How Long Until We Address the Real Questions Behind the Mental Health Crisis?

It’s time to look at the bigger picture

I don’t know about you, but something about the mental health conversation strikes me as suspiciously shallow. At its best, it’s an honest exchange about dealing with the realities of everyday negative emotion. At its worst, it’s a Corporate HR box-ticking exercise that has absolutely nothing to do with mental health.

In any case, neither situation does much to get at the root of what’s really going on here.

It makes sense for the current conversation to emphasize mental health awareness—especially when we consider some of the most frightening statistics. However, at some point, we all have to start wondering at the gaping hole in the mainstream discussion:

Why aren’t we talking about why this is happening?

Several contributing factors to the crisis have been clearly identified, the use of social-media for example. And yet these proximate causes are just that: proximate—they’re the immediate reasons for why we feel how we feel, and as such, they can ultimately obscure the thing we should really be trying to get into focus: the ultimate cause, the sine qua non.

The rise of social media and big tech, our fraying cultural and social bonds, the casual nihilism that now pervades society… what do all these proximate causes of the mental health crisis have in common?

It might be hard to define, but we can all intuit how these dilemmas are all products of modernity; we associate them with humanity’s onward movement, not with the way ‘things used to be’.

Rekindling a Long-dormant Debate

Back in the late 18th and 19th centuries, we used to argue a lot about what modernity meant. For prophets of progress like Herbert Spencer, modern man was the epitome of civilization, and the eventual perfection of society was not a question, but metaphysical certainty. To historical pessimists á la Jacob Burckhardt, however, modernity carried with it forces that would end up systematically undoing man’s past achievements, leading to a return to barbarism.

Things have changed. The modern world of today presents us with a whole swathe of mind-boggling contradictions, and yet we don’t appear interested in discussing them. For instance, forces of modernity like science improve our lives in innumerable ways, but they also seem to strip out the meaning out of existence, leaving us increasingly rootless and grasping for purpose.

It’s safe to say that neither of the two camps has been proven totally correct. So… what happened to the debate?

Back in those days, modernity was something that was still happening. Today, it is something that has thoroughly happened. The mainstream cultural milieu is virtually all a product of it. And so—like a fish in water—we have stopped noticing the very thing that pervades our daily life, while the cultural debate has moved on to other, smaller concerns and away from modernity itself.

This is a shame because although the apocalyptic vision of modernity was clearly wrong, this doesn’t mean the pessimists weren’t onto something.

These were the people who had contempt for what they saw as the degrading values of modern society. They lamented the way in which the average middle class-inhabitants of cities like Paris or London seemed not to care about the arts or the spiritual. The German poet Hölderlin said these narrow-minded individuals were the products of “industriousness and science” and were “deeply incapable of every divine emotion.”

The pessimists worried that modern commercial society was swiftly washing away what for centuries had been regarded as the pillars of man’s spiritual and social life, replacing it with materialism and a dogmatic faith in progress and liberation. ‘Ennui’—that feeling of almost comatose listlessness so common in modern life—came to define the spirit of the age.

If we assume that mental health is a function of a society’s character and the harmonious functioning of all its parts, then it’s not hard to understand how those opposed to modernity were expressing concerns that have very real ties to the current crisis, even though they did not think in terms of ‘mental health’.

To the pessimists, the rise of uncontrollable negative emotions would not be considered an isolated event, but rather a mere extension of a continuous process of societal decay spurred on by modernity. They would correctly identify the mental health crisis as the symptom, not the disease.

What Carl Jung Saw

The 19th century pessimists knew something was wrong, but they couldn’t really express it in terms other than the “decay of society”. There was still a need to explain this process in terms of the individual, and in this regard the later advent of psychology proved invaluable.

Enter legendary Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who came to posit that modern life was doing much to suppress primaeval factors of the human mind, thus causing them to become split off from consciousness and become potentially dangerous to the individual.

