You aren’t languishing, you’re sad
“It is no measure of health to be considered well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Erich Fromm, “The Sane Society” (1955)
(1)
My sister was the fourth person to send me a link to Adam Grant’s Apr 19 NYT piece “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling”.
Grant is a superstar psychologist —youngest tenured faculty member at Wharton, best-selling author — and this particular column has been shared widely. I’ve seen it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook; plus those direct forwards. If I had a TikTok account, I’m sure I’d find an impression of it there as well.
Clearly the piece struck a chord for many readers. Grant correctly describes, in the piece itself, the value of having a name for one’s experiences: “Psychologists find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them.” (Linked to a talk by another superstar, Lisa Feldman Barrett.)
It struck a chord for me too — the Cacofonix kind. Something in the piece really bothered me, and it took a flurry of texts with my sister to pin it down. Partly, it’s the Malcolm Gladwell-esque quality of the article — the assembling of research that, while each piece is presented fairly, adds up to an idea that the original researchers might not support. (The Lisa Feldman Barrett video he links to is — you guessed it — a TED talk.)
Still, it goes deeper than aesthetics, deeper than my hesitations around highbrow pop psych. Much as I enjoy Grant’s writing and analysis, in this case, he’s missing the far more obvious explanation.
You aren’t languishing, you’re sad.
(2)
Grant describes languishing as “the neglected middle child of mental health” — drawing on sociologist Corey Reyes, who coined the term when his research suggested that many people were neither depressed (i.e. had an affective disorder) nor thriving (i.e. well-adjusted, in the best of mental health).
To languish is to be functioning, kind of. Not at one’s peak; one is not necessarily distressed, or not more so than expected of one’s situation in life (e.g. if you have loans, some anxiety is to be expected till you repay them), but one lacks energy / motivation / drive, and derives less pleasure even from things one used to find pleasurable. There is no trauma, no rupture, no great disruption — but there is also no growth, and even moments of joy can feel shallow and fleeting.
At the risk of harsh words: What an invitation to solipsism!
Picture yourself as one tree in a forest. A stray lightning bolt has sparked calamity, and now a wildfire is spreading rapidly. Even if no tree in your little copse is burning, smoke from one or the other flashpoint constantly wafts past. Not too far from you are stretches of bare, ash-strewn ground — areas the fire has devastated.
To speak of languishing is to ask: do you think the sap in this tree is flowing a little less smoothly? Perhaps it will bloom a little less than usual this year — after all, fewer bees have stopped by than normal. It’s one thing to miss the forest for the tree; the bewildering thing is missing that the forest is on fire.
To live in the pandemic —certainly to do so in India today — is to be wreathed in smoke every day. We watch as people suffer, starve, gasp for breath, die, and mourn their dead family. This week, we are watching mass cremations, spilling over from crematoria to parks and parking lots.
How can we not be sad?
How can we not be afraid, that this could be us or our loved ones tomorrow?
And — at least for those of us who study policy & governance — how can we not be angry, knowing the actions and inaction that have made this so much worse, and continue to compound the harm?
To be sure, there is an unspoken norm that such emotions are to be managed privately. For instance: my office has been doing full-staff check-ins on Zoom once a month; a couple of months ago, we were asked to type into chat what one word or phrase encompassed the past year for us.
I wrote “sad”.
Among dozens of responses that day, I think mine was the only negative one. I am sure my colleagues felt it too; they were choosing a socially appropriate response, whereas I simply did not have the energy to mask it.
If a CEO writing one of those “How we stayed productive in the pandemic” pieces were to deftly hand-wave past these emotions (“we also engaged counselors, and the response has been so positive, we may continue with them even after”), I would smirk and move on.
For a psychologist writing about mental health during the pandemic to miss out on this is extraordinary.
Funny thing is, Grant literally quotes a Harvard Business Review article which talks about the collective experience of the pandemic as grief. We are mourning, that article suggests, not just the loss of lives — tragic and infuriating in itself — but also the loss of a way of life. Yet he treats it as merely an illustration of how naming emotions makes them more manageable, and promptly goes on to suggest a different name for the same emotions.
He would have been better off retweeting the HBR article, or at least its title: “That Discomfort You are Feeling is Grief.”
