An article that is free to read at Vox, for now, is pretty interesting:
How anxiety became a catchall for every unpleasant emotionHere's part of it:
Here’s how to understand the difference between everyday anxiety and an anxiety disorder.
Normalization of mental health is undoubtedly positive: More people can feel empowered to seek care and to openly discuss their experiences. However, increased awareness has resulted in more people confusing “milder forms of distress as mental health problems,” according to one academic paper. Despite therapy’s wider cultural acceptance, we still don’t have a grasp on what we really feel. Without a nuanced vocabulary to describe these experiences, complex emotions are flattened with blanket terms. “We don’t have a sophisticated lexicon,” Rosmarin says. “We end up labeling everything as anxiety.” When we don’t accurately define our emotions, we don’t know how to properly address them. If we approach our feelings with curiosity, we can improve our emotional intelligence. ........
The boundaries of anxiety are blurry and subjective, says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, so it makes sense that lay people would label all of their upsetting experiences as “anxiety.” But we can stand to improve our emotional intelligence — the ability to accurately identify what we’re feeling, Haslam says. Because many don’t receive emotional education beyond primary school, says Rosmarin, we have a limited emotional vocabulary. Feeling “bad” is a significantly different experience from feeling “distressed,” “frustrated,” “jealous,” “overwhelmed,” or “anxious.”
An emotional binary of “good” and “bad” emotions actually makes matters more confusing. “You don’t understand how you should respond to what’s going on,” Haslam says, “whether you should flee or fight, whether you should bite your tongue.” People who struggle to put their emotions into words have more difficulty coping with complex feelings, Haslam says.
When we don’t have a deep knowledge of common human emotions, we may pathologize normal experiences. Feeling uncomfortable in a room of new people is incredibly common. It is not, however, social anxiety, Marks says. Online and social media content created by non-professionals may paint anxiety with broad strokes, leading viewers to self-diagnose as having an anxiety disorder. “Even if you do have anxiety, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an anxiety disorder,” says psychologist Juli Fraga. What’s often at the root of situational anxiety — like feeling anxious in social scenarios — may be relational trauma dating back to unhealthy social interactions during childhood, Fraga says.
Sounds quite sensible.
"More Americans are seeking professional mental health treatment than ever before. Nearly a quarter of adults visited a psychologist,"
ReplyDeleteToo much introspection is a bad thing. Too much individualism becomes pathological ...
Even the psychic invalid throws away his crutches, in such moments [large external threat]. For him the greatest joy is to realise that there is something more important than himself. All his life he has turned on the spit of his own roasted ego. He made the fire with his own hands.
Miller, Sexus
That highlights the ridiculous psychological ignorance of libertarians and some conservatives.
"The importance of emotional intelligence"
EQ sucks.
"When we don’t have a deep knowledge of common human emotions, we may pathologize normal experiences. "
Attribution error. In the past we didn't need a deep knowledge, the culture guided us and helped us along the way. Now the culture is making us sick. In Beyond Human Nature: How Culture And Experience Shape Our Lives, the philosopher Jesse Prinz argues that we scripting people for depression. In the 50's the rate was 2%, now 10 times that amount.
Actually it is the mental health community that tends to pathologize normal experience. There are lone wolves out there. For example:
Saving normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life
Allen Francis(Chairman of the DSM IV taskforce) 2013
In Australia we have introduced subsidies for psychology services and antidepressant prescriptions have gone through the roof. Hasn't shifted the dial at all.
The problem is cultural, the problem is that too many in the mental health community don't read enough and suffer from:
"Any representation can block creativity, as well as aiding it. To be creative is to escape from the trap laid by certain mental processes currently in use. People can be trapped not only by a frozen heuristic, but also by a frozen representation."
Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms.
That's a comment with an unusually large number of citations, John.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why over-introspection seems such an American thing in particular: it's odd how Freud and Yung started it from Europe, but it seems to have fallen onto fertile soil across the Atlantic, I guess!
Steve it isn't just the psychotherapy. The USA is by far per capita the largest consumer of legal and illegal psychotropic and drugs. I don't know why that is the case. It would make for an interesting essay. The USA: where if you're not receiving mental health treatment you must be insane.
ReplyDeleteSteve, the citations arose because when I am focused and thinking the memory flow; though at my age without the vigor of youth darn it.
ReplyDeleteBTW I highly recommend Sapolsky's Behave. We can learn more about human behavior from that single but very dense 700 pages than any religion, philosophy, podcaster, vlogger, can ever teach us. Better as a Kindle because it is easily the single most comprehensive compilation of the most recent research. It isn't just neurobiology he synthesizes information from a wide variety of domains. I wish everyone would read it because in public discourse there is a desperate need for a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of behavior.