Spiritual Health Creates Mental Health
Today’s issue of The On-The-Other-Hand News comes to you via author Lee Siegel’s “Opinion” article in The New York Times Thursday, January 2, 2020. Its title is: “Why Is America So Depressed?”
Lee Siegel’s article on why America is so depressed is chilling. His thesis is that our politics are affecting our mental health. I’d submit that the reverse is also true: our mental health is affecting our politics.
N.B. I address a particular kind of depression in this essay—spiritual angst/ennui, not clinical depression.
Regardless of the indisputable fact that divide-and-conquer has been the name of the game for the white patriarchy certainly for as long as I’ve been alive (62 years), nothing lives in a vacuum here on Earth. Nothing. We are all, like it or not, and there are plenty of us who don’t, connected.
We have been set against one another as a matter of course for a long, long time. Competition, we are told, is what drives our economy. It’s also what’s causing a lot of our depression.
What if we were to give up our addiction to competition? It’s a thought. Then we might be able to celebrate the accomplishments of others with joy and gladness, taking their success as an indication that ours is on its way. What a thought!
Another major cause of our depression is the antipathy that has become epidemic to things of the Spirit. God, if you will. I do not, however, mean religion.
Our skepticism, our judgmental attitudes, our drive to win at all costs have set our very nature—that of spiritual beings having a human experience—against our own minds. We’re so busy doing in order to have that we have forgotten to be. You’ve heard this before, I’m sure. We are human beings, not human doings. Further, we have forgotten what kind of beings we are. Uh, that would be spiritual beings.
Mr. Siegel says that Mr. Trump appeals to the basest, meanest parts of ourselves. While that may be true, it doesn’t have to be. Sure, he reflects those parts of us back to ourselves, but we don’t have to live there. We’re choosing to live there.
Why?
I think it’s because we’re exhausted. To live as a country divided within one’s own self is to live in constant battle. Suppressing the inherent spiritual nature of a human being guarantees that that human being will come unglued mentally either sooner or later.
Why do you suppose so much of the early baby boomer generation is succumbing to Alzheimer’s? Because they can’t manage the dichotomy. This is not their fault. We’ve all participated in the creation of this unmanageable world. We ought to take it as the warning it is meant to be.
We do not thrive without the awareness that we fit into a cosmic plan.
The reason is because we cannot thrive without meaning.
Meaning, real meaning, must be revealed, must be discovered, must be arisen from inside out.
When meaning is taken out of the small day-to-day things that make life worth living, it’s only a matter of time till we fall into internal anarchy. Another name for this is mental illness. We are set against ourselves not only by our political structure, but by the structures that continue to deny basic human rights to all of humankind.
We need to feel seen. We need clean water. We need affordable healthcare. We need safe homes. We need clean air. We need love. We need ... well, the shortest word is ... God.
I’m not saying we need prayer in schools. I’m saying we need to understand how we fit in the greater scheme of things. We need to know that we, each one of us, have a place, and that that place is ours. Without a place to stand, we cannot move.
Which is a pretty good description of where our world is right now. Stuck. Not improving, certainly, and getting worse, the longer we are paralyzed.
There is a cure.
A spiritual life. A life lived within the context of meaning that you not only get to decide for yourself but that you have to decide for yourself. Mr. Siegel finds that living for participating in his children’s lives keeps him here and grounded.
It doesn’t really matter what gives your life meaning.
It matters only that your life have meaning. Every single day.
Meaning is the rock-solid cure for depression. It’s found in spiritual, most often intangible things.
Get spirituality right, and you’ll get your mental health in order.
Actually, there’s a name for this. It’s called Divine Order, and there’s a reason for that. Because the order was established by the Divine.
Why Is America So Depressed?
It’s no coincidence that our politics and our mental health have declined so rapidly, at the same time.
By Lee Siegel
Mr. Siegel is the author, most recently, of “The Draw: A Memoir.”
Jan. 2, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
Everyone has his or her own definition of a political crisis. Mine is when our collective mental health starts having a profound effect on our politics — and vice versa.
It cannot be a simple coincidence that the two have declined in tandem. The American Psychiatric Association reported that from 2016 to 2017, the number of adults who described themselves as more anxious than the previous year rose 36 percent. In 2017, more than 17 million American adults had a new diagnosis of a major depressive disorder, as well as three million adolescents ages 12 to 17. Forty million adults now suffer from an anxiety disorder — nearly 20 percent of the adult population. (These are the known cases of depression and anxiety. The actual numbers must be dumbfounding.)
The really sorrowful reports concern suicide. Among all Americans, the suicide rate increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2017.
All of this mental carnage is occurring at a time when decades of social and political division have set against each other black and white, men and women, old and young. Beyond bitter social antagonisms, the country is racked by mass shootings, the mind-bending perils of the internet, revelations of widespread sexual predation, the worsening effects of climate change, virulent competition, the specter of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, grinding student debt and crises in housing, health care and higher education. The frightening environment helps cause depression, depression causes catastrophic thinking, and catastrophic thinking makes the environment seem even more terrifying than it is.
