The Myth of Mental Health. #AdviceNobodyWantsToHear

when you're talking about social
cultural and political patterns it's very easy to perceive conspiracies everywhere when in fact what you're seeing are people acting in their own individual self-interest in an isolated unpremeditated and idiosyncratic way but each of them has enough in common in terms of what that self-interest is what objectives they're pursuing consciously and unconsciously that when you scale it up to the behaviors of millions of people and millions of people choosing which youtube videos they're going to watch and what social movements and what trends they're going to jump on they're going to join they're going to follow what delusions they're going to reinforce and which they're going to select to believe in and incorporate into their own lifestyles themselves right it starts to look like a conspiracy right now there is no conspiracy to mainstream the acceptance of steroid use of performance enhancing drugs if you step back and take a look at it with detachment what's going on right now on youtube on instagram on twitter even right what's happening on the internet it looks a whole lot like a conspiracy what i would say to you is this if there are two types of advice for how to achieve the same outcome and one of them makes money the other one doesn't and one of them is easy whereas the other one is hard work our own tendency towards greed and laziness is going to massively amplify one solution and silence or suffocate the other some of you will have had this experience in your own life you lose weight and maybe gain muscle mass and you have friends or colleagues or relatives oh wow great how did you do that and the minute you started to tell them oh it was really hard work oh yeah here's how i did it you could do it too and you know i go to the gym for three hours a day and instead of taking the bus i'd walk for an hour uh to get to school with the heavy backpack full of rocks and yeah i suffered a lot you know ate this different diet oh yeah it's hard it's great you want to join you want to get involved right now part of the reason for that is that those same people are listening to either passively or actively these messages on the internet all even on radio and television but this is especially true with social media with internet-based media they're listening to messages again and again that promise them that this can be easy this can be fun this can be relaxing and of course it can cost money there's some way directly or indirectly that this is generating revenue for someone and i'm not just talking about the drug dealer income steroids this pattern which seems so easy for us to admit to ourselves when talking about physical health applies with even more terrifying implications when we start talking about mental health anything and everything we can say about mental health is in the shadow cast by our assumptions and our assertions about human nature so i'm gonna digress at this point to talk a little bit about human nature but very directly and powerfully how it's linked to how we think about mental health and how we resolve to do things for self-improvement for the sake of our mental health most people in english-speaking white western culture have great difficulty talking about human nature it's an abstraction they're unfamiliar and uncomfortable with by contrast they're very comfortable talking about men talking about women what men think what men do how women feel what women want what women do oh completely comfortable with that and it doesn't really occur to us that were in fact making statements about human nature and that these claims are reciprocal our idea about who men are what they do right this is in the shadow cast by our assumptions about women and to some extent in certain discussions our assumptions about transgender people uh so on and so forth right um when we add just a few more nouns and adjectives to narrow down what we mean by men and what we mean by women it's interesting how much more clarity focus and purpose is brought to the conversation i'm not going to tell you about men i'm going to tell you about the type of guy who becomes a bicycle courier all of a sudden even if you've never met a bicycle career in your life or let's say you've seen bicycle careers but you've never really had a conversation with them and talk to them about what their life is like so even if for you this is purely hypothetical purely conjectural purely philosophical when we talk about the types of guys who become bike careers right that's very different from making a pronouncement about men and it's very different from making a pronouncement about humanity now why is that right because for most of us most of the time reasoning does not begin from abstractions to then precipitate downward toward the grassroots of tangible visible things in our life right we proceed upward from the things we really know really touch really feel smell taste the people we've interacted with we proceed upward from those people to generalizations and abstractions right so particular people are bike couriers there are particular bike careers i've known even if i've never known them as soon as i give you a few concrete tangible imaginable things to think about you know i knew a guy who was so passionate about bicycle racing as a sport and he got to be about 40 years old and he was trying to go into like kung fu and karate fighting sports and then i realized it was the same set of motivations that fueled him under both headings he'd always been a very small you know short lean guy and he'd wanted to be in these competitive sports with the big guys but he never could be and riding a bicycle gave him a way to be competitive and had this kind of aggression and you know and this became a way for him to exercise that side of his character they felt you know frustrated with their stymied within in other in other walks of life oh wow okay that's someone one of my brothers became a bicycle courier now this isn't true of every bicycle career company in the united states and canada but where he worked he said from the first day he got there there was this huge uh macho ego trip foisted onto him by the other careers and they showed him with pride the chalkboard where they had the rankings for who was the best bike courier at the company under different headings how many packages delivered per day or per hour and how many kilometers gone in a day at different records different stats the same way little kids collect baseball cards that have statistics there were statistics for the different writers and they impressed upon him oh if you want to be respected here you have to earn it you have to and by the way also uh in all these theaters kind of the more athletic theater of cycling and competitive career theater recycling a lot of drugs a lot of alcohol a lot of ostentatious cheating on one's wife for cheating on one's girlfriend having uh having supernumerary sexual partners and letting it be known to other men rather than keeping it a secret till they die or whatever there's a lot of shall we say toxic masculinity and now we can think about this clearly and it's clear to everyone in the conversation that we're not making a generalization about all humanity we're not even making a generalization about all men we're not even making a generalization about bicycle careers because there will be individual bicycle carriers who work in that same company and feel alienated from this and have this tension with their co-workers right now we're talking about human motivations in a way that we can all understand it's very important that we build up to our generalizations about culture about politics about nebulous concepts like mental health in this way starting from proceeding from the tangible world of uh grassroots reality i saw a youtube video today that was dealing in part with mental health and it was dealing in part with relations between the genders shall we say and this person don't know how old she is she was referring to high school as if it were the day before yesterday so i'm guessing this is someone who graduated from high school within the last couple of years i dunno um she was so certain that her experience with how men treated women and how men treated other women pardon me how men treated other men how women treated other women her experience with gender relations was definitive and universal and this was human nature and this was something she was going to have to cope with her whole life as she now looks forward to her 20s and 30s and 40s whatever that this was something inflexible and unchanging and if we could just shift the discussion from being men to being as specific as the type of guy who becomes a bike career right i think already there's a way out of this trap this way of thinking this this sense of false security in knowing what human nature is okay so you went to a high school apparently where football was a big deal and male competitive spirit was a big deal these different things you you complain about you explain um i know some high schools where these same factors are better and somewhere they're worse but i know some high schools where your whole assessment of human nature would fundamentally be different have you ever heard about uh performing performing arts school have you ever heard about a high school sometimes these are just for the last two years of high school where every single kid there is either an aspiring professional musician aspiring actor singer this sort of thing every single kid in the school already see we've shifted from talking about men and humanity to a certain type of person so already all kinds of things you can think about these kids these are kids whose parents support them in making this decision these are a lot of these are kids whose parents have put pressure on them to succeed to be a movie star to be a singer to musician now maybe they're competitive in some ways but not in the same way as a football hero is competing to be the best in the football team right already everything has has shifted maybe some of them are very shallow and care only about their looks but i got to tell you i knew people in the theater who were not conventionally good looking at all and and were successful in addressing success through other routes and there are people there who are i remember this i knew people who were getting their meal ticket punched by getting technical expertise in lighting and set design people with the attitude that they could they could try to be a movie star one day but they were going to be able to pay their rent with some technical skills into theater filmmaking set design that kind of thing okay wow already again maybe none of you have ever met this kind of person you know just like the bike courier right you might not have any real experience of this but we've somehow provided enough fodder for the imagination that we've broken away from universalizing generalizing abstract claims about human nature have you ever heard about these special magnet schools that are just for students who are pursuing a career in the hard sciences where every single student there believes they're going to have a career in physics or chemistry just simplify the sciences they say of course in real life there'd be biology and a few other things mixed in all right and that high school will have its own ego trips it will have its own gender identity issues and struggles probably men at that school will have their own way of being macho and women will have their own way of employing different strategies and whether it's you know women struggling with other women or women struggling with the attention of men or whatever it is but already what a different universe we seem to be describing what a different world we seem to be imagining when we've just narrowed it down to talk about real people with real faces with real motivations and you know each one of these settings has its own kind of pathos its own kind of inevitable tragedy in the milieu of the hard sciences tell me seriously what percentage these kids are actually going to go on to have a career in chemistry what percentage of them are going to go on to have a career in physics what percentage of the guys on your football team or baseball team what percentage of them even had amateur sport as a significant part of their lives let alone professional sport there's a lot of failure there are a lot of illusions and delusions to go around all right and i think the deepest part of this predictable tragedy of all there will be people who go into theater who go into film who go into physics who go into chemistry and once they get there they say if i had known that this is what it was going to be like i never would have wanted this in the first i never would have wanted this future for myself i would never would have wanted this career i never would have chosen this course of study i would have done something else and we'll never have percentages for how many people feel that way the most basic premise of my philosophy is that if you change what you know it will change how you feel and this is fundamentally a very optimistic message even though it is most easily demonstrated with human tragedy i had a grandfather who wanted all his life to be a lawyer and he felt frustrated and self-pitying and so on that he had never achieved this that he'd never gone into law i'm a hundred percent certain that he lived his whole life with frankly a naive russian immigrants set of delusions about what the practice of the law is like in canada i'm not saying he knew a whole hell of a lot about what being a lawyer was like in russia we would be talking about russia before the communist revolution he probably had very 19th century attitudes about being a lawyer that carried on into the 20th century then he had a totally romanticized idea that being a lawyer meant you sat down at philosophical discussions about politics in canada or somewhere and i can say with some certainty for him and for many people in the audience if he knew what it was like if he knew what the process of law school was like if you knew what the daily experience of being a lawyer was like if he knew that it would change the way he felt it would change the way he felt about his own life here and now it changed the way he felt looking back at his life over the last 10 years the last 50 years or what have you right what we know changes what we feel how many people right now watching this youtube video on some level are still holding on to the thought that there's somebody they wanted to [ __ ] in high school and that their whole life would be better and their whole life would be different now if only they'd slept with that person and if only they'd fall in love with that person or maybe they'd be married today some of you some of you might have this attitude might have this attachment and then you just happen to click on a podcast or you just happened to click on a youtube video and there was that person you could have [ __ ] in high school 10 years later and they're all grown up and they're talking about who they really are and who it is they've become as the years went by and you sit back and go whoa i'm so glad i didn't fall in love with that person i'm so glad i didn't get married to that person all right what you know changes how you feel the ignorance of or contempt for this factor is a huge fundamental problem with our whole model of therapy and mental health in the 21st century uh decadent west now just say again very briefly i remember talking to a relatively young man i think he was in his late 20s on the internet who was making generalizations about women and men and human nature in france and he openly indicated that his experience was based on his high school and his university and i said to him did you not notice that there were separate high schools for muslims that there were separate high schools for catholics that there were separate high schools for orthodox jewish people and this kind of thing those are people too those people also count in your reckoning of humanity and human nature and it's harder to deal with than people who chose to study the sciences or people who chose to study theater performing arts school this kind of thing precisely because most of those people didn't make that choice at some stage they had the choice made for them to have that cultural identity that religious identity um and so on but nevertheless if you're making generalizations about men if you're making generalizations about human nature right away this puts us in a whole different frame of reference and it's interesting to me how most of the major tenets of biopsychiatry completely fall apart and are revealed to be risible laughable as soon as we bring in this type of intercultural comparative analysis oh well what you've just said would this be true of a japanese person would this be true of a muslim person a muslim person from indonesia let's say you