Maintaining
Mental Health In The Age Of Madness
Carolyn
Baker
Americans
have a remarkable ability ‘to look reality right in the eye’
and deny it.
~Garrison
Keillor~
The
World Health Organization defines
mental health as “a state of well-being in which every
individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the
normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and
is able to make a contribution to her or his community.” A state
of well-being is obviously more than just the absence of disease.
It assumes that a human being is reasonably functional mentally,
physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Similarly, this
definition can be applied to healthy communities with the addition
of social functionality as another aspect of well-being.
However,
most readers are aware of the decline in mental health treatment
within the past three decades. Whereas thirty years ago many
working people had insurance benefits for outpatient psychotherapy
as well as in-patient treatment, not only have the benefits
dramatically decreased, but massive unemployment makes it
virtually impossible for millions of people to pay for any kind of
health care, physical or mental.
Meanwhile,
nearly all inhabitants and communities of industrial civilization
are struggling to cope with living in societies in unprecedented
decline. Energy depletion, climate change, economic contraction,
and the collapse of myriad institutions such as healthcare,
education, infrastructure, and police and fire services weigh
heavily on the wallets and emotions of millions. In the United
States, the realities of the sequester debacle will only
exacerbate the unraveling, and for many, avoiding homelessness and
starvation are top priorities with nothing left over for any kind
of healthcare. Yet it is precisely this demographic who are
contending with monumental stress, and for many of them, just as
they may be one paycheck away from being homeless, they may also
be one stress away from mental and emotional meltdown.
The
reader does not need yet another litany of this culture’s
hyper-proliferating dysfunctions. However long or short your
residence on this planet, you are well aware of its genocide of
species and its suicide of itself. And regardless of how far
removed from this madness you experience yourself, it invariably
weighs upon you whether you choose to admit that or not. If you
are the least bit honest with yourself, you recognize that you are
surrounded by madness yet constantly being reassured, particularly
in the United States, that you live in the safest, healthiest,
freest, and most desirable country on earth.
Moreover,
if in recent years or months you have dared to explore the
realities of peak oil, climate change, and economic contraction
and their inevitable ramifications, you may feel
mega-schizophrenic as you live with this information and at the
same time attempt to navigate a society in which every form of
functioning is dictated by denial. In fact, you may feel as if
you’re looking at one of those cube diagrams from a chapter on
perception in a psychology textbook in which looked at one way,
one of the sides of the cube appears to be in the foreground and
the other side in the background, but when looked at another way,
the foreground and background are reversed. On some days, you may
feel completely crazy, yet on another day, you may feel blessedly
sane but overwhelmed by the madness around you.
Historically
speaking, it is important to remember that millions of individuals
throughout history have felt similarly. Some were able to trust
their instincts and respond resiliently; others were not. In
the final days of the Roman Empire, many were able to see through
the madness around them and vacate large cities. In Nazi Germany,
some were able to discern the horror that lay ahead and escape. In
the Soviet Union, millions lived through Stalinist purges and
totalitarian oppression for decades knowing that a collapse was
inevitable such as they witnessed in 1989-90.
Regardless
of how robust a civilization may appear, certain aspects of it are
terribly fragile, particularly its commitment to creativity vs.
destruction. Jungian author and blogger, Paul Levy, writes in his
2013 Dispelling
Wetiko:
A
civilization usually doesn’t die from being invaded from the
outside, but unless it creates culture which nourishes the
evolution of the creative spirit, a civilization invariably
commits suicide. As if possessed, our civilization is, trancelike,
sleepwalking in a death march toward its own demise.
The
word wetiko
is
a Native American term, the spelling of which varies from tribe to
tribe, but essentially it means a
diabolically wicked person or energy that terrorizes others by
means of evil acts.
Carl
Jung was one of the first modern psychologists to address the
issue of collective madness. He theorized that individual humans
possessed not only a personal unconscious mind but were also part
of a collective unconscious mind which from time to time becomes
activated and generates a collective psychosis. In the current
moment, inhabitants of industrial civilization are living in
cultures committed to infinite growth, consumerism, resource
extraction, war, and of course, massive denial that any of these
are inexorably destructive policies of planetary suicide. Humans
are colluding in mad behavior, based on the sharing of an illusion
which is the literal definition of collusion
or co-illusion.
In
fact, on days when you may feel as if you are surrounded by
madness, it might be useful to read these words from Levy:
Whenever
the contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they
have an unsettling effect on the conscious mind of everyone. When
this psychic dynamic is not consciously metabolized, not just
within an individual, but collectively, the mental state of the
people as a whole might well be compared to a psychosis. Jung
never tired of warning that the greatest danger that threatens
humanity is the possibility that millions of us can fall into our
unconscious together and reinforce each other’s blind spots,
feeding a contagious collective psychosis in which we unwillingly
become complicit in supporting the insanity of endless wars; this
is unfortunately an exact description of what is currently
happening.
Collective
madness manifests in myriad ways, but one manifestation is the
self-reinforcing feedback loop of what Canadian psychiatrist,
Gabor Maté calls “the realm
of hungry ghosts,”
a Buddhist term for people who are always hungry, always empty,
and always seeking satisfaction from the outside. That is to say
that we have created a society of insatiable addicts, many of whom
have poor attention skills or full-blown attention deficit
disorder.
Moreover,
without using the terms “collective madness” or “collective
unconscious” as Jung did, Maté describes
a similar phenomenon with respect to how children in our society
develop:
… the
conditions in which children develop have been so corrupted and
troubled over the last several decades that the template for
normal brain development is no longer present for many, many kids.
And Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, who’s a professor of psychiatry at
Boston—University of Boston, he actually says that the neglect
or abuse of children is the number one public health concern in
the United States. A recent study coming out of Notre Dame by a
psychologist there has shown that the conditions for child
development that hunter-gatherer societies provided for their
children, which are the optimal conditions for development, are no
longer present for our kids. And she says, actually, that the way
we raise our children today in this country is increasingly
depriving them of the practices that lead to well-being in a moral
sense.
In
other words, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed
the conditions required for healthy childhood development.
The
Madness Of The Mental Health Community
Yet
if you feel you need professional help with the schizophrenic
feelings you are experiencing regarding the state of the planet,
and if you are brave enough to visit a mental health professional
in the United States and begin talking about the “collective
psychosis,” peak oil, or the collapse of industrial
civilization, you are likely to be diagnosed with some sort of
anxiety disorder or clinical depression. Sooner or later, your
mental health professional is likely to suggest medication and
attempt to work with you to “reframe” your perception of the
world or perhaps suggest that you invest more energy in the
positive aspects of your life than dwell on the negative realities
of the macrocosm. Certainly, we would like to believe that the
mental health community is exempt from a collective psychosis, and
some members of it are. However, the overwhelming majority are
not. Of this Levy says:
That
the mental health community, which should be concerned with
psychic hygiene (both personal and collective), is not even
addressing the issue of a rampant collective psychosis is a clear
indication that the mental health community is itself embedded in
and hence infected with the very psychic epidemic it should be
studying….What clearer sign do we need of a psychic epidemic
than when our mental health system itself, whose job it is to
study, monitor, and deal with such phenomena, not only doesn’t
recognize that there is a collective psychosis running rampant in
our society, but is itself infected with it?
In
an article entitled “Working Through Environmental Despair” in
Theodore Roszak’s marvelous book, Ecopsychology,
Joanna Macy writes:
But
because of the individualistic bias of mainstream psychotherapy,
we have been conditioned to assume that we are essentially
separate selves, driven by aggressive impulses, competing for a
place in the sun. In the light of these assumptions,
psychotherapists tend to view our affective responses to the
plight of our world as dysfunctional and give them short shrift.