You aren’t languishing. You’re sad.
(3)
One thing Grant gets exactly right in this piece: a forced performance of positivity does little to help, and may well add infuriation to injury.
Our emotions in response to this pandemic, with its attendant pain and suffering, cannot but be negative. To be unaffected by the suffering of those around oneself is to be a sociopath. Even years of upper middle-class socialisation — of ignoring and growing inured to the child begging at the traffic signal — have not managed to bring most of us to quite that level of sociopathy.
India is — fortunately, for my own mental health — among the countries Grant references as not having the USA’s tooth-achingly weird commitment to positivity. Here, one answers questions about how one is doing with a non-committal flip of the wrist that would make an Olympian judoka envious. “Bas theek, aap to jaante hain, khair, aap kahiye…” (Oh, well enough, you know, anyhow, you say…)
No chirpy “I’m great!”. Mercifully few incongruous grins (the kind, Bill Bryson writes, that say “we are completely out of our minds, thanks, how are you?”.)
Still, there are many forms of toxic positivity. The quintessential Indian one is a pseudo-scientific, quasi-religious insistence on the importance of a positive outlook to one’s own physical and mental health. I dare not dismiss the idea outright: my late father managed to be unfailingly cheerful while fighting a painful and eventually fatal cancer. Still, it grates to be accused of negativity, or exhorted to resist despair, when one is simply acknowledging that so many of the people around us are in extraordinary pain.
If you are, by inclination, a problem-solver, a do-er, an activist — you may have this even worse. You are intrinsically motivated, when you see something wrong, to do something about it. When you learn about an injustice, you are angry, and you set about to right it. Yet the pandemic constrains you, offering few (and sometimes zero) avenues for action.
Physical congregation is inadvisable, even if it is legally possible where you live. There is basically no cure at this time, only prevention (by vaccine, as well as by distancing, masking, and hand-washing). There may be limits to the money you can contribute or raise. Everything you are feeling — the sadness, the anger, the boiling urge to help — is right, of course. But what can you channel that energy into?
Self-improvement feels churlish, an incredibly privileged indulgence. And even if you do find some form of service to engage in, most things will feel inadequate for the occasion. There is a Hebrew saying about duty and effort, the first line of which is often translated as “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief…” — but it truly is hard to not be daunted by a reality that truly afflicts the world.
Even genuine — not forced, not toxic — positivity and pleasure can feel strange in these times. I inflict random bits of humour on my friends almost every day (and pandemic humour does lean to the random). Some of them send me pictures of their pets being silly (or picturesque). My cousin will share the occasional video of their infant, being adorable as only babies can be.
Even the genuine, tender joy of those moments is brittle, skating on the thin ice of survivor’s guilt.
It comes with the discomfort of holding two incompatible emotions; or an emotion and a belief that pull in different directions; or an emotion or belief that drive us one way, even as we act in a different way altogether (or are unable to act). If you find yourself compelled to maintain a facade of positivity, that sense of wrongness must be affecting you even more.
There is, in fact, a name for this mental state as well.
You aren’t languishing. You’re experiencing cognitive dissonance.
(4)
If we must borrow a sociological term to describe our present reality, the sociologist we should turn to is our old friend Emile Durkheim instead. In his studies on suicide and social alienation, we will find much that resonates with our experience today.
(I mean no disrespect to Reyes — his paper looks very interesting, and I am sure there is more to the concept of languishing than the NYT article alone can cover!)
Many social scientists have noted that modern economic and social conditions are marked by uncertainty and indefinite transition (“waithood”, to quote Alcinda Honwana.) The pandemic has both intensified and prolonged the uncertainty: we are literally uncertain when status quo ante can resume, and the economic effects of the pandemic will leave a large number of young people and families even less able to achieve security of livelihood, income, or status. It is a public health catastrophe, in a world where catastrophic health expenses are a major factor driving people into (or back into) poverty.
The uncertainty is not merely temporal. As guidance on appropriate ways to protect oneself and one’s family shifts, with mixed messaging from many governments, in a fragmented and low-trust information environment, it is also unclear how one is to behave from one day to the next. What one is supposed to do, what one is supposed to not do, what is good and proper and virtuous behaviour, what is irresponsible or vile — all of this is hazy, and can be a moving target.
