Another ‘Mental Health’ Failure

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The New York Times reports that paying too much attention to your mental health is bad for your mental health — something we knew, and have known, and have had in writing, since people were sacrificing goats to Pallas.

They say, in an article titled “Are We Talking Too Much About Mental Health?“

Students who underwent training in the basics of mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy did not emerge healthier than peers who did not participate, and some were worse off, at least for a while. And new research from the United States shows that among young people, “self-labeling” as having depression or anxiety is associated with poor coping skills, like avoidance or rumination.

The University of Oxford went farther and said that awareness campaigns, so far from reducing pain, were adding to it.  They said that people who experienced sadness and worry were then focused on how sad and worried they were, and instead of, say, accepting them as a part of life or finding meaningful solutions, they were labeling them horrible things and then blowing them out of proportion.  Oxford researchers then labeled this explosion of false and reckless self-diagnosing “prevalence inflation” — the clinical term for “being a whiny brat.”

I would compare the “scientific” approach to mental health with a pagan one, which was thought up well before anybody knew about serotonin.  Seneca sums a happy life up in a few easily digestible categories,

It comes from having a good conscience, from taking honorable counsel, from doing the right thing, from looking down on fortune, from a calm and steady mode of life that walks along a single road.

In other words, instead of chasing good things, he recommends being them — a shift from empty consumer to producer.*  But even this is too abstract for many.  A little more down-to-earth, Diogenes Laertius writes of the philosophy of Chion (Mensch translation):

When asked in what respect the educated differed from the uneducated, he said, “In good hopes.” When asked what is hard, he said, “To keep a secret, to use leisure well, and to be able to bear an injury.” He offered the following advice: Watch your tongue, especially at a drinking party. Do not speak ill of your neighbors; for if you do you will be spoken of in ways that give you pain. … Be quicker to visit friends in adversity than in prosperity. … Honor old age. Take thought for your safety. Prefer a loss to an ill-gotten gain; the one will only grieve you once, the other forever. Do not laugh at another’s misfortune. When strong be gentle, that you may be respected, rather than feared, by your neighbors. Learn how to manage your own house well. Do not let your tongue outrun your thought.

What you see here are a series of beautiful things, which you can easily observe, dream about, and sometimes be.  Each of them is concrete, shareable, and free to anyone who wants in.

The modern man, by contrast, despite having a reputation for being skeptical and materialistic, is a believer in fairy tales and snake-oil spirituality.  He first of all proposes happiness as a goal — an abstract, nebulous, and slippery concept that tends to disappear the harder you focus on it.  And then, in order to attain this impossible state of nirvana, he proposes you get rid of concrete negatives, such as sadness and worry.  That’s a crazy, childish, and impossible philosophy.

In the eyes of modern men, the other “solution” is to try to drown out personal failures with “big issues” — like taking your mind off a headache by crushing your finger with a hammer.  That’s not a wise solution, but it is a very effective one.  Politics and moral crusading are the only antidotes left, once you’ve decided God is irrelevant, and you either can’t or won’t fix yourself.

Walter Hooper says that when C.S. Lewis dropped The Screwtape Letters in 1942, he was accused by some loudmouths of being trivial, and even petty — like how a wokester might take Chion’s domestic advice above.  Thus Hugh Graham wrote for the Times in 1966, “With the concentration camps across the Channel and the blitz at home, Screwtape seems to have been aiming at rather small targets and to have been decidedly lacking in the historical imagination.”

W.W. Robson wrote in the Cambridge Quarterly, about the “general moral pettiness” of The Screwtape Letters, that “in an age which has produced Auschwitz, it is distasteful to have such slight topics associated with human damnation.”

But it’s almost always the slight topics that damn us.  The big fights are cataclysmic and dramatic — and temporary.  The little domestic horrors are forever.  We forget that what the big wars and the ideological clashes and the crusades are about is home, and if you look closely, you’ll find that too many of the crusaders’ souls are in shambles.  They forgot how to answer gently.  They forgot to forgive quickly.  They forgot to admit when they’re wrong.  And because they forgot the little things, they made the big things all pointless.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of Prejudices — a collection of questionable essays on Substack.  Email him at letterssubscription@gmail.com to get a free copy of his essays, or to see what he says next.

Image via Pxfuel.