Mocha-Vodka-Xanax and Learned Mental Helplessness

Self portrait of the Peruvian hotographer Amparo Torres. Via Wikimedia Commons (CC 2.0)

I’ve been seeing a wave of variations on a particular meme… There is this idea, popular among a certain section of modern society, trying to convince us we’re all fundamentally broken, incompetent, and incapable of ordering ourselves. This has lately been expressed as an idea that everybody is filled to the brim with existential anxiety, all the time, and we’re all “on medication”; if you’re not, then why not? It’s the weaponization of mental illness. There’s an attitude that you can’t hold me accountable for things because I am anxiety stricken, and it’s painful to me to be put on the spot. Simultaneously, it’s a badge of honor that I can wave for attention — I have anxiety.

Folks, this is not normal and definitely not desirable to normalize. Panic over trivial, minor, and ultimately unserious things is not appropriate. One should not be afflicted with anxiety over simple choices and everyday things.

Stop falling for this gaslighting.

There is a concept sadly lacking application in our current society. This concept is that we become inured to hardship. It’s a great word, seldom heard these days. To become accustomed to a difficult situation or condition, to toughen up, to grow a callus.

Why are we failing to become inured to things? There are a few obvious culprits. One is that we are a victim of our (societal) successes. Although it contains some problematic assumptions, there is a counter-meme floating around: that hard times create competent persons, that competent persons create conditions for easy living, and those conditions enable weak persons to create hard times. That’s a topic for deeper delving another time, but it seems difficult to refute the idea that we have created conditions where it seems unnecessary and superfluous for  some people to put children through rigorous conditions and processes. So without an introduction to struggles, they are unprepared for struggle when it finds us, like a muscle left unexercised or a tool never sharpened.

Another is that the stories we tell affect us. We create and live up to certain mythologies. Some of them may be about tough pioneers. Other stories might be about being free from the constraints of economics; yet another might be that we are bound by chains of oppression. These stories shape how we see ourselves and therefore what the guard rails of our appropriate reactions may be. If the story is, as seems so often today, that the world is complex, and we’re very small, insignificant pieces of a machine, with no control over our own destiny, and it is only normal that we are overwhelmed by this, then we’re probably going to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed even when it is not necessary; just like someone who has convinced themselves that an aggressive response to any hint of competition may lead them to be overly aggressive even when not needed. The stories we tell are all morality plays.

The spur for these ruminations were two things I saw within a few days of each other. One was a sign in a coffee & book shop. I’m a hugely bookish nerd, so I love these places, and books can certainly be a refuge for the timid. This particular sign is suddenly common; signs, coffee mugs, t-shirts…

Here we encourage (jokingly, of course! It’s just a joke, folks! Except it’s not…) the abuse of drugs and alcohol, as an ordinary part of presumably everyone’s life. Seeing this sign the other day (been seeing similar stuff for quite some time) spurred me to examine some trends and think about it. Claiming a mental illness is one of those silly trends of the privileged wealthy that they can use to signal they are above consequence, that then trickles down to the poor and disproportionately harms them. I read some thoughts on this some years back and became more formally and distinctly aware of it as a thesis. But I always instinctively knew this. Poor kids cannot get away with the stupid shit that rich kids walk away from seemingly unscathed. You don’t see the same blithe acceptance of “crazy” in ethnic minorities that you do among (particularly the financially privileged) white majority. It’s a shame that stigma exists to the point where many Black, Latino, or Asian Americans & poor Whites won’t avail themselves of treatment, but the over-use of mental illness as an excuse for poor behavior among rich and increasingly middle class whites is not admirable.

Privileged people doing outrageously stupid things for attention is nothing new, of course. It used to be conspicuous consumption and waste. When most people are literally starving, nothing says you’re better than them like overeating, throwing up so you can eat more, and then wasting the rest. You can’t go do physical work in medieval pointy-toed shoes that connect to your kneecaps. You can’t do anything useful if you need servants to carry pillows around under your hands to keep your Mandarin class fingernails from being damaged. These are not indulgences the average person can afford and they’re not GOOD for the rich either, but they have enough resources available to tolerate it. Single parenthood, abusing drugs, and indulging bad behavior and lack of self discipline that you then duly repent to your therapist… rinse and repeat… none of these make life better.