Central to his argument was Jung’s belief that the human brain was the result of an unbelievably long process of cognitive evolution and had not fundamentally changed with the rise of modernity. As such, it would be foolish to think that modern man could totally dispense with the evolutionary history of the mind and the factors it has produced within it.

Jung believed modernity was ignorant of these primitive factors of the mind; he saw how the values it instilled were a poor substitute for the mysteries of the human condition, which could never be fully understood but did possess a sort of logic

Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation. —Carl Jung

It is important to understand that the virtues which Jung refers to aren’t necessarily what pre-modern people did, but more along the lines of how they perceived and interacted with the world. They understood life as drama — a place of meaning where one was meant to act. In contrast, the current objectivist mindset has pummeled this frame of perception out of our minds and left us with a mere world of things to be interpreted and analyzed.

Today, most people see this transformation as an unambiguous progression in man’s understanding of the world. After all, it has allowed us to pretty much conquer the natural world. But to Jung, these advancements were offset by an impoverishment of the psychic energy man needs.

He elaborates further:

Today for instance, we talk of “matter”. We describe its physical properties. We conduct laboratory experiments to demonstrate some of its aspects. But the word “matter” remains a dry, inhuman and purely intelectual concept, without any psychic significance for us. How different was the former image matter-the Great Mother- that could encompass and express a profound emotion meaning of Mother Earth.

Jung stressed that we could ignore these fundamental qualities of man, but that does not mean they would go away. If the post-modern man did not attempt to reconcile the disparate elements of his psyche, then these forces could wreak havoc on man’s unconscious and lead him to a psychologically vulnerable state.

It only takes a basic knowledge of the 20th century to acknowledge that so called “rational and modern” people are still aggressively capable of becoming possessed by irrational and extreme ideas. Jung did not attribute this to the ideologies of fascism and communism as much as he did to his theory of modernity’s effect on the human psyche.

Healing the Split

Does it make sense to try and get back to our roots and rediscover some of what has been lost? Or would any attempt at this just be a pale imitation? Sadly, I believe it’s basically impossible for us to perceive the world as pre-modern people once did. That is gone. Our factory settings are too far away from that now.

As Nietzsche said: “God is dead, and we have killed him.”

However, there is actually nothing incompatible between the pre-modern perspective and the present. It is our ideas about the present (i.e. modernity) that deny us the gifts of the past. If we start cultivating these qualities once more, then—just maybe—future generations could have the best of both worlds.

The Conversation We Deserve

Sometimes, big problems are easier than little problems. How likely does it sound that the tech industry will suddenly have an epiphany about what it’s doing to teen’s anxiety levels and reform itself? Yeah… that’s what I thought.

There’s little hope for change here unless we can catalyze societal action on a wider scale. And that’s why the conversation about modernity’s effects on mental health is so important.

The current conversation sees the mental health crisis as something that can be resolved through awareness, HR departments, and guided meditations—not as an existential question about how modern life has stripped out elements that are essential to the human condition. Unfortunately for us, that’s exactly how the conversation we need to be having.

The central problem here is our faith in modernity. These concepts might seem mutually exclusive, but they’re really not. Adherents of modernity share a blind confidence that humanity’s constant advancement will be able to fix all issues, and that eventually everything that is unknown will be explained—what is that if not faith? And while this belief might be true in terms of the natural world, when it comes to the spiritual and mental, man cannot subsist on reason alone.

Don’t take me for some dude who wants to go back to the middle ages: I love all the comforts of our time as much as you do. But it’s time we recognize that even though modernity has given us some wonderful things, it is not a fix-all solution to humanity’s needs. A truly “modern” world will need to make room for faculties and virtues that were not originally included in its vision.

The mental health crisis is telling us that the proper balance of society is off, and I shudder to think about what a couple more decades of this will leave us with.

Will the mental health crisis of today become commonplace for new generations?

I don’t pretend to know the answer, but the time has come to take the scope of the problem seriously and recognize that when we talk about the mental health epidemic—we’re also talking about modernity.