Exercises in Thought: Mental Health

Sweeney: Four Examples Toward Ameliorating Your Mental Illness (Ill-Mental)

1. In this example you have a philosophical friend. You go to Hitch and you wring your hands and you bob around looking for something to drink. Your friend asks if you’re doing alright. You say yeah, I just feel like people think I’m weird, but it’s ok, I just need to stop caring what other people think of me. Your friend asks if that’s true. You say what. First of all is it true that you care what people think of you, your friend asks. Sure it is, you say. But if you really cared, your friend says, then why wouldn’t you simply go up to someone and ask what they thought of you.

You scoff. Like that would be a good way of finding out. It’s not as if the opinion of one person would be what everyone thinks, you say, and, more to the point, in all likelihood the person I ask would be completely indifferent to me, that is, until I ask them what they think of me, after which they would think I was weird.

But look at what you just proved, your friend says. You just proved that 1, you think it’s implausible that everyone could have the same opinion of you, and that 2, you think most people haven’t taken enough notice of you to think that you’re weird.

Oh yeah, you say.

So why do you think that people think you’re weird, your friend says.

I don’t know, you say.

I know, your friend says. Your problem isn’t that you care what people think of you. Your problem is that you care too much what you think about yourself, and what’s distinct about this problem is that it doesn’t matter so much what you think about yourself so long as you are able to think something. When you go to parties and you wring your hands the anxiety is not, fundamentally, about being weird. It’s about not knowing what you are being — and so you seize on being ‘weird,’ because in your mind being weird isn’t something you have to prove to others that you are. Being weird is the easiest thing to think of yourself as; the easiest thing to be.

Hmm, you say.

What you have to understand is that nothing is given, which also means that nothing is the thing which is given. It is equally as difficult and exciting and rewarding to be weird as it is to be cool or smart or funny, because those things can only mean anything to you to the extent that they mean you in the mind of someone else. Therefore being weird or cool or smart or funny are nothing but equal opportunities to pay attention to the people around you. Understand this and your world will open up into what it already is. Every action is a reaching out for some recognition, for someone who will hear and resound our talents and our limitations. And we grow and die in the light of others, and we learn for ourselves how impossible it is to be.

Never believe that you shouldn’t care what people think of you. Life without caring what people think of you, were it even possible, would be hellish and lonely. You have to care what people think of you, both because you have ties and bonds to all people, and because of the responsibility you have to yourself to discover how these ties and bonds make up what can be the only joy of your life. Of your life.

Damn, you say. I had no idea you cared so much about what people thought of you.

Oh me, no I don’t care very much, or not anymore I don’t. Once you start caring that much you learn soon enough that you aren’t capable of finding most of what others think of you all that interesting. The difficulty then becomes remembering the tragedy that such a limitation truly is.

2. In this example you have a good friend. You drink beer. You play various lawn and tabletop games. You laugh together all the time. When they’re sad you give them a hug or maybe they tell you about something in their life they appreciate and you would fall down with gratitude for them having had in their life something simple enough to point at always and say “This is good” if you weren’t already splayed out on an adirondack chair looking across at them straight chillaxing.

Your good friend leaves you, and you leave them, and it is very sad. But it wouldn’t be good to worry yourself over trying to replace your good friend. Nor would it do any good to worry yourself over whether in making new good friends you have replaced the old. The air of a good friendship has a sincerity which fixes its form in you as frankness does to a firm handshake. Once that air has been fixed you have to have the goodness (and you do have it) to let the rest of life blow about in you raggedly and softly, in the recognition that it is precisely because that air cannot be abolished that nothing will again come to fill its breadth. You can do this with a small smile or by folding your hands in a certain way, and it is this that we call character.

Of course you might end up being wrong about what folding your hands entails, but this shouldn’t trouble you either. And if nothing has been in your life that you can call so good, then I am sorry.

