resting from the great effort it took to toss seeds around, God’s work produces of itself. God’s work produces of itself. And I love this part — the dude literally has no idea how. Totally clueless, but still, he reaps all the reward.
Harvesting the goods of God’s kingdom relies not one bit on our understanding or effort. It relies entirely on God’s generosity. […]
The life of faith as portrayed in these two parables is far from the one I spent so much of my life striving for thinking I was volunteering for God’s kingdom when really I was being conscripted without realizing it because I was too busy trying to be good. But honestly, most times when I am TRYING to do good things, when I am SO SURE I am being helpful and holy, it all just kinda goes sideways. It’s humbling for someone who has spent much of her career planting a church and writing books and running conferences and starting big projects to realize that God’s Spirit most often moves among us in small ways we don’t even notice, much less can ever take credit for.
Maybe our best work in God’s Kingdom is hidden from us at the time, so that our egos don’t mess it up too bad. I’m starting to suspect that the Spirit prefers small nudges to grand gestures, anyhow. […]
I cannot say for sure, but I suspect that God’s best gifts are always the smallest.
Strays:
- An inspiring little post on the Lamp by Peter Hitchens on the overlooked virtue of saying grace before meals.
- Very encouraged to see the Surgeon General come out in favor of warning labels on social media
- Check out Paul Zahl talking Moltmann with Jason Micheli!
- Finally for your listening pleasure, a beautiful new single from The Porter’s Gate “The Kingdom of Jesus,” featuring Jon Guerra and Sandra McCracken:
