I work with teenagers everyday and my heart sinks for them. Western society says “you are not a child” and “you are not an adult” but these lost humans want deeply to be attached to something. “I can’t help it”, “excuse me. It’s my….”. If their not already drugged, there parents are desperate for it. It’s very sad, we might all need to SLOW down, breathe and listen to their pain and the pain of our Mother Earth. It’s all connected. Bless them and all our pain
“The highest rates of diagnosed depression occur among England’s poorest people, but the government probably prefers prescribing antidepressants to trying to solve poverty.”- This makes me think of a quote from an NHS psychologist writing in the Guardian- ‘If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.’ https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psychologist-devastating-lies-mental-health-problems-politics
I can fully identify with your article. I suffered a breakdown at the end of my professional life. I was diagnosed with depression and spent some time in a clinic after therapy showed that I had already gone through two episodes before and tried to ignore it, resulting in somatic symptoms that I still retain today, although I can cope. Today, I see my situation as described by Erich Fromm some time back:
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the lives of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”
I survived but met several people in the clinic, and I was not so sure they would. I think many things are happening here, and one of them is that our society does not acknowledge that people are very different. Alone, the fact that introverts and extroverts are bundled together, let alone people on the autism spectrum, shows that we have a brutally pragmatic approach to how we expect people to behave and generally expect the same from everybody.
One person even asked me, whether I expected society to bow down to everybody’s needs, as though that was impossible. Having worked in nursing homes, it was our job to treat each person individually, so I answered yes. The reply I received seemed to betray the fact that the questioner wanted themselves desperately to be treated as they needed but had given up hope.
Such a meaningful conversation to be having, and as always, so eloquently put, Sarah. Thank you! It is always curious to me that while a diagnosis can provide (to some degree) initial relief, understanding, identity, belonging and some hopeful direction, it can simultaneously provide shackles, stereotypes, alienation and bewilderment. Diagnoses mean so many different things to different people. I tend to view my diagnosis as a little piece of information from someone who has been invited into my world for a short period to view from a distance how I experience it. Remembering this has helped me to continue to question, absorb, experience, seek and wonder as myself, not my diagnosis.
I look forward to reading the discussion as it unfolds!
Thanks Sarah. I recently went to a Mental Health First Aid course run professors at my local university (Mental Health nurses) who likened Mental Health on a spectrum comparable mainstream illness ie: a cold (mild sadness) through to serious cancer (schizophrenia). The idea is to view mental health on a spectrum of other common illness where we may have episodes of sickness during our lives, seek treatment, rest, recover and keep going. Viewing it this way allows us to normalise it and reduces a tendency for society to demonise or weaponize the diagnosis and, importantly, for us not to cling it. Personally, I like to view it this way. Don't collapse into your diagnosis is a great mantra.
Thanks Sarah - just a great conversation to be having. I feel for my friends who are receiving the diagnosis of ADHD, for example, taking the pills and waiting for a miracle. Yes, medication can help and yes there is also something going on that can be excavated, observed and even changed so the mental health improves. No one size fits all either.
In Ayurveda (I know I mention this a lot) there are the three gunas, or the qualities of the mind - sattva, rajas and tamas. It's a bit to go into here, however a combo of the three states woven together makes up the reality for individuals. So in my best summary, sattva is the most calm of the gunas - clear, balanced and creative. Rajas is the guna of change, transformation and action (if someone is 'rajasic' then this is the guna that is out of balance - the busyness of the mind, the doing the racing, the scrolling, the appointments etc) and the third guna is tamas and it is the heaviest state and often related to potential not being used.
Anyway, the upshot is that we are all a combo of three states and when in balance, things can feel like we are showing up from our soul (rather than our mind!)
This knowledge greatly supports me in being so much more than a diagnosis because my mind state can change for fluidly - I am not stuck with a label of 'generalised anxiety disorder' that I was given some time ago. This new knowledge (ancient wisdom) gives me freedom to explore each of my daily rhythms and how I can easily be swayed from one state of being to another.
The other thing about a diagnosis is that for some it feels like a quick fix - let's get this sorted and move on. That's not always the case and also, for many people, it took a long time to reach this state of imbalance so it might take a while to move through it.