These are precisely the conditions in which one expects to find — or to experience — what Durkheim termed anomie (“normlessness”, but it sounds cooler in French). Anomie is characterised by a loss of social cohesion — a weakening or breaking of ties —leading in turn to loss of motivation at the level of the individual.
In the absence of norms, shared expectations, social validation etc. to give meaning to life, Durkheim suggests, individuals may find little intrinsic motivation to do, well, anything. They may simply go through the motions, or stick with whatever they have done so far, if only because there is little sense of what to switch to either. They may withdraw into a form of silent despair, and they may also be more susceptible to collective or spontaneous acts of violence (what Louisa Lombard calls “the violence of the pack”).
Notice the similarities to the characteristics of languishing? The key difference is that anomie is inherently a social phenomenon; it arises from the disruption of social order, from situations when the norms as commonly understood cannot apply or cannot be attained.
You aren’t languishing. You’re experiencing the anxieties of waithood.
You’re experiencing anomie.
(5)
Indulge me in a brief digression.
About a year ago, I wrote a post on Facebook, about mental health from a social systems perspective, quoting the work of Bruce Alexander.
<<<Couldn’t find a way to link it, so have copied the whole thing in at the end of this blog post.>>>
Alexander was a lab psychologist at the height of behaviourist empiricism: a time when addiction, for instance, was studied by locking a rat in a little box. Strapped in place, with a needle jabbed into its vein, the only thing the rat could control was a lever, which would give it another dose of IV morphine. The fact that rats in this situation would scrabble at the lever till they overdosed and died was presented as proof of the dreadful addictiveness of morphine (and of drugs more generally). This is your brain on drugs!
Alexander and his colleagues suspected — correctly, as it turns out, but also duh? — that being locked in a torture cell might have something to do with the rat’s choices. To test that theory, they built Rat Park: a great big enclosure with all kinds of fun things for rats to do — sawdust and shredded newspapers to build nests in, food and water to forage for, odds and ends to play with, and (most importantly) other rats to party with.
There was drug-laced water in Rat Park too, and most rats figured out where to find it; unlike in the little torture cell, though, they didn’t lose all self-control or overdose. It was one option among many, and they went to it when they were having a bad day: the drug was a coping mechanism, not a devilishly addictive substance that overrode the will.
Alexander’s work has profound implications for the study of loneliness, addiction, substance abuse, depression, and (what was it Durkheim studied again?) suicide — what are sometimes called “deaths of despair”. Many aspects of mental health, it turns out, are not about the mind. They’re about the box.
(6)
When, as solutions to pandemic-induced languishing, Grant presents a list of fundamentally self-centred measures — name the feeling, give yourself uninterrupted time (to do work, mind you — so he may as well have said, time when you ignore the rest of the world), chunk large tasks into smaller ones, try to achieve a state of flow! — he demonstrates, intentionally or otherwise, the limits of an individualistic conception and approach to mental health.
To be clear, I have nothing against these suggestions. I have been practicing some of them myself, and can attest to the benefits of focused work time and chunking via Pomodoro Method. They will indeed help you be functional, even productive. You will do the work your office needs. You might even get through a reading list, or pick up a new language, or whatever.
It is simply that all this is vastly inadequate. It is absurdly small — again, solipsistic — for our present reality. What is needed is an effective plan for vaccination, emergency medical aid, humanitarian aid, a path back to sustainable livelihoods; all at a global scale. What Grant offers instead is: press the lever, and another dose of productivity will flow into your veins.
Some of us — and I imagine the average NYT reader in this category — had the privilege to be gamboling in a park when the pandemic hit. COVID-19 has pushed us back from our parks into a smaller and sparser box. One wall of the box is a screen, and it’s more or less constantly showing us our fellow humans suffering.
Each of us is finding ways to adjust to this new reality.
As a dear friend — a practicing psychologist herself — reminded me, in a comment on that Facebook post: it is no measure of health to be considered well-adjusted to a profoundly sick world.
(FIN.)
(The Facebook post referred to above — can’t seem to find a way to link it, so just copying the whole damn thing in here instead.)