3. In this example I have a kind friend. We would sit together in the cafeteria our freshman year of high school. The lights would be bright, and tables would roar vaguely around us. I would nibble on some carrots, some grapes, a sandwich. I never spoke to my friend. I appreciated him.

My friend asked one day if I would like to go over and sit with some of his other friends who were just over there. I said I would not like that, and I thanked him. He went over and sat with them and every day from then on I sat alone and not with him, except when it was every other day, because our school was on an “A day/B day” schedule and so on A days my lunch period would be different and so I would sit with a group of friends with whom I was familiar and of which he was a member and in which I would not speak.

One day, maybe seven years later, it occurred to me that it was (likely) not the case that one day it had occurred to my friend that to sit with his other friends would be preferable to sitting alone with me, which is to say there was no shift in preference to speak of, and that indeed all along in sitting alone with me and not speaking he was doing something remarkably kind. This revelation was, to me, astonishing simply for not having come sooner, but not so astonishing that I could fail to explain its delay with reference to a revelation I’d had maybe a year prior, which was that much of the story of my life could be described as me not being able to realize something.

Let me say that again. In every childhood attitude in which I would sit (on a school bus, on a park bench, on the ledge of the sidewalk during water breaks in marching band practice) or stand (in the hallways, between the two cones which figured as the goal I was keeping during recess) I was trying to think what I was thinking of. The expression on my face was never (even on the occasions when I myself thought it was) sadness but the visible formation of the only emotion that at that time I had ever strongly felt, which could be called “puzzlement” or perhaps “whatdoyoumean.”

So you see, faced with a task so absorbing I could provisionally be excused for not having more consideration toward my friend.

Fast forward to college and I still didn’t know what I was thinking. But all the time the thing I was thinking was getting stronger and stronger, and one day when I was thinking it all of the sudden there were trees. Birds. Rocks. Clouds even. Had you seen the expression on my face when I saw these things, you almost would have believed that they were the thing I was thinking of. But what was even more improbable were how many people there were, all of the sudden, how many people all around. And I thought what a kind thing it would be, which is to say I thought what kind of thing it would be were I able to tell them this thing I was thinking, which might have been all along just how I saw them, just how I saw them walking.

The greatest joy of my life is other people and the greatest disappointment of my life is that I can’t give them to themselves. If you don’t know what I mean, I am sorry, and as always I have nothing to say.

4. In this example you have no friends because you post on Fizz and are a loser.

Carroll: Mental Health in the Open Curriculum, Mental Health Under Capitalism

I think we are confused about mental health. Or, more specifically, we aren’t thinking about mental health in the right gradations; we aren’t thinking about mental health capaciously enough. This past Friday, students swarmed the Wellbeing Fair on the Val quad, featuring a laundry list of college offices from the Center for Counseling and Mental Health to… the Emily Dickinson and Beneski Museums, inexplicably. We grabbed popsicles and cuddled with baby animals, maybe grabbed a flier and got some good old resources. Ah, who doesn’t want more resources? That’ll fix me. What do we really mean when we talk about mental health? What are we invoking when we say we are “taking a mental health break?”

In one sense, mental health can refer to a fragile and thin notion of psychological well-being. It is the subjective state being measured when we ask ourselves: Do I feel happy/good/satisfied right now? Maybe you can achieve this thin sense of mental health by consuming in excess (e.g., entertainment, food, clothing, sex). This kind of mental health is what most people refer to. On the other hand, and this is where I will focus, is a thick and robust notion of mental health as a sense of meaning and a higher purpose in one’s life. It’s the mission, goal, or vision that we strive towards. What do I want to have accomplished in ten, twenty, fifty years? It takes the pursuit of decades to work towards these missions.