I think it makes sense that we are sick as a species. Perhaps the reported rise of mental illness is a symptom of an unwell culture, our ways of connecting to each other and nature are so far from how we evolved. It makes sense that we are all unwell. As a species we treat the earth, other species and nature like it is separate from us, raping and pillaging the planet for profit. I think it makes sense that we are sick. Our current systems are unsustainable and damaging not only to the planet but to ourselves and our psyche. Many different ways of looking at the issue but I do see it through this lens.
My brain is buzzing with how you can know all of this detailed information and give us so much content constantly.
If that’s a consequence of said mental illness then it’s bloody brilliant.
If we look back through history to the creatives, leaders, artists, people - I’m sure they would all have a named disorder today.
Scott Morrison definitely has one.
There’s a common phrase that I’m starting to detest - ‘First World Problems’ as well as not so commonly - ‘Affluenza’
I’m so reminded of my travels in the nineties and 2000s and wanted to share this 24 years later.
I went to visit Lebanon in May 2000, all based on loving two Lebanese restaurants in London - Fairuz and Le Mignon.
I loved the cuisine and I also loved the comfort of being in those places of friendship and family.
The photos on the wall in Le Mignon convinced me that I had to go and see it for myself.
Beirut was this shell of a city then, buildings like cheese graters riddled with bullet holes.
It was humbling and devastating to be there and see it.
But, the most humbling and amazing thing was the kindness of the people.
Everywhere we went people wanted to talk to us, invite us to their home for dinner, give us gifts.
What??
We heard a story from a school teacher who used to have to dodge the snipers going across the green line every day, trying to get to the place to educate her students.
Not once did anyone say, poor me. Everyone had been through hell and yet they were still there, talking, living, loving.
On the morning we were to fly out the power went off. The power station in Beirut had been bombed.
A few days later we saw the road to Baalbek had been bombed and saw the huge crater on the news.
We had been on that road days before.
We were just tourists, with the safety of returning to our homelands with no snipers or bombs.
I cried as the plane took off, I didn’t want to leave.
Lebanon - huge bright shining light in my heart always. ❤️
My experience - people often with the least are the most generous and the most happy.
I know this is a divergence from the mental health labelling but I feel it’s an important memory to share here X
I agree with your points Sarah, and am concerned with the ADHD clinics popping up like the pain clinics in the US. Handing out meth rather than opioids.
I had the conversation with my therapist the other day, I challenged him for facilitating poor and immature behaviour And asked him to start challenging me and holding me more
accountable. Navel gazing is as much a disorder as the disorder which made it necessary in the first place. Pain is as good a distraction as pleasure, and it is the distraction from “real life” which is at the core of the issues you have raised.
Nothing makes me more happy than to gather enough energy through good behaviour, to engage a new behaviour. And this can only be done in real life, in real time.
Omg it’s like you’re me. I’d actually like to have those earlier dx removed from my medical record now the long overdue ‘well duh’ ASD dx is there. I’m also feeling an urge to distance myself from the tedium of my conditions and the way they have come to define me, internally and externally. I’d just like to ‘be’ and ‘DO’. Thanks for this, so on the nail.
My treatment of choice is Internal Family Systems. I find talk therapy useful to some extent but also limiting. Healing happens through a deeper internal process.
“I asked Leif Kennair, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of anxiety, and Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, what they thought of practice. Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated.
If we want to help kids with emotional regulation, what should we communicate instead?
“I’d say: worry less. Ruminate less,” Kennair told me. “Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do—less.”
There’s another problem posed by emotions check-ins: they tend to induce a state orientation at school, potentially sabotaging kids’ abilities to complete the tasks in front of them.
Many psychological studies back this up. An individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state. If she’s thinking about herself, she’s less likely to meet any challenge.
“If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom,” Dr. Linden said.”
Yes to not identifying with mental health issues. I’m a psychologist and I see too much of ‘I am my mental health’. And that blocks the very real invitation here to, which is to heal. We’re not meant to stay stuck in a diagnosis. We’re meant to grow through it. Thank you for calling this out, Sarah!
