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10/01/2022

The Myth of Normal or the Pathology of Normalcy

Pollock 2

“Young adults in California experience alarming rates of anxiety and depression, poll finds”

Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2022

By Paloma Esquivel

“Young adults in California experience mental health challenges at alarming rates, with more than three-quarters reporting anxiety in the last year, more than half reporting depression, 31% experiencing suicidal thinking and 16% self-harm, according to the results of a survey commissioned by the California Endowment. The numbers reflect a years-long trend of worsening mental health among young people that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, experts say.

The poll of nearly 800 Californians ages 18 to 24 also found young people facing significant barriers to getting help — with nearly half of those who wanted to speak to a mental health professional saying they had been unable to do so, and many saying cost or lack of access had stopped them. [….]

The poll reveals a generation under strain from a wide range of problems, with 86% saying the cost of housing was an extremely or very serious problem and more than three-quarters saying the same about the cost of college, lack of well-paying jobs, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and the cost and availability of healthcare.

Mental health ranked just behind the cost of housing as a widespread problem for young adults, with 82% calling it an extremely or very serious problem. When asked to pick a word that described how they felt about their generation’s future, the two dominant feelings were uncertainty and worry.

‘If we compare this to what we get when we talk to [older] adults, we don’t see the same breadth and intensity of concern about this wide range of issues,’ said pollster David Metz of the research firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, which conducted the survey. ‘I think that says something about the burdens that young people are feeling.’” [….] The full article is here.

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The findings reported here are part of a deleterious nation-wide trend in public mental health issues (so described, this includes physiological symptoms of various kinds in keeping with our knowledge of mind-body causal interactions), as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy warned at the end of last year. While just a hunch or suspicion (based on anecdotal evidence and trustworthy personal testimony), I’m inclined to believe the situation may be considerably worse than outlined in this article (one obvious symptom* that something is awry is the increasing rate of automobile accidents of late, which jibes with the countless daily stories from work and home of how horribly people are driving these days, including the widespread reports of ‘road rage’). Over fifty years ago, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote of the so-called normal person in contemporary society suffering from chronic low-grade schizophrenia marked by an inability to feel deeply, loneliness, anxiety, alienation and lack of creative activity. The epigraph to the Introduction to Gabor Maté’s (with Daniel Maté) latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (Avery, 2022) is fittingly, therefore, a well-known quote from the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society (1955):

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors [of formal and informal logic, reasoning, perception, cognition, etc.] does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

Now consider, if you will, the opening paragraphs of Maté’s book:

“In the most health-obsessed society ever, all is not well. Health and wellness have become a modern fixation. Multi-billion dollar industries bank on people’s ongoing investment—mental and emotional, not to mention financial—in endless quests to eat better, look younger, live longer, or feel livelier, or simply suffer fewer symptoms. We encounter would-be bombshells of ‘breaking health news’ on magazine covers, in TV news stories, omnipresent advertising, and the daily deluge of viral online content, all pushing this or that mode of self-betterment. We do our best to keep up: we take supplements, join yoga studios, serially switch diets, shell out for genetic testing, strategize to prevent cancer or dementia, and seek medical advice or alternative therapies for maladies of the body, psyche, and soul.

And yet collective health is deteriorating. What is happening? How are we to understand that in our modern world, at the pinnacle of medical ingenuity and sophistication, we are seeing more and more chronic physical disease as well as afflictions such as mental illness and addiction? Moreover, how is that we’re not more alarmed, if we notice at all [here is where problems of cognitive dissonance, self-deception, pernicious forms of wishful thinking, and denial come into the picture]? And how are we to find our way to preventing and healing the many ailments that assail us, even putting aside acute catastrophes such as the COVD-19 pandemic? [….]

I have come to believe that behind the entire epidemic of chronic afflictions, mental and physical, that beset our current moment, something is amiss in our culture itself, generating both the rash of ailments we are suffering and, crucially, the ideological blind spots that keep us from seeing our predicament clearly, the better to do something about it. These blind spots—prevalent throughout our culture but endemic to a tragic extent in my own profession [a health care system suffused with capitalist imperatives and distortions]—keep us ignorant of the connections that bind our health to our social-emotional lives [that is, our welfare, well-being, and potential or possibilities for individual and collective human fulfillment or happiness or eudaimonia].”

* For me at any rate, another and more all-pervasive symptom has to do with deteriorating adherence to minimal standards of etiquette, good manners, and social norms more generally.

Please see, in particular, the titles below for works that support or complement Maté’s arguments about the social and cultural sources of “the entire epidemic of chronic afflictions, mental and physical.”

  • Auestad, Lene, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac Books, 2014).
  • Berkman, Lisa F., Ichiro Kawachi, and M. Maria Glymour, eds. Social Epidemiology (Oxford University Press, 2014).
  • Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).
  • Durkin, Kieran. The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
  • Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1955).
  • Glass, James M. Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995).
  • Gruen, Arno. The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward an Understanding of Human Destructiveness (Grove Press, 1992).
  • Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
  • Haybron, Daniel M. Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013).
  • Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
  • Hofrichter, Richard, ed. Health and Social Justice: Politics, Ideology, and Inequity in the Distribution of Disease—A Public Health Reader (Jossey-Bass, 2002).
  • Krieger, Nancy, ed. Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives (Routledge, 2017 [Baywood Publishing, 2005]).
  • Layton, Lynne (Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, ed.) Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes (Routledge, 2020).
  • Levine, Bruce E. A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment (AK Press, 2022).
  • Phillips, Adam. Going Sane: Maps of Happiness (Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, 2005).
  • Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture (Verso, 1991).
  • Staub, Michael E. Madness is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
  • Venkatapuram, Sridhar. Health Justice (Polity Press, 2011).
  • Waitzkin, Howard. Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health (Monthly Review Press, 2018).

And relevant material is found in these bibliographies:

Posted at 06:59 AM in Patrick S. O'Donnell |

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