have to specify a little bit more than that and so on um we have claims that are supposedly innate and universal to human nature that are regarded as science but they are every bit as childish as claims about human nature men women gender roles that are based on your particular high school your experience growing up and to be fair that experience may have been so traumatic for you or so shocking that you have great difficulty thinking about it uh with detachment now at the start of this video i said if there are two types of advice competing and one of them earns money and one of them doesn't one of them appeals to your sense of laziness just take it easy just relax and one of them appeals to you to be resolute hard-working self-discipline exhaust yourself push yourselves you will in effect have a cultural conspiracy to promote the option that's fast and easy and costs money and to conceal the one that's the opposite of those things you have what seems like a conspiracy even though nobody is conspiring because individual actors and influencers are all pursuing their own self-interest i think the deepest misconception about mental health in the united states of america today is that relaxation brings about personal progress brings about self-improvement that all of your problems could be solved if only you could be relaxed enough and on a very deep level this rests on the assumption that your mental health is emotional and that it's something that is attained by returning to homeostasis or turning to a resting state rather than exerting yourself now i think this is just as delusional as pretending that having an amazing physique being lean and muscular is homeostasis it's something you can achieve just by relaxing just by taking it easy right now some of you may think well yeah but come on relaxation doesn't cost any money so what does this have to do with your your fundamental premise for this video have you kind of gone off top here no no what's hard to understand about relaxation is that it can be infinitely marketed infinitely monetized not only to the sale of drugs alcohol vacations recreation relaxation is actually very easy to monetize hard work not so much americans separate emotional development from intellectual development their concepts of intellectual development correctly is that it's hard work and doesn't make any money those two things are completely true they also and i would say this is true of europeans the french the germans also the english they also think of the life of an intellectual intellectual work the life of the mind they think of being an intellectual as a kind of luxury above and beyond what's essential to life they think of it as being something like going to the opera which it is not uh for many different reasons including the fact that being an intellectual isn't something you do on friday night it's something you do all the time it's something that changes the way you live think and feel 24 7. okay now counter opposed to this idea of intellectual work is the american ideal of emotional work so last 30 years the verbiage and cultural assumptions for emotional work it's developed a lot right what is emotional work talking to your boyfriend girlfriend husband wife talking to your therapist taking antidepressant drugs smoking marijuana the concept of emotional self-development basically boils down to being sedate at all times and they're quite willing to achieve this through sedation through drugs but if not if not through drugs massage massage therapy vacation packages right certain kinds of especially self-indulgent exercise sports the idea is that you just have to do less you have to relax more you have to not experience anxiety alertness work fear and that this will let you regress to a kind of homeostasis that if you're just in a relaxed enough state and let time go by maybe years go by that you will emotionally blossom into this better person you will achieve some kind of self-cultivation or personal development and what is nagging away at the american imagination is this awareness that can never quite be eradicated that can never quite be fully repressed that no the outcomes we desire in terms of self-cultivation and personal development are hard work and the type of work we're talking about is intellectual in nature i think that most of what we perceive now as mental health problems here meaning emotional problems the term is so broad i could now digress into narrowing down what we mean by emotional health problems i'm not saying all the vast majority of what our society struggles with as mental health problems i do not mean dyslexia i do not mean medically real learning disabilities brain abnormalities i do not mean having a disorder that causes your whole nervous system to twitch or seize up the vast majority of what we now deal with under headings like depression anxiety so on and so forth can be improved and can be overcome through intellectual hard work it's not just one problem so you're not going to have just one solution what do you do when you read history when you read history you live through the eyes of other people you sympathize with and you imagine their experiences i often get very emotional reading the history of recently history of france history of napoleon and the french revolution and i find myself sympathizing with people who are on the opposite side to myself politically here and now i find that i can sympathize deeply with young men who decided to stand up and fight for the king of france in the french revolution i'm of course i'm totally opposed to monarchy i prefer democracy so forth but when you are going through that history with some detail it can't