Diagnosis in the mental health field has always been controversial. In part because the labels lack inherent validity and were arrived at fairly arbitrarily many decades back. Homosexuality was a psychiatric diagnosis at one point in history! They have become enshrined as if they 'exist' but really they are just shorthand for clusters of internal experiences and externally observed behaviours. They cannot be measured or 'seen' on a test in the way that physical health issues can, therefore even among trained professionals there is often huge disagreement about diagnosis. We have adopted a model from physical health and clumsily applied it to mental health. In my experience, diagnostic labels help some people, to give validity to their experience and a language that they can communicate with others, or access to supports and resources. They also harm some people when they feel diminished, stigmatised, or, as you say, overly identified with a fixed label as if it is a static thing, a fault within them. They fail to take account of the context to someone's struggles. The reality is we all struggle to varying degrees with emotion regulation and mental states at different times. I'd like to see us move away from diagnostic labels and towards more individualised and nuanced descriptions of what an individual is facing at any given time. In the school of psychology I trained in, we focus on formulation -understanding why someone presents with a particular set of struggles at a particular point in time and in a particular context - rather than diagnosis, which tells us none of those things.
Hi Sarah. I recently starting writing about this too. I've overly identified with my different diagnoses for years (GAD, depression, PTSD and then OCD), and it got me nowhere. I suspect I would qualify for the ASD label as well, but honestly, I am just so tired of medical system and trying to find answers that never actually lead me to feeling any better.
I decided to side-step the mainstream health system for now and am trying out private coaching. Their approach is very much what you are learning to do- manage the anxiety and grow through it, doing your best to live the life you wish to live despite it all. It's the most hopeful I've felt in years. Before this I felt I had to micromanage every facet of my life to cope, and just wanted to give up. I really do feel for Gen-Z.
You might be interested in reading the work of Freya India and Jessie Meadows if you haven't already. Both have some interesting things to say in the area.
This issue not mentioned in this article is we are also now talking about a large industry where people are making lots of money at the expensive of such issues.
In Australian schools, they receive more funding when a child has been labelled with ADHD, Autism etc. If we think this is not pushing up numbers, then we have our head in the sand.
I work with teenagers everyday and my heart sinks for them. Western society says “you are not a child” and “you are not an adult” but these lost humans want deeply to be attached to something. “I can’t help it”, “excuse me. It’s my….”. If their not already drugged, there parents are desperate for it. It’s very sad, we might all need to SLOW down, breathe and listen to their pain and the pain of our Mother Earth. It’s all connected. Bless them and all our pain
“The highest rates of diagnosed depression occur among England’s poorest people, but the government probably prefers prescribing antidepressants to trying to solve poverty.”- This makes me think of a quote from an NHS psychologist writing in the Guardian- ‘If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.’ https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psychologist-devastating-lies-mental-health-problems-politics
Hello Sarah,
I can fully identify with your article. I suffered a breakdown at the end of my professional life. I was diagnosed with depression and spent some time in a clinic after therapy showed that I had already gone through two episodes before and tried to ignore it, resulting in somatic symptoms that I still retain today, although I can cope. Today, I see my situation as described by Erich Fromm some time back:
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the lives of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”
I survived but met several people in the clinic, and I was not so sure they would. I think many things are happening here, and one of them is that our society does not acknowledge that people are very different. Alone, the fact that introverts and extroverts are bundled together, let alone people on the autism spectrum, shows that we have a brutally pragmatic approach to how we expect people to behave and generally expect the same from everybody.
One person even asked me, whether I expected society to bow down to everybody’s needs, as though that was impossible. Having worked in nursing homes, it was our job to treat each person individually, so I answered yes. The reply I received seemed to betray the fact that the questioner wanted themselves desperately to be treated as they needed but had given up hope.
Rob
Such a meaningful conversation to be having, and as always, so eloquently put, Sarah. Thank you! It is always curious to me that while a diagnosis can provide (to some degree) initial relief, understanding, identity, belonging and some hopeful direction, it can simultaneously provide shackles, stereotypes, alienation and bewilderment. Diagnoses mean so many different things to different people. I tend to view my diagnosis as a little piece of information from someone who has been invited into my world for a short period to view from a distance how I experience it. Remembering this has helped me to continue to question, absorb, experience, seek and wonder as myself, not my diagnosis.
I look forward to reading the discussion as it unfolds!
