Losing Our Minds

The Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps that killed his father, mother, brother and wife, said: ‘An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour’.²⁴ Similarly, the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, a prominent early critic of the medi-calisation of mental distress, said that insanity was a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world’.²⁵ Of schizophrenia, he said, ‘The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unliveable situation.’²⁶ More recently, the psychologist Lucy Johnstone argues that when someone is distressed, instead of asking ‘What is wrong with you?’ we should ask, ‘What has happened to you?’²⁷

I also wonder whether there’s something frustrating and scary for today’s parents about being able to see so clearly how much psychological space their adolescent’s social world takes up. Of course, some parents are worried about social media because their child is being bullied or has been upset by something specific that has happened online, and in that situation it’s completely appropriate to be concerned. But in the absence of any stress or unhappiness, I wonder if there is just something unnerving about being able to explicitly see how much peers matter to young people – a social world that is now superseding that of the family, of the parents themselves. Peers and socialising have always dominated the lives of teenagers, but previously it was a little more hidden: contained in the mind, or expressed in parent free spaces during and after school. Now, parents see this fascination manifest itself right in front of them. It’s far easier to criticise and condemn phones than to recognise them for what they so often are: evidence of adolescents’ entirely normal biologically driven social obsession.

Lastly, I wonder if some adults dislike social media for another reason: it is evidence of a stage of life they have left behind. There’s a strange moment that all adults experience at some point when we realise that we are no longer the young ones. It was once us using the technology that grown-ups couldn’t grasp, but now it’s us who don’t understand it. I’m reminded of a moment in The Simpsons when a young Grandpa says to his teenage son Homer: I used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was.’

[...a few pages/chapter later...]

[...] I find it utterly strange that so much of the discussion about young people’s mental health is fixated on their phones: there’s also been an awful lot of stress and disruption in the outside world for young people today and, as we know, all of this uncertainty and hardship are legitimate factors that could act as precisely the kind of external stressors that trigger mental illness. When trying to understand the recent increase in mental illness, self-harm and suicide, one plausible explanation could therefore be that there’s simply more stress in people’s lives now compared to those of previous generations.

[...a couple of pages later...]

Like many people, I find [...] the term ‘snowflake’ itself, frustrating. It is often used by older people to criticise and shame the young, accompanied by wistful talk of Britain’s stoicism of yesteryear: we used to be strong, is the implication, and now you are weak. The flaw in this logic is that you cannot blame a child for the way they’ve been taught to deal with stress. If a young person reacts ‘badly’ to stress, then that is surely the fault not of the young person but of all the adults and institutions around them who should help prepare them for life’s challenges. But leaving blame and criticism aside, is there any truth in this argument? Are there some people who are coping less well, relative to their counterparts in previous generations?

Psychologist Nicholas Haslam has applied the idea of looping effects to the concept of mental illness.²⁰ He argues that when professionals classify and name something as a mental disorder, they don’t just describe something that already existed, they actually invent something new: that category, that thing, comes to life. People then come to recognise themselves in that label, and the concept becomes solidified. This in turn adjusts how they view themselves, according to what they learn about the label. As Hacking says, ‘Our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. Then – and this is the looping bit – the way in which people take on and embody these labels influences the professionals. They do more research on it, or they adjust and refine their thinking based on what they now see in the people who present with this disorder. Haslam sums it up: ‘Changing ideas change people ... and changed people necessitate changes in ideas.’

[...]

Haslam suggests that this same looping effect is also happening at a grander scale in society with the general concept of ‘mental disorder’, such that it has become an ‘ever-expanding vortex’. As psychiatrist Derek Summerfield wrote in 2001: ‘The constructs of “psychology” or “mental health” are social products. Collectively held beliefs about particular negative experiences are not just potent influences but carry an element of self-fulfilling prophecy; individuals will largely organise what they feel, say, do and expect to fit prevailing expectations and categories.’²¹

In other words, part of the reason why rates of mental illness seem to be rising could be because at a societal and cultural level, we are more readily interpreting our experiences as such. Through our language and interpretation, we may be creating additional cases of mental illness. The Hungarian-Canadian sociologist Frank Furedi refers to this as the ‘problematization of emotional life’, and that this has ‘widened the definition of harm to a historically unprecedented point’.²² Of course this can only ever be part of the explanation, and it is not a criticism of anyone who is experiencing mental illness or distress. As I say throughout this book, and as I know personally, these experiences are real and can be disabling, whatever we call them. But as a contributing factor to the phenomenon of rising rates, it is too plausible to be ignored.