be on the level of proclamations about human nature about men right about mankind or men in the other sense right when you're really reading about the choices these people faced what they knew what the options were in front of them i can totally profoundly sympathize and even weep reading about the choices young men made to support the king of france and to fight and die for doomed ideology right does that prepare me in some simple sense for the miseries and struggles and disappointment in my own life it prepares me to cope with the contradictions the struggles the sorrows of history as it unfolds around me on the most intimate scale my own family the most grandiose scale the whole society the whole world or huge nations all right in a manner that is not easy to summarize that is not easy to write up on a chalkboard as a formula you know what is easy to put up on a chalkboard a diagram of the effects that antidepressants have on your brain oh oh this is the pro the problem isn't that you have a meaningless life the problem isn't that you know you're you're struggling to live a meaningless pardon me that you're struggling to live a meaningful life in a society that in many ways confronts and confounds and denigrates you you know the problem isn't that you're a kid in high school who wants to have sex but can't who wants to be respected who finds themselves denigrated and disrespected by other students by teachers by the whole system the problem isn't that you know you feel some sense of instinctual yearning to be part of a tribe to be part of a clan to have friends and colleagues and instead you're all alone playing video games no no no no no no no no the problem is your brain chemistry the problem is your dopamine levels and and we have a pill supposedly that can solve that well okay let's just say you start smoking marijuana and taking prozac standard antidepressant okay so now you're still in high school you still have all these social and political conflicts you don't understand you still have this yearning to get laid to be loved to be adored maybe you even yearn to be a leader of men maybe you you know you have more grandiose desires than this you want to be part of a tribe you want to be somebody important you want to be someone valued you want to be respected instead you're disrespected you know maybe even you want to be smart and successful and you want teachers to tell you that you're special and you're a genius maybe you want to get a pluses or maybe you want to have better opportunities church you want all kinds of things right and you still want those things but now you're sedated now you're less able to cope with or comprehend any of those things or to achieve those ambitions right but relaxation as the model of mental health is infinitely marketable it's highly profitable and it appeals to your sense of laziness the idea that you can feel better you can overcome your depression you can even become a better person if only you relax enough no matter how expensive the vacation no matter how expensive the therapy sitting and talking about your feelings right all of this profoundly appeals to our sense of laziness and our sense of our own implicit inherent inborn specialness that if only we could just be ourselves just relax all the way and this is just as dumb as supposing that you're going to develop amazing musculature through the same course of relaxation right compassion is a muscle you develop it through exercise when i read books of political history there's nothing on the cover that says this is a course in compassion okay they don't look like self-help books when you read voltaire talking about slavery you may feel compassion for the slaves you may feel compassion for voltaire as the commentator on slavery and you know what if you keep doing research you may feel compassion for the slave owners you may feel compassion as twisted as it feels for what they were going through how it was they conditioned themselves to accept this awful oppressive social system and to play their part in it how they justified what they were doing with their lives all right any respectable history book about slavery including the french revolution by the way and slavery and the french revolution okay is going to help to train you in compassion it's going to help to train you to regard social problems political problems and personal problems in your own time in your own society and even in your own life even in your own family in a very different way learning to look through the eyes of napoleon bonaparte someone i completely despise completely morally disprove of i can even say i hate napoleon bonaparte okay looking through the eyes of napoleon blown apart can change the way you feel about your relationship with your own mother about your relationship in your own marriage even about your own struggles in high school or whatever the case may be that's not promised by the book cover but that's something you can accomplish that's a real change you can accomplish in your life through hard intellectual work when you develop yourself as an intellectual at a minimum you are increasing your ability to cope with the emotional strains that are now in our culture perceived or misperceived as mental illness the fundamental puzzle the fundamental problem we're dealing with in american and english-speaking culture is the separation of the human mind into intellectual and emotional spheres when they are in fact one and the same the cure to your emotional problems cannot be found through relaxation cannot be found through medication it can be found only and exclusively through self-cultivation self-discipline intellectual hard work