Thanks Sarah. I recently went to a Mental Health First Aid course run professors at my local university (Mental Health nurses) who likened Mental Health on a spectrum comparable mainstream illness ie: a cold (mild sadness) through to serious cancer (schizophrenia). The idea is to view mental health on a spectrum of other common illness where we may have episodes of sickness during our lives, seek treatment, rest, recover and keep going. Viewing it this way allows us to normalise it and reduces a tendency for society to demonise or weaponize the diagnosis and, importantly, for us not to cling it. Personally, I like to view it this way. Don't collapse into your diagnosis is a great mantra.
Thanks Sarah - just a great conversation to be having. I feel for my friends who are receiving the diagnosis of ADHD, for example, taking the pills and waiting for a miracle. Yes, medication can help and yes there is also something going on that can be excavated, observed and even changed so the mental health improves. No one size fits all either.
In Ayurveda (I know I mention this a lot) there are the three gunas, or the qualities of the mind - sattva, rajas and tamas. It's a bit to go into here, however a combo of the three states woven together makes up the reality for individuals. So in my best summary, sattva is the most calm of the gunas - clear, balanced and creative. Rajas is the guna of change, transformation and action (if someone is 'rajasic' then this is the guna that is out of balance - the busyness of the mind, the doing the racing, the scrolling, the appointments etc) and the third guna is tamas and it is the heaviest state and often related to potential not being used.
Anyway, the upshot is that we are all a combo of three states and when in balance, things can feel like we are showing up from our soul (rather than our mind!)
This knowledge greatly supports me in being so much more than a diagnosis because my mind state can change for fluidly - I am not stuck with a label of 'generalised anxiety disorder' that I was given some time ago. This new knowledge (ancient wisdom) gives me freedom to explore each of my daily rhythms and how I can easily be swayed from one state of being to another.
The other thing about a diagnosis is that for some it feels like a quick fix - let's get this sorted and move on. That's not always the case and also, for many people, it took a long time to reach this state of imbalance so it might take a while to move through it.
It's a long game, that's for sure.
Love Cherie
I think it makes sense that we are sick as a species. Perhaps the reported rise of mental illness is a symptom of an unwell culture, our ways of connecting to each other and nature are so far from how we evolved. It makes sense that we are all unwell. As a species we treat the earth, other species and nature like it is separate from us, raping and pillaging the planet for profit. I think it makes sense that we are sick. Our current systems are unsustainable and damaging not only to the planet but to ourselves and our psyche. Many different ways of looking at the issue but I do see it through this lens.
Brilliant thoughts Sarah.
My brain is buzzing with how you can know all of this detailed information and give us so much content constantly.
If that’s a consequence of said mental illness then it’s bloody brilliant.
If we look back through history to the creatives, leaders, artists, people - I’m sure they would all have a named disorder today.
Scott Morrison definitely has one.
There’s a common phrase that I’m starting to detest - ‘First World Problems’ as well as not so commonly - ‘Affluenza’
I’m so reminded of my travels in the nineties and 2000s and wanted to share this 24 years later.
I went to visit Lebanon in May 2000, all based on loving two Lebanese restaurants in London - Fairuz and Le Mignon.
I loved the cuisine and I also loved the comfort of being in those places of friendship and family.
The photos on the wall in Le Mignon convinced me that I had to go and see it for myself.
Beirut was this shell of a city then, buildings like cheese graters riddled with bullet holes.
It was humbling and devastating to be there and see it.
But, the most humbling and amazing thing was the kindness of the people.
Everywhere we went people wanted to talk to us, invite us to their home for dinner, give us gifts.
What??
We heard a story from a school teacher who used to have to dodge the snipers going across the green line every day, trying to get to the place to educate her students.
Not once did anyone say, poor me. Everyone had been through hell and yet they were still there, talking, living, loving.
On the morning we were to fly out the power went off. The power station in Beirut had been bombed.
A few days later we saw the road to Baalbek had been bombed and saw the huge crater on the news.
We had been on that road days before.
We were just tourists, with the safety of returning to our homelands with no snipers or bombs.
I cried as the plane took off, I didn’t want to leave.
Lebanon - huge bright shining light in my heart always. ❤️
My experience - people often with the least are the most generous and the most happy.