As a result, we have trouble crediting the notion that concerns
for the general welfare might be genuine enough and acute enough
to cause
distress. Assuming
that all our drives are ego-generated, therapists tend to regard
feelings of despair for our planet as manifestations of some
private neurosis.
In
the first pages of John Michael Greer’s latest book, Not
The Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, And The Myth Of
Progress,
he
notes a number of “unmentionable crises” throughout history
that were actually social crises, but because of the
undesirability of dealing with them, they were temporarily
“re-framed” as personal crises. One of these was a contrived
“pathology” in relation to African American slaves living in
slave states who were said to have suffered from a mental illness
called “Drapetomania” in which they had an “irrational”
desire to run away. Yet another example Greer cites is the lack of
meaning and value in the lives of women in the 1950s and 60s that
Betty Friedan described as “the problem that has no name.”
These are two examples of how social crises were reframed as
personal problems which conveniently enabled addressing them as
social phenomena to be postponed indefinitely.
Similarly
in current time, we are witnessing an enormous gap between the
dominant story of our culture which is one of “infinite
progress” and the palpable sense of anxiety and despair that
permeates the psyches of most inhabitants of industrial
civilization. According to Greer, the notion of infinite progress
has become nothing less than a “civil religion,” and
questioning the reality of the notion is one of the most
disturbing heresies a “civilized” human being can commit.
Moreover, as Greer notes, “Central to the myth of progress, and
also one of the keys to its potent emotional appeal, is its
affirmation of the omnipotence of human agency.” That is to say
that axiomatic within the “religion of progress” is the
assumption that if an individual or a community is not
experiencing progress, it is merely because that individual or
community is not exerting enough effort, is not working smart
enough, or its investments are not shrewd enough. This is another
way of saying that progress is of our own making—or not, and
that if we aren’t reaping the fruits of it, we are suffering the
consequences of our choices and need to make different ones.
Those
who embrace the notion of peak oil or the collapse of industrial
civilization are perceived by the society at large as “deviant”
because they do not hold to the dominant mentality of infinite
progress. Greer points out that mainstream culture can conceive
essentially of only two scenarios for the future: 1) Infinite
progress which has a few fits and starts but overall, continues in
an upward trajectory indefinitely; 2) An apocalyptic scenario such
as an asteroid hitting the earth, a nuclear war, or severe natural
disasters that wipe out a series of regions worldwide. What it
cannot grasp, according to Greer, is a steady, gradual decline
over a period of decades and years which results in abject energy
depletion, the long-term collapse of institutions and centralized
systems, and the protracted devolution of industrial society
downward to a state of primitive, pre-industrial functioning.
By
and large, mental health professionals in the modern world are
able to connect the dots between the explosion in the number of
clients suffering from addictions, depression, anxiety, attachment
disorders, learning disabilities, and other illnesses with world
events at large. Most fall somewhere on the liberal side of the
political spectrum and support efforts to maximize the quality of
life for humans and the quality of the environment for all
species. Yet I believe that most clinicians who are not familiar
with the “Three E’s” of energy, environment, and economics
as converging crises signaling the collapse of industrial
civilization, will be emotionally challenged in working with a
client who embraces this perspective. Few Gabor Matés, Paul
Levy’s, or Joanna Macys occupy therapy consulting rooms, and few
mental health professionals are willing to deeply explore what the
collapse of the systems on which they rely would mean for them
personally.
To
be fair, many mental health professionals are frantically
attempting to re-invent themselves as hospitals, clinics, and
agencies close and they find themselves without employment, but in
my experience, few are able to grasp the larger picture of peak
oil and the Long Emergency. Curiously, if they are able to make
the leap to the larger picture, then indeed, they will at some
point find themselves reeling from this knowledge and probably
begin feeling as schizophrenic as any client who would seek help
with the same issue.
