Hopelessly Repeating History: Acute Financial Stress
A historical look at financial PTSD and the hopelessness it has caused, and is causing, in people’s lives.
The Great Depression and Financial PTSD
One of my most rewarding and enjoyable professional experiences has been during the ten or so years when I would make the three-times yearly trek to DC for a day or two of grant proposal review for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The way grants are reviewed by the NIH is a throwback to old school scholasticism like one rarely sees anymore, even in the hallowed halls of academe.
At the start of the proposal review process, three primary reviewers give their scores and then review the proposal and make an argument for the score they assigned. If all three reviewers come in with similar scores, the process is straightforward, even boring. But when there is significant dispersion among the three scores, the task of each reviewer is to try and persuade the others about the merits weaknesses of the proposal.
This is the time to use all of your knowledge, rhetoric and social skills to convince often world-class scientists of the superiority of your argument, while they do the same. It’s the kind of interchange that we don’t have the opportunity to engage in very often these days.
In Defense of AFS as PTSD
Publishing our research on Acute Financial Stress (AFS) and its remarkable similarity to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has provided an unexpected opportunity to dust off my debating and principled argument skills again.
I posted the piece that Forbes had written on our study in The Psychology Network group (subscription is required to see comments) on LinkedIn. This led to the kind of spirited debate that review committees rely on. Here’s a typical comment: “This does not meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. For PTSD to develop the threat of imment (sic) death needs to come about from a sudden event. Not a process of cognition which is essentially what you are talking about.”
As is often the case with an honest difference in ideas, this debate has served to focus my thinking on what AFS and PTSD are all about. Both result in the same clusters of symptoms: cognition, emotions and behaviors show dysfunction in both conditions. PTSD, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fifth Edition (DSM-V), however, stems from an imminent threat of death. This is rarely the case with AFS. Yet the end result is the same no matter how a patient got there.
My colleagues who draw a distinction between PTSD and AFS focus on the lack of a threat to life and often, as the commenter quoted above, infer stress that’s primarily cognitive in its cause cannot have the physical consequences that a life-threatening physical stress can have.
I have argued repeatedly that this is both an inaccurate understanding of how stress works in the human brain and it also inherently minimizes the psychological and medical consequences of Acute Financial Stress.
We accept other stressors that do not include direct physical threats can result in PTSD, such as profound life-altering events like the loss of a child or marital or professional betrayals, and AFS needs to be included in the scope of damaging experiences that lead to physical consequences.
To better understand the impact of financial stress and why it impacts the brain as intensely as a physical threat, let’s look back to the time in our history when we faced the largest economic collapse America has ever experienced, The Great Depression.
Living With Nothing in The Great Depression
Most of us have no meaningful frame of reference for the time in American history widely accepted as the most stressful and for so many, hopeless periods we‘ve ever faced as a country. It’s impossible to understand the effect of The Great Depression without understanding the decadence of the Roaring ’20s when the president, “Silent Cal” Coolidge let the bankers, industrialists and speculators run things as they pleased.
Think of the tech bubble of the late ’90s — a time of great but illusory hope — except the whole country bought into an idealized future with no limits, despite an artificially inflated economy throttled by a few industrialists and lots of speculators.
The stock market crash of 1929 plunged the Industrialized world into a 10-year period of deep economic distress, with arguably deeper levels of psychological distress than at any time since.
In 1929, there was no safety net whatsoever. Over 4.5 million Americans were left to live on the streets and 25% of working people were unemployed. Thousands of banks closed, leaving members waiting for years before they got any, be it partial, reimbursement of their deposits. The average American family farm had an annual income of $400. Hope was in very short supply, replaced with desperation and fear at a vast scale.
However, talk to survivors of this era and the experience takes on a depth beyond what the statistics can provide.
I have both the good fortune and the good genes to still have access to people with direct memories of this time. Both of my parents, Richard and Sara, were born four years before the crash, and are now relatively healthy 91-year-olds. Sara spent the Great Depression safely ensconced with her mom and dad, seven sisters and a baby brother on their largely self-sufficient farm amidst a collectivistic Mennonite community. If her father ever had difficulty putting food on their table, she and her sisters would have been the last to know.
But Richard lived in a different world, all of ten miles away. His father died in the middle of the Great Depression. A brain tumor left my grandmother to raise seven children alone during a time when many two-parent families were unable to support their families. It was a hardscrabble life and everything I recall from what my dad has told me over the years plays back in my memory in black and white.
Endless days spent in the fields trying to coax enough produce out of a small farm to make a living. Getting up in the middle of the night to go to market to try and sell produce to people who desperately needed food, the most desperate with the least money. Everyone was guarded and hard, everyone was a potential thief, increasingly so as time wore on and it became clear there would be no quick fix. The suicide rates skyrocketed, with 1933 having the highest numbers ever recorded, as a disturbingly high number of the “new poor” came to the decision that no future was more appealing than what seemed to await them. The picture my dad paints is one where he, his mother and siblings stand together amid a sea of abject hopelessness, somehow savoring each day and every meal even if it was a “sugar sandwich, hold the sugar.”