Perhaps this distinction in mental health might appear unnatural, but it’s valuable. If we want to think about holistic well-being, it makes perfect sense to consider one’s religion, spirituality, higher calling, or principled mission as part of mental health. The crucial idea is that having a strong sense of purpose will almost necessarily help you endure your daily trifles; in other words, a robust notion of mental health as a higher sense of purpose trumps and absorbs a fragile notion of mental health as a subjective state of satisfaction. As Nietzsche said (through Viktor Frankl), “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Would you rather have a robust “why” or a robust “how?” The former certainly helps us endure the latter, while the latter gives us no guidance to the former. If your higher purpose is to, say, further the mission of social justice for a marginalized identity group, or to expand the kingdom of God, or to engage in the pursuit of mathematical knowledge for its own sake, then you can endure a difficult exam, paper, or an annoying classmate. To clarify, a “why” does not mean a passive general “interest” in something; it is vocation, a calling that pulls you out of bed in the morning against your will, that occupies your thoughts day and night.

How many people at Amherst have this robust notion of mental health? The college appears to collect some flimsy data around this, but the college (and the students) seem far more concerned with a thin notion of mental health. The ballooning of career funneling into consulting and finance is, among other reasons, a result of young, capable undergraduates not figuring out their own sense of purpose and resorting to money making in the hopes of figuring it out later. Really, what is the college doing to help you divine your calling in life, and what is the college doing to distract us with shiny baubles on the weekends? And in some sense, it’s hard to fault the college for doing so, because most people really like shiny baubles, and the money put into purchasing shiny baubles is guaranteed to entertain us in the short term, while money put into encouraging deep reflection is not guaranteed to produce anything.

Yes, the tragic thing is that Amherst is not necessarily helping us achieve a robust notion of mental health. In the open curriculum, there is no grand narrative or higher goal if you don’t have one already. You can take whatever you find generally interesting, and walk out of this college with a smattering of anthropology, literature, a bit of chemistry, and a lot of unanswered questions and no idea where to go next. Things used to be different when Amherst was avowedly educating “indigent young men of piety and talents,” acting as a religious institution. The curriculum was the opposite of open, more than closed; students were forced into a set of core courses with normative sets of values, including religious doctrine. I’m obviously not advocating for a regression to a compulsory religious education, nor for a movement away from liberalism and the toleration of difference. Rather, I am lamenting the loss of intentional force from the college for us to seek a higher purpose in our lives.

I think there is a useful analogy here between contemporary Amherst’s open curriculum and its lack of higher meaning and contemporary market capitalism’s spiritual emptiness. The free market provides us with no higher values except to secure our own bodily integrity by earning a wage, with no spiritual higher purpose provided. With the decline of religion and spirituality, life for many risks becoming a slog between paychecks. Under capitalism, we have to actively fight tooth and nail to find meaning in our lives. And the displacement of soul-searching for money making is manifest in our demographic. People don’t know what to make of their lives. This framework really gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “mental health crisis.”

Another potentially useful analogy is that of aristocratic societies versus democratic societies. While there is no nobility in a democracy, that is not without its disadvantages. In the transition from feudal aristocratic societies to liberal democratic societies, we have gained in freedom what we have lost in spirituality and obligation.  As Tocqueville explains, although aristocracies were de jure stratified by class, that structure linked members of different classes through significant obligations. At least in theory, the virtue of the aristocratic class was to be guided by “self-sacrifice,” by real “noble or selfless action” to serve the lower classes. To an extent, this sacrificial obligation bound the nobles and peasants together, and its effect “filtered down to the peasantry itself,” inculcating the spirit “that it is glorious to forget oneself and that it is fitting to do good without self-interest.” Crucially, this self-sacrifice strived towards an “immaterial greatness” that democracy lacks. Again, this isn’t to say that aristocracy is, as a whole, preferable to democracy. Nor is it to say that democracy can’t struggle to foster a kind of civic religion by glorifying popular government. It is the case, though, that this transition has given us a society which is prima facie less meaningful. In a similar manner, what we have gained in freedom from the open curriculum we have lost in the structured meaning of a closed curriculum.