Collapse
Deviants And The Shadow
The
shadow, according to Levy is: “…typically conceived of as the
underdeveloped, undesirable, and inferior parts of our
personality; the aspects of ourselves which we repress the most;
it is the part of ourselves we are least proud of and want to hide
from others.” (86) Not only do we each individually have a
personal shadow, but cultures create shadows as well. When we do
not own the shadow and affirm that it is as much a part of us as
the other aspects of ourselves that we cherish, we invariably
construct a system of projection in which we unconsciously
attribute the shadow parts of ourselves to someone else.
“When
we project the shadow,” says Levy, “we unwittingly become a
conduit for evil to possess us from behind, beneath our conscious
awareness, and to act itself out through us.” As individuals we
frequently project the shadow onto other individuals without
realizing that we are doing so. Whenever we encounter someone that
we really don’t like or who pushes our buttons, we are also
encountering some aspect of the shadow. That is not to say that
the other person has no offensive qualities, but rather, that some
aspect of our own shadow is triggered by them. Furthermore, how we
choose to respond externally to the other person is less important
than what we learn about our own shadow by exploring it throughout
our interactions with the other.
Collectively,
we project the shadow on nations or communities when we attribute
virtue to ourselves and evil to the other. The repeated utterances
of George W. Bush as he called Islamic fundamentalists “the
evildoers,” demonstrated an exquisite example of shadow
projection. Likewise, as American citizens target and bully
immigrants, gays, lesbians, and the disabled in hate crimes, the
shadow is blatantly and brutally at work in projecting onto the
other the unclaimed parts of the self. (For an in-depth study of
America’s collective shadow projection, I recommend Madness
At The Gates Of The City: The Myth Of American Innocence,
by Barry Spector.)
Understanding
the shadow and its projections assists us in navigating a culture
in which we are deemed “deviants” or “heretics” because we
no longer embrace the notion of infinite progress. Certainly, it
is no surprise when a corporate lackey or a Wall St. banker
accuses us of deviance, but being pathologized by a mental health
professional may be. I have experienced that even in circles of
Jungian therapists and teachers who have spent decades of their
lives working with the shadow, resistance to the tragic, ultimate
consequences of humanity’s suicidal behavior is frequently
interpreted only symbolically and attended by a refusal to
recognize a literal collapse of industrial civilization, including
the possibility that humanity may inevitably cause our planet to
become uninhabitable.
A
Call To Mental Health Professionals
As
the Long Emergency intensifies, mental health professionals can
choose to continue framing client anxieties about the social
situation as personal pathologies, as the majority are now doing,
or they can open themselves to having an “End of Suburbia”
moment in which they themselves confront the demise of the civil
religion of progress. This necessitates, as Greer notes, a
willingness to pass through what he calls “The Five Stages Of
Peak Oil,” in which one moves from denial, through anger,
bargaining, and grief, toward acceptance—a non-linear process
first outlined by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in relation to death and
loss.
As
a result of moving through their own epiphany about our
predicament and doing their own grieving, if a therapist or
counselor can, in the words of Greer, “take the presence of
collective crisis into account in their work, help clients explore
and articulate the cognitive dissonance they are experiencing, and
provide a supportive framework in which clients can work through
the stages of grief and begin the search for meaningful ways of
living in a world on the far side of progress, the benefits to
society as well as the individual may not be small.”
The
human toll of mental health professionals not allowing themselves
to pass through the Five Stages of Peak Oil and therefore be able
to genuinely empathize with and hold their clients in the current
crisis will be severe, not only for the individual client but for
society at large. The rewards, however, for the clinician, the
client, and the community are potentially incalculable and
profoundly hopeful. And here I use the word hope
in
the same manner as Greer who defines authentic hope as the
combination of personality traits that respond to difficult
circumstances by finding some good that can be achieved, and then
striving to achieve it. In other words, genuine hope is an
internal, pro-active response to one’s predicament as opposed to
a passive anticipation that external circumstances will change or
that someone will discover a magic solution.
The
Healing Power Of Paradox
So
how do we maintain our wholeness in an increasingly fractured,
fragmented, and shattered world?