On mental health (3): to the more basic question — what is “mental health” or “mental illness” anyway?
Ans: It’s about the box.
[Long post — even longer than usual. I promise it comes together by the end!]
TL; DR: We can and should re-frame how we think about mental health / lack thereof. Understanding “mental illness” in terms of behaviour-context fit is a positive intervention in itself, especially because it points us to working on the context and not just the individual / their behaviours, beliefs, habits etc.
— -
Earlier posts were on “being there” for someone experiencing emotional distress or mental illness, and why this can be hard work (though the skills involved can be applied in daily life as well). In those, I tried to suggest some ways all of us can act as a support system — as individuals, as groups, and at a policy level.
As (a friend) noted, this was still oriented towards supporting people in times of serious distress, rather than widespread social change. So that’s what I want to talk about in this one: the relatively small change we can all make, starting a few minutes from now, as you finish reading this post.
We can re-frame how we think about mental illness, & so also about mental health.
— -
The chapter on “abnormal psychology” (i.e. mental disorders) in the intro Psych textbook we had in high school (Morgan & King?) starts with an innocuous question: when is a given behaviour, thought, or pattern thereof to be considered a “disorder” / a sign thereof?
Textbook answer is that it has to fulfill two conditions: it has to be sufficiently different from what is considered normal or appropriate in those circumstances (hence “abnormal”), AND it has to cause subjective distress to the individual and/or those around them. (Without the latter, it’s idiosyncratic or eccentric, not a disorder.)
I never liked this definition, because it ascribes a lot of power to the cultural & social context: for instance, this is exactly why people were able to classify homosexuality or bisexuality as mental illnesses.
(Even if the individual in question did not report distress, people around them — e.g. their family — could say they were distressed by the individual’s sexual orientation, and voila — it gets labeled a disorder, people get labelled “mentally ill”, and all sorts of “treatments” — read that as “tortures”, consistent with the use of violence in “mental health treatment” for centuries — spring up.)
It wasn’t till I studied about Bruce Alexander and the Rat Park experiments that I realised this is precisely the point: sometimes the behaviour is of concern & the individual should work to change it, and sometimes the norm is of concern and the society and culture — which is us, collectively — should work to change it.
— -
Dr. Bruce Alexander, who retired from teaching psychology at Simon Fraser University right around when I started studying it at St. Xavier’s, worked as an experimental psychologist in the 1960s — a time when cognitive psychology was competing with B.F. Skinner-style behaviourism to become the dominant paradigm in the field.
What the “cognitive revolution” brought to psychology was a recognition that mental processes — thoughts, beliefs, judgments — could intercede between stimulus & reaction, an area that behaviourists had treated as a “black box” (as in, we don’t know what’s happening inside the box).
This was often very literal, as Alexander recounts in a speech: they put rats in boxes, and then did not even look at the rat, just the data on how frequently the rat pushed a lever or some other mechanism.
One line of research using rats in these “Skinner boxes” was around addiction. Studies showed that rats would get addicted to drugs — that they would self-administer large & even fatal doses if possible — which was taken as evidence of how drugs were addictive, and would “hijack” the brain. (Of rodents, in these studies — but the implication was that drugs have a similar effect on humans.) Stimulus present, response guaranteed, no mental processes involved (“this is your brain on drugs!”).
Alexander’s issue with these studies was: you trap a rat in a small box, strap it to the ceiling with a catheter stabbed into a major vein, where the only thing the rat can control is when it gets the next injection of drugs — and from this you conclude that addiction is a function of the brain?!
To look at addictive behaviour in a more “life-like” context, Anderson built Rat Park. Unlike the tiny box, Rat Park is — as the name suggests — a playground for rats. (It was literally an 8-foot plywood box with random cans, exercise wheels, a bunch of sawdust and wood chips to line the floor, and containers where food & water were periodically refilled — sounds basic, till you compare that to being locked inside a tiny torture cell.)
Perhaps most importantly, Rat Park had other rats. (And because rats socialising make baby rats, it soon had even more rats.) On every metric, in every experiment, using every mechanism they could devise, the rats in Rat Park consumed way less of the drug (in the first studies, morphine) than rats locked in a Skinner box. Not a single rat wound up addicted.
