Summerfield deftly characterises the self-reinforcing tendency that comes with the medicalisation of emotional pain:<\/p>\n
When the medicalization of everyday life and the commodification of \u201cmind\u201d is professionally endorsed and taken up by wider culture, the language of psychological deficit is inserted into the public imagination. People come to see themselves not as normally stressed, but as \u201cill,\u201d with negative emotion recast as a mental health problem. As more resources for mental health services are called for and provided, more are perceived to be needed, an apparently circular process, a dog chasing its tail.<\/p>\n
Summerfield is not the only one. In his 2012 book\u00a0Psychology\u2019s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back,\u00a0eminent Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan deplores the explosion in psychiatric diagnosis, and our tendency to conceptualise normal human suffering as disease. Kagan contends that the misapplication of the biological model of disease has led us to pathologise ordinary emotions. \u201cA mental illness is assumed to be analogous to malaria. If, however, most humans experience at least one serious, although temporary, bout of depression or anxiety during their lifetime, it is not obvious that these states reflect abnormal brain profiles produced by deviant genes.\u201d He quotes a line from Beckett\u2019s play\u00a0Endgame:\u00a0\u201cYou\u2019re on Earth, there\u2019s no cure for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
When we construe normal feeling as illness, we offer people an understanding of themselves as disordered. This has the unintended consequence of encouraging people to be stuck in a limiting narrative. A young woman in my practice has had to take several leaves of absence from college due to what she terms \u201canxiety and depression.\u201d She had been working toward completing several credits this semester, culminating recently in final exams. Reporting on her finals, she told me that she had had \u201ca panic attack\u201d during the first exam. Based on this experience, she had been extremely anxious about attempting the second exam and had asked for an incomplete instead.<\/p>\n
When patients come in with pat summaries of their inner landscape couched in psychiatric waffle, it is usually an indication that they are stuck in their story. I asked this young patient of mine what in fact had happened during the first exam? She responded again, \u201cI had a panic attack.\u201d I lightly pressed her to move beyond the jargon and tell me about her actual experience as she took the exam. Eventually, she was able to tell me that, as the papers were being handed out, she became flushed and light-headed. Her heart was pounding, and her hands felt clammy. What happened then? I asked. She felt like running out of the room, but she was able to calm herself down enough to take the test. Though she successfully completed the first exam\u2014and did okay on it\u2014the fear that she might have another \u201cpanic attack\u201d had prevented her from attempting the second exam.<\/p>\n
What had happened here? One way of understanding this young person\u2019s experience is indeed that she had had a limited-symptom panic attack. According to the\u00a0diagnostic criteria<\/a>\u00a0for panic attacks in the\u00a0Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders\u00a0(DSM), a limited-symptom panic attack can be diagnosed based on a pounding heart, sweating, and shaking. Of course, as anyone knows who has ever taken an exam, performed in front of an audience, or asked someone they like out on a date, these are in fact utterly normal reactions to feeling nervous. I gently attempted to reflect this back to my young patient. \u201cSo you were nervous about taking the exam, but you didn\u2019t run out of the room. You did it. You pushed through the fear feelings.\u201d I wanted her to see this as a success, one that she could build on, that could help alter her stuck story that tells her she is too anxious to function adequately. Her response to my positive reframing was telling. She looked up at me from under her brows and held my gaze. \u201cYes,\u201d she responded firmly. \u201cBut I had a panic attack.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Understanding Victimhood Culture: An Interview with Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning<\/p>\n Conservatives and others who find themselves opposed to campus activists might uphold the values of the dignity culture the activists reject<\/p>\n Her relative triumph in finishing the semester and taking the one exam was undone by her firm commitment to the narrative that she had had a panic attack. The belief given to her by the psychiatric establishment and our culture\u2019s enthusiasm for reductive diagnosis made her construe what happened to her in the first exam not as the success that it was, but as confirmation that she was, in fact, ill. Here was a case in which the process of diagnosis and treatment had concretised the story, arguably making transformation less likely. As of this writing, it remains to be seen whether she will be able to finish the incomplete and get the credits she worked for all semester.<\/p>\n I found myself wondering where she had learned that she ought not to be expected to tolerate ordinary distress or discomfort. How have we come to the point where we believe that emotional disquiet will cause harm, that we ought to be soothed and tranquil at all times? In fact, we know that children raised by parents who engage them in challenging experiences\u00a0suffer from less anxiety<\/a>, not more.<\/p>\n I was reminded of King Theoden and the insidious counsel of Grima Wormtongue in Tolkien\u2019s\u00a0Lord of the Rings. Grima has been acting as advisor to the king, but, in reality, he is in league with the forces of corruption and decay. As Theoden\u2019s counsellor, he whispers fear and distrust into the king\u2019s ear, encouraging him to shun bold action and to stay safe inside his great hall. He appropriates the king\u2019s sword and conspires to have the king lock up his devoted son. Whereas Gandalf calls Theoden to rise up and face the growing threat to his kingdom, Grima encourages Theoden to rest and play it safe. Grima Wormtongue seems to me to be a perfect metaphor for our own fears, and the ways in which treatment that lacks a broader imagination can actually make us more infirm.<\/p>\n Michael Pollan\u2019s research into psychedelics and their potential use in the treatment of emotional distress provides a fresh perspective. In his recent\u00a0podcast<\/a>\u00a0with Sam Harris, on his new book\u00a0How to Change Your Mind,\u00a0Pollan makes a remarkable statement. Psychedelics seem to provide the most benefit for those illnesses in which people are trapped in unhelpful narratives. \u201cThe ego is stuck in these stories,\u201d says Pollan. Substances like psilocybin seem to work because \u201cthey dope slap people out of their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n Pollan\u2019s observations may provide a clue as to why traditional conceptualisations of mental illness tend to be self-reinforcing and create more illness. Much mental suffering results from being stuck in a story about ourselves. When we take the story at face value, we risk reifying and reinforcing it, when what heals and transforms is anything that allows us to shift our perspective and transcend the narrow, ego-bound experience of ourselves.<\/p>\n Psilocybin and other psychedelics appear to offer such experiences, but there are other ways to access this perspectival shift, and I suspect that taking psychedelics is not in and of itself a guaranteed way to attain this. The ego cannot manufacture such an experience. It cannot be forced by another, and it is not available in pill form\u2014at least not yet. What is required is a degree of receptivity to that which is other-than-ego.<\/p>\n Such an attitude can be cultivated. Travel has a way of altering our sense of ourselves and the world, especially when we travel alone, or in a way that thrusts us out of our comfort zone. The perspectival shift afforded by travel has long been recognised intuitively, and is now being\u00a0validated by research.<\/a>\u00a0The ability to relate to something larger than oneself cultivated by religious practice may be responsible for the\u00a0apparent mental health benefits<\/a>\u00a0of adhering to a faith. Reading novels allows us to inhabit the emotional landscape of a fictional other and can therefore\u00a0aid<\/a>\u00a0us in perspective taking. Dreams offer a nightly opportunity to engage a radically other-than-ego perspective.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/SafeSpace.jpg\")
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