But it’s not all hopeless; the open curriculum is not beyond saving.  At its best, the open curriculum can enable an expansive and rich education. Here’s the key conceptual maneuver: Instead of placing mental health and rigor in opposition, what if we found mental health in rigor? Instead of thinking we need to take a break from our stressful course load to do something meaningless, what if we leaned into our course load because we found it meaningful? What if we embodied the serious intellectual pursuit of learning for its own sake and that provided us with this elusive “mental health?” Here’s where the analogy to capitalism breaks down, slightly, but in a hopeful way. Telling someone to “just fall in love with your job” is not a substantially promising solution to the dearth of meaning under capitalism. But there is something more attractive about falling in love with your coursework as a student of the liberal arts. It’s the open curriculum, really, you don’t have to take classes you don’t want to take! Or at least that’s the idea.

I think there are other palliative treatments for this kind of mental health. Amherst is similarly confused about the role of “tradition.” Students say they want tradition but don’t really know why. AAS is actively reviving traditions, which is great, but I’m not sure that students can articulate why we want them. What’s a college without some traditions? Well, here’s another way of putting it: What’s the joy in engaging in a set of practices that existed before we got here and will continue to be practiced after we leave? The joy lies in that tradition feels meaningful because it viscerally reminds us that we are part of something greater than ourselves, part of an institution which endures over time, regardless of the content of the particular tradition itself.

Although the college is constructing so many new, air-conditioned, accessible, and pretty glass buildings, they are spiritually hollow (even if they are named after donors of yore). How do you feel walking into the Greenways, Keefe Campus Center, or even Frost, compared to Converse, or Johnson Chapel? (Perhaps my favorite part of Oxford was the libraries. Nothing quite screams being part of the long tradition of the scholarly pursuit of knowledge than being in a library so old that they had to replace the stones, and it still looks absolutely ancient.)

The new “branding” of Amherst College, especially in places such as the gym, gives this weird impression that Amherst is not an institution of education which has been around for hundreds of years, but is instead just some twenty-first century cheery colorful corporate bubble of smiling young adults who type on laptops and play frisbee on the quad. No. While the Amherst of today is very different from the Amherst of 1821 — and in many ways, for the better — it is still the same Amherst. This is a storied place of learning. We should acknowledge that it is one, that we are mere passers by in its long legacy, and that it has a mission which we are called to fulfill. “Let them give light to the world.”

Ultimately, the argument I have just posed, and its complication of commonly-held values, is possibly the nerdiest thing I have dared publish to date. You can already picture me pushing up my glasses, saying “oh, you feel tired? Boo hoo. Suck it up and study harder.” But my point is finer — don’t lock yourself in the same room to do more coursework in the blind hopes that doing so will somehow grant you a higher meaning. You’ll have to be more deliberate about finding your “why” to live for. But just to be sure: If you need a break from work, take a break from work.

In short, considering where our mental health, broadly conceived, strongly flows from, I think it is a far more compelling vision that mental health flows more from the higher purposes and missions of our lives rather than from the short biological pleasures or fleeting states of psychological satiation. I have argued that one compelling place we can find this higher purpose is in our studies as scholars of the liberal arts, rather than in the reprieves from those exact studies. Under this latter vision which opposes mental health and rigor, such reprieves from our studies become desperate gasps for air, where our time span is only the here and now, and nothing matters except for the screen in front of me, the couch cushions supporting my spine. Why take hard classes, why go to a hard school at all? Under this vision, our rigorous education at Amherst is not motivating, energizing, or inspiring, but it is rather torturous. That’s not a mentally healthy vision to live by.

Take the necessary time and space to reflect upon your life and find whatever principles you want to live by. Don’t aim downwards at your animal needs of mental health as a reprieve from the difficult, but aim upwards, through the rigorous and the difficult, at whatever robust sense of purpose motivates you.