How pride both helps and harms mental health
It’s a blessing — and a curse
Pride occupies a confusing place in our collective psyche. On the one hand it’s said to be the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. “Pride comes before a fall”, we’re told — meaning that overconfidence leads to mistakes, and arrogance is not just unattractive but also unwise.
It was Pride that changed angels into devils;
It is humility that makes men as angels.
- St Augustine
But on the flip-side, we’re constantly told to take pride in our appearance, in our work, in ourselves as valuable and valid members of society. Pride is linked to self-esteem — something we’re taught must be cultivated and nurtured if we’re to reach our full potential.
The messages are mixed. Clearly, our sense of pride has to do with our social status — ‘how we’re seen’ — or perhaps more accurately, how we see or judge ourselves, and imagine everyone doing the same.
Reading between the lines of these two perspectives, it seems like we should be aiming for some sort of middle way — well-founded and grounded confidence, perhaps. We need to tread the tightrope between under-selling and over-aggrandising ourselves.
This tricky balancing act around something so core as our conception of self-worth means it’s no wonder pride gets caught up in our mental health and happiness. And what becomes clear on reflection is that it can both help and hinder it.
What does pride have to do with mental health?
Pride can be a stick to beat ourselves with….
As someone diagnosed with a mental illness (bipolar disorder), which played out very publicly over several years, pride has often been at the forefront of my mind. Namely, the loss of it.
Being declared crazy by all who knew me and forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital has to rank as the top most undignified experience of my life.
My pride was shattered, not least because of the stigma of mental illness. How embarrassing to have not been able to cope with life and gone so publicly mad! But also because I’m someone who has always taken great pride in my mental faculties — and to have those taken away from me felt utterly humiliating.
I have no doubt that the indignity I perceived in those manic episodes (which I broadcast all over social media) contributed to the severity of the episodes of depression that followed. And I’ll be ever grateful to my non-judgemental friends who faithfully trawled through Facebook deleting all my posts for me in the aftermath, when I couldn’t bear to look.
But gradually I came to realise: feeling humiliated about my situation just gave me an additional hurdle to overcome — on top of the challenges I was already facing around recovery.
The same holds true for any situation where we feel our pride has been damaged — from being fired or dumped to having a public breakdown, and anywhere in between.
Being embarrassed about the position we find ourselves in only serves to take energy and headspace away from improving that position.
Of course, that’s all easier said than done — and there is both value and importance in acknowledging the pain we’ve suffered and retreating to lick our wounds. Over the course of my recovery, I’ve taken plenty of time out to cry, to feel sorry for myself, to grieve what happened and acknowledge the realness of the hurt and challenge I’ve been through. I believe it’s healthy to do so. But then I’ve carried on with the task in hand — focusing on recovery and rebuilding, step by step — and harnessing pride to help me along the way.
Pride can be a life raft to cling on to in rough times and help us swim to shore….
Pride may come before a fall, but I think the opposite holds even truer: pride comes after a fall. It’s an essential component in how we get over setbacks and move forwards.
We see this every day in advice on how to improve our lives and relationships: “you have to be on your own team. If you can’t love yourself, how can you love somebody else?”. In the same way we try to counsel those struggling in the deepest depths of depression: “Be kind to yourself. There’s so much you’ve achieved and should be proud of”.
When we find ourselves in rough times, being on our own team — taking and having pride in ourselves — is really the best way forward.
It can sometimes be difficult to find — especially from the starting point of a deep depression, where everyday achievements can be hard to celebrate. To help me climb out of depression, and recover from five years of mental ill health, I went back to the original source of my loss of pride: my diagnosis.
Now this will certainly not be for everyone — but I’ve always disputed my diagnosis, and been determined to ‘prove’ that I’m not chronically ill forever. In grasping back hold of the pride that had been ripped away from me, I found the motivation to work as hard as I could to recover.
I’m aware of the riskiness building my recovery on something as fragile as pride, but it was the only thing that gave me the motivation and momentum I needed. That pride served me to get me to this point, but as I now prepare to come off medication and risk the possibility of relapse, I am working to loosen my grip on it.
Ultimately, what I’ve learned is that we have a choice about whether to use our pride for or against us.
If we choose the latter, our pride really does make us foolish: it renders us victims. But if we choose the former, we maximise our chances of tackling the challenges at hand and creating the best future for ourselves — improving our mental health in the process.