I know this is a divergence from the mental health labelling but I feel it’s an important memory to share here X
I agree with your points Sarah, and am concerned with the ADHD clinics popping up like the pain clinics in the US. Handing out meth rather than opioids.
I had the conversation with my therapist the other day, I challenged him for facilitating poor and immature behaviour And asked him to start challenging me and holding me more
accountable. Navel gazing is as much a disorder as the disorder which made it necessary in the first place. Pain is as good a distraction as pleasure, and it is the distraction from “real life” which is at the core of the issues you have raised.
Nothing makes me more happy than to gather enough energy through good behaviour, to engage a new behaviour. And this can only be done in real life, in real time.
Omg it’s like you’re me. I’d actually like to have those earlier dx removed from my medical record now the long overdue ‘well duh’ ASD dx is there. I’m also feeling an urge to distance myself from the tedium of my conditions and the way they have come to define me, internally and externally. I’d just like to ‘be’ and ‘DO’. Thanks for this, so on the nail.
My treatment of choice is Internal Family Systems. I find talk therapy useful to some extent but also limiting. Healing happens through a deeper internal process.
I found this interesting reading on kids/teens being taught to focus constantly on their feelings: https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/how-bad-therapy-hijacked-american-schools?r=1cf7q5&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
“I asked Leif Kennair, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of anxiety, and Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, what they thought of practice. Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated.
If we want to help kids with emotional regulation, what should we communicate instead?
“I’d say: worry less. Ruminate less,” Kennair told me. “Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do—less.”
There’s another problem posed by emotions check-ins: they tend to induce a state orientation at school, potentially sabotaging kids’ abilities to complete the tasks in front of them.
Many psychological studies back this up. An individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state. If she’s thinking about herself, she’s less likely to meet any challenge.
“If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom,” Dr. Linden said.”
Yes to not identifying with mental health issues. I’m a psychologist and I see too much of ‘I am my mental health’. And that blocks the very real invitation here to, which is to heal. We’re not meant to stay stuck in a diagnosis. We’re meant to grow through it. Thank you for calling this out, Sarah!
Diagnosis in the mental health field has always been controversial. In part because the labels lack inherent validity and were arrived at fairly arbitrarily many decades back. Homosexuality was a psychiatric diagnosis at one point in history! They have become enshrined as if they 'exist' but really they are just shorthand for clusters of internal experiences and externally observed behaviours. They cannot be measured or 'seen' on a test in the way that physical health issues can, therefore even among trained professionals there is often huge disagreement about diagnosis. We have adopted a model from physical health and clumsily applied it to mental health. In my experience, diagnostic labels help some people, to give validity to their experience and a language that they can communicate with others, or access to supports and resources. They also harm some people when they feel diminished, stigmatised, or, as you say, overly identified with a fixed label as if it is a static thing, a fault within them. They fail to take account of the context to someone's struggles. The reality is we all struggle to varying degrees with emotion regulation and mental states at different times. I'd like to see us move away from diagnostic labels and towards more individualised and nuanced descriptions of what an individual is facing at any given time. In the school of psychology I trained in, we focus on formulation -understanding why someone presents with a particular set of struggles at a particular point in time and in a particular context - rather than diagnosis, which tells us none of those things.
Hi Sarah. I recently starting writing about this too. I've overly identified with my different diagnoses for years (GAD, depression, PTSD and then OCD), and it got me nowhere. I suspect I would qualify for the ASD label as well, but honestly, I am just so tired of medical system and trying to find answers that never actually lead me to feeling any better.
I decided to side-step the mainstream health system for now and am trying out private coaching. Their approach is very much what you are learning to do- manage the anxiety and grow through it, doing your best to live the life you wish to live despite it all. It's the most hopeful I've felt in years. Before this I felt I had to micromanage every facet of my life to cope, and just wanted to give up. I really do feel for Gen-Z.
You might be interested in reading the work of Freya India and Jessie Meadows if you haven't already. Both have some interesting things to say in the area.
This issue not mentioned in this article is we are also now talking about a large industry where people are making lots of money at the expensive of such issues.
In Australian schools, they receive more funding when a child has been labelled with ADHD, Autism etc. If we think this is not pushing up numbers, then we have our head in the sand.