Stimulus present, but as one of many stimuli; mental processes intercede, multiple responses possible. As Alexander and his colleagues wrote: we are learning that drug consumption is about isolation & helplessness, not inherent addictive-ness.
Alexander’s work has continued to focus on those two areas — isolation and addictiveness — and it has found great resonance among those studying modern trends in what are sometimes called “deaths of despair” (which include substance abuse & suicide, & are often diagnosed alongside affective disorders like depression or anxiety.)
I think we need to use Alexander’s insights to frame how we think about mental health in general, beyond just the question of social isolation.
— -
There are many real-world parallels to the Skinner box. The most severe, of course, is incarceration; others are material correlates of poverty; still others are cultural — like rigid gender roles, or the norms that determine what is seen as “appropriate”.
Some of us are lucky enough to grow up with fewer such constraints. Our environment has no dearth of opportunities for exploration, play, learning, social interaction — the world is Rat Park for us. Others do not have as much privilege; in one way or the other, they are constrained, isolated, boxed in. And some constraints — again, I’m thinking at the social/cultural level — are far more widespread, irrespective of one’s material circumstances.
Over the course of our lives, we all develop patterns of behaviour & thought — i.e. beliefs, habits, identities — that respond to these circumstances. We try to live the best lives we can, given the box in which we find ourselves. And sometimes those behaviours are a great fit — no norm deviance, no distress — so we call them “healthy” or “adaptive”. That’s mental health: being well-adjusted to your context.
And sometimes those behaviours are not a great fit. That could be because they were developed in one context, and then the box changed — or we hopped into a different one — and they’re not quite as well-suited for the new one. The stimulus or set of stimuli have changed, but our brains are still going with the response they know best.
Once someone experiences distress as a result of these responses, we call these behaviour patterns “maladaptive”. That’s the opposite of mental health — it’s mental illness, or mental disorder — and it will persist till we can replace the maladaptive stuff with something better aligned to the new box.
(Substance abuse — the subject of the original Rat Park study — is one example of maladaptive behaviour. Rats in Rat Park did self-administer the drug — it was one coping mechanism they turned to “on a bad day”. In a Skinner box, every day is a bad day; when the box changes, it can take time — and dedicated effort — to stop using “bad day” coping mechanisms on days that are not, despite your expectation, bad days.
Many other psychological disorders — “mental illness” — can be seen as this form of maladaptivity as well. They were developed for a reason, which made sense in the context where they arose; they are having negative effects at this time, and it is helpful to explore — especially if the context has changed — how the individual can replace them with something that meets those goals without causing as much distress.)
AND SOMETIMES IT ISN’T ABOUT THE BEHAVIOUR — IT’S ABOUT THE BOX. It’s about social & cultural norms that constrain, stifle, limit, isolate, and oppress. Consider homosexuality again: while it is possible for an individual to change their behaviour to conform to a norm that homosexuality is “wrong”, “illegal”, or “immoral”, that’s a very limiting box, where they have to smother a part of their identity in order to fit.
What’s needed isn’t new behaviours, it’s a new box — in this case, new thinking on gender roles, new norms around sexual identity & behaviour, new norms that recognise caste for the historic atrocity that it is. In the interim, since social change isn’t quick or linear, it will probably help anyone feeling constrained by such norms to hop boxes — to find new social groups which accept that part of their identity, and do not ascribe anything negative to it.
To be sure, there’s more to mental illness than behaviour/context fit. There are known links between certain neurophysiological or neurochemical phenomena and certain mental illnesses; there are genetic factors that can predispose people to such conditions, and there is now good evidence that epigenetic factors — such as traumatic events in a parent’s life — can do so as well. (Isolation is one of a number of environmental factors that can interact with such predispositions — a diathesis/stress or resilience/stress model.)
Unless you actually work in those fields, though, what are you going to do about it? On the other hand, here’s what we can all do: when we hear about mental illness, think “behaviour-context misalignment”, and then ask what part of that is contributed by the behaviour, and what part is contributed by the box.
You may or may not be able to help people work on replacing maladaptive behaviours with more adaptive ones; you almost certainly can work on dismantling some boxes and building some parks.