A
pillar of Jungian psychology is the notion of holding the tension
of opposites. This ancient concept, clearly articulated by the
Medieval alchemists, applies to the psyche as well as to the
alleged transformation of metal into gold. The alchemists claimed
that the transformation resulted from allowing opposite chemical
elements to remain in a container subject to intense heat.
Psychologically speaking, when confronted with the horrors of our
predicament, the most crucial ingredient for maintaining our
wholeness is holding the tension of the opposites within
ourselves, that is, the both/and of our experience. Rather than
asking: “Will the collapse be fast or slow?” we must know that
it is
being
both fast and slow even as I write these words and you read them.
Rather than pondering whether to retreat back into the comfort of
denial and pretend that everything you’ve heard about collapse
is nonsense or conversely, sinking into abject depression and
despair because “nothing matters anyway,” consider that the
future is all about both/and.
As
I write these words, more than 13,000 contaminated dead pigs are
floating down the Shanghai River in China, and yet somewhere in
the Northern Hemisphere, spring is coming to the land—robins are
singing and crocuses are bursting forth from the earth. Yes, if
you are preparing for the Long Emergency, you are
a
deviant in the eyes of so many of this culture’s institutions,
the mental health system being one of them—and, you are also an
extraordinary, intelligent, vibrant, unique human being with gifts
to offer your community and your world that we all desperately
need.
In
this both/and world of the present and the future, as psychologist
Bill
Plotkin
says, we must move from pre-occupation with EGO-psychology to
immersion in ECO-psychology. Otherwise, we will not
be able to maintain wholeness in the madness. Perhaps the loudest
message of this Great Turning/Great
Churning/Decline/Demise/Collapse/Transition is that living our
lives from the perspective of the human ego is exactly what
brought us to this convergence of crises, and not only is it no
longer working; it will never work again! Excluding spiritual and
emotional preparation for the future in our arduous efforts to
prepare logistically is a continuation of the soul-murder
perpetuated by industrial civilization.
We
maintain our wholeness in the madness by joining with others to
begin making the kind of world we want our children and the next
seven generations to live in. If you yourself are a helping
professional of any kind, embrace your deviance and commit to
proliferating
the deviance! The opportunities for re-imagining, sharing,
cooperating, and partnering with kindred hearts are endless. In
fact, never have so many humans had so many opportunities to
resiliently re-fashion their lives and their communities.
However,
we must not revert to the “keep busy doing projects so that you
don’t have time to think” syndrome of industrial civilization.
In my experience, every person who is preparing for the Long
Emergency needs safe spaces where they can discuss their feelings
about the future with kindred souls. The Transition founders
certainly got it right when they included “The
Heart And Soul/Psychology Of Change”
initiative in the Transition model. Consciously preparing for the
future is a task far too onerous, too overwhelming, and too
anxiety-provoking to take on in isolation. In terms of the Five
Stages of Peak Oil, the mental health system lags far behind “the
psychology of change” initiative and is yet another institution
highly susceptible to collapse.
In
my own community, our local “Growing Resilience” group is
moving into its fourth year. Our activities have included a weekly
book study, a quarterly movie/potluck night, and annual solstice
rituals. We have created a safe place for members to speak freely
their concerns about the future and give and receive support. Yet
ours is but one model in a sea of possibilities for dialog and the
forging of bulwarks for creating emotional resilience.
And
so dear reader, know that this Sacred
Demise
is awakening humans throughout the planet and carries within it
the potential for creating a new species of human. But we must
remember that health means wholeness, and without attending to the
soul, wholeness eludes us. In the words of Paul Levy:
The
only thing that really matters now is whether humanity can climb
up to a higher moral level through self-reflection and be able to
evolve into a more expanded state of consciousness….If ever
there was a time when the turning inward of self-reflection was of
critical importance, it is now, in our present catastrophic
epoch….In the moment of self-reflection, the psychospiritual
necessity for evolutionary growth overrules the biological
compulsion of unreflective animal instinct….Self-reflection is a
genuinely spiritual act, which is, essentially, an act of becoming
conscious.
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