Think of the wine mom trope; “Oh no. Parenting is so hard. Kids drive you crazy. I need wine” says the stay at home mom whose kids are in school all day while she goes to yoga (in the 60s these were upper class rich white ladies with hired housekeepers). A male acquaintance wonders, “Why are you complaining? Your husband pays the bills and you’re only putting in part time at best,” and the wine moms close ranks with a vicious will. “Everybody knows” being a mom is harder than literally anything, and ANY challenge of that assumption (not even about the heavy responsibilities of parenthood, but any aspect of the choices one makes) must be immediately destroyed. Challenges must DIE.

It’s one thing to joke about “needing” a glass of wine to deal with the kids. It’s a different thing when you’re not joking, and you’re asking other people to co-sign the necessity. At what point does a humorous trope become a self-indulgent meme and defensive mechanism for bad behavior?

It’s probably not a bright line. For most people, having a glass of wine and relaxing after a stressful day is not a problem. It’s not even a bad way of managing minor daily stress through self care and taking time to recruit oneself. When it becomes 3 and 4 glasses every night, then a couple bottles, and no other substitute for boozing can be found, and that is entirely someones else’ fault… that’s not just having a glass of wine and appreciating small pleasures in life.

Of course I am not a doctor, and especially not a mental health professional. I did personally go through a pretty serious bout of depression a bit over 20 years ago that, in retrospect, I perhaps should have sought some help for.

But I was able to pull out of that dive with a combination of simply doing my duty by myself and family, exercise, and diligent self improvement and focused career effort. (I mean diligent, double and triple time effort to improve my situation at work through education and other means.) The depression was primarily due to external stressors, but those external stressors were exacerbated by my poor choices that led to experiencing them. They didn’t reverse just by making different choices, but they did slow down and eventually turn around by first, having stopped digging myself further into the hole, and then second by intelligently and in a self-aware manner working to get out of the hole.

Straighten up and do what’s right, and many external stressors can be reduced or eliminated. Continue to make bad choices and they only get worse.

That doesn’t help people with medical conditions that are beyond their control, or some external pressures. Circumstance can go too far and sometimes it becomes beyond an individual’s capacity to change course on their own, especially with financial stuff and other people’s bullshit. But I remain firmly convinced we are often our own worst enemy because of the stories of persecution and personal blamelessness we tell ourselves. Take agency and work to make things better. You may or may not succeed but even if you’re not perfectly successful you’ll still feel better about it. PTSD is highly associated with feelings of helplessness in the face of the stressors. Taking action at least lets you know it wasn’t your fault; you weren’t complicit in doing it to yourself.

I wonder how many people would be helped by being open-minded when someone tells them “Yes your life DOES suck. But it doesn’t have to, and you can turn it around; in fact, you’re the only one who can steer to turn it around, but we’ll help push the vehicle if you make the effort to steer it.”

Rather than; “Man, that must be rough. Here are some pills. Fuck the system.”

The stories we listen to, lent weight by repetition, and never questioned – these form the context through which we filter our perception of reality. These stories may momentarily allow us to excuse ourselves from unpleasant duties, but significantly, they don’t actually change reality without action. Those chores never go away on their own.

Likewise, if one says that the poor must change their ways in order to not be poor, that is a challenge to the accepted narrative of oppression (even if one does not deny that oppression and unfairness exists) and the “everybody is broken, nobody can do anything about it“ crowd must forcefully reject whatever comes next.

To be clear, there’s nothing morally wrong with being poor. But there’s nothing particularly morally uplifting about it, either. It does generally force one to think very practically about some things, but the shocking amount of mythologies poor people hold dear that are directly contradicted by fact and example is surprising, too. Things that they (we) tell themselves that work to hold them down. People have an amazing ability to fool themselves about why things are the way they are, if the true answer requires them to take any portion of the responsibility for it and make an effort to change it.

Cultural expectations that you are largely responsible for where you end up, that making good choices is incumbent upon each of us, and that we do have the ability to effect change, these are best practices that create leverage and are enablers for individual success.

You can still succeed even if nobody around you believes these things. They’ll just hate you for it and make excuses.