Even the Mennonite Church was not a bastion of support and understanding. One of the most profound memories my dad has, well over 80 years later, is of one family in his church who had to make a confession before the entire congregation that they’d filed for bankruptcy. Mennonites didn’t shirk their bills even if it was their legal right to do so.
Looking at my dad — his quiet intensity and life of the mind, despite eight years of education — it all takes on a very different perspective when I think of him growing up in The Depression. His generation spent their childhoods plagued by the stress of literally putting food on the table. In spite of the hardships he’s endured — or perhaps because of them — he is resolutely averse to debt, and as far as I know, the only debt he ever took on was buying our family farm for all of $42,000 in 1961. Land in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania went through an explosion in value, and many people jumped on the bandwagon of growth during the ‘70’s, but not my dad. He paid his bills and planned for the future, taking immense pride in buying an apartment in a Mennonite planned retirement community with an arrangement that assures he and mom are taken care of, no matter what their needs are for the rest of their lives.
When Hope is Lost
As a research psychologist, a construct that I intuit to be highly relevant in many current discussions of financial stress — although rarely focused on — is hopelessness.
Plenty of people survive and even thrive in and after unbelievably desperate situations, like prisoners from the Vietnam War or modern day survivors of human trafficking. The human spirit seems indomitable unless hope is lost. We have no reason to live, nothing to drive us to be in the world or no reason to think what we do makes any difference whatsoever. This is exactly what my dad saw in the eyes of those around him during his childhood and early adolescence.
Hopelessness is not the subject of volumes of psychological research, but there are a number of patterns that seem to emerge when we think of who loses hope and who flourishes. This variable can be indicative of deep emotional reserves, or their absence.
The Silk Stocking phenomena of the 20’s — often characterized as a time of unrestrained entitlement and greed — is my candidate for one of the apparent parents of hopelessness so evident in The Depression. Expectation and entitlement seem to be two of the least useful attitudes we can develop. On the other hand, their opposites, gratitude and generosity, are not only extremely functional approaches to facilitating effective group dynamics, but there’s an increasing body of neuroscientific research demonstrating that developing these attitudes leads to rather staggering enhancement of brain activity.
Several imaging studies of the brain reveal important outcomes of both gratitude and generosity.
People who show a more grateful approach to life have more active brains in several divergent regions. Specifically, gratitude seems to enhance the functioning of the anterior cingulate, a region of the brain that’s essential for many of the activities that distinguish us as humans, including understanding emotions and making effective decisions.
The Benefits of Thank You
The good news for all of us, even the curmudgeons amongst us, is that by practicing gratitude — by doing such simple things as keeping a journal of three things we appreciate every day — we see very rapid and long-lasting changes in how we feel and behave. Gratitude leads to optimism, less depression, increases in employee morale, more willpower and increases in well-being. Gratitude leads to hope. It’s cognitively like having the glass perpetually half full.
However, when we approach life without gratitude — with the sense that we are owed something or that enough is never enough — we not only minimize our access to all of these positive aspects of the human experience, but we also set ourselves up for an even bigger cascade into isolation and anger. The loss of gratitude so often goes hand-in-hand with outright hostility toward others, notably those who differ from us and even more so toward those who may be vulnerable. It’s leading to an us versus them attitude, in which competition to have more trumps decency, inclusiveness and generosity.
The Power of Hope
In part, it’s this attitude that sets us up for the kinds of collapses we’re seeing nationwide. Comparatively speaking, we have vastly more than nearly everyone on earth, and we mourn our losses — jobs, homes, savings and security — while feeling as though nothing can catch us. We feel alone, broken, lacking what we had or want, and it becomes very hard to literally count our blessings.
Without gratitude, our thinking becomes increasingly black and white, cornering us into us against them, into me against the world. With this comes a smaller and smaller sense of community. Without gratitude, how can we accept or give support? Without gratitude, the stress of an unrelenting economy feels like actually being on a hamster wheel. It’s unrewarding, empty and feels very precarious. Falling today, while so many others are falling too, means feeling as though there’s nothing left and nobody or nothing to grab onto.
But I can’t help but think about the power of hope to change this entire equation. And I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of the economic inequalities so many of us are facing, often for the first time. This is not an attempt to blame the victim. Our society has spent literally trillions of dollars to convince us we need silk stockings, several big screens and anyone in our way is a threat. What I hope is that together, we can identify a path toward empowerment that no one — bankers, debt collectors and even our own misperceptions — can take away from us.