Out of this dark cast of mind arose the hunger for a strong, avenging figure whose arrival has sent even more mentally harrowing shock waves through society. If President Trump is indeed mentally ill, as so many of his critics claim, he may well be the most representative leader we have ever had.
Yet as everyone whose mind is in jeopardy knows, it is not sufficient to speak about mental illness in general, abstract terms. A person’s individual challenges are not simply extractions from a national malaise.
I would not have sat down to write this if I had not been tormented over the past few years by my own individual challenges, including frequent thoughts of suicide. Even today, the idea of jumping off a bridge or swallowing a lethal amount of pills enters my mind and holds me in its grip.
But with the exception of one morning a year and a half ago, when the effects of the withdrawal from the Valium that I had been taking nightly for 18 months were so overpowering that I nearly stepped in front of a subway train, my fantasies of killing myself have been just that: dreams of escape that would obliterate my pain without ending my life.
Along with visits to a therapist — since my experience with Valium, I have refused for now to take psychiatric medication — I have my own coping strategies. Picking out “Over the Rainbow” on the piano my wife and I have rented for our 9-year-old daughter, I realized that the first two notes — “Some-where” — are identical, separated by an octave. The seven notes between them correspond to the seven colors of a rainbow. Thus the song musically embodies the leap from unfulfilling Kansas to the enchanted world of Oz.
The process of struggling to conceive of a positive idea of the future that would enable me to leap out of my depression I have begun to call, to myself, “octave thinking.”
The real national division is between people who have the resources, inner and outer, to survive their mental illness and those who don’t.
Particular instances that make it possible for me to climb out of despair I imagine as pitons, the iron spikes mountain climbers drive into rock to ascend, sometimes hand over hand. Work is a piton. The enjoyment of art is a piton. Showing kindness to another person is a piton. Helping to raise our two children — our son is 13 — is the strongest piton of them all.
Freud famously said that depression was anger turned inward. We know now that depression is a result of numerous factors: social environment, economic pressure, cognitive misreading, a random event, trauma, neurobiology and genes.
Like anyone who has confronted depression, I know that this is, first and foremost, my challenge, unique to my life. And yet the line between the self and all the external forces that continually shape and reshape the self is blurrier than we like to believe. There are very particular external factors that make their way into my head and impel me toward thoughts of taking my own life.
There is the constant, relentless, unremitting financial triage as our financial obligations slowly overwhelm our means of meeting them. The choices are especially painful when they involve responding to one child’s needs over another’s. We have to weigh expensively nurturing a child’s gift against expensively responding to a child’s challenge.
It’s not just the money. To say that there is less use for a 62-year-old white male (unless you happen to be running for president) these days is not to devalue the social transformations that are rapidly occurring in the age of Trump. You can hail necessary social change and complain about being, to some degree, a casualty of it, both at the same time.
In this way, I view myself — and imagine others — caught in a double bind. My depression springs from my biology, my biography, my choices. But it occurs within a far broader context that could bring just about anyone down, and apparently does. The fact is that the country is not red and blue. It is almost entirely blue.
The real national division, as I see it, is between people who have the resources, inner and outer, to survive their mental illness and those who don’t.
Affording a therapist and finding the right therapist — it is rare: wisdom, empathy and kindness cannot be taught — they are the first obstacles to overcome. Then you might have to find the right and affordable psychiatrist, who will help you make an informed decision about whether to take psychiatric drugs that will or will not help, perhaps even saving your life.
Even more people never receive an actual psychiatric diagnosis. A 2014 study found that 80 percent of all prescriptions for antidepressants were being issued by primary care physicians who had no psychological, psychiatric or psychopharmacological training at all.
Yet even as our mental health crisis proliferates, even as streams of books and articles are published about depression and anxiety, the subject of mental illness has become another voyeuristic exhibition in the carnival of commerce. We talk about it, but we don’t talk about how to address it.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter established the President’s Commission on Mental Health, which led to the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980. Much of that legislation was repealed by Ronald Reagan, but it led to many good policy ideas, including a new emphasis on treatment for African-Americans and women, and for people with a nonbinary sexual identity or a disability. There was also a new focus on organized psychiatric care for children and adolescents, older Americans, those living in rural areas and victims of rape.
Trump appeals only to our meanest selves, unconcerned with the impact that has on our overall sense of self.
Many of these ideas, however, never took hold in practice. And mental health has not been addressed at a sweeping national level since then. Our pandemic of mental illness simply does not come up in the presidential debates.
We need a national leader who will, as President Carter tried to do, address the urgent issue of mental illness, not with piecemeal legislation but with a national crusade. We need a leader who will elevate this crisis to the same level of national urgency as gun control and climate change.
I know what I rationally expect in a president: reason, character, dignity. But I will not feel hopeful about anyone who does not respond to my turbulent unconscious, to my brute, irrational need to be the object of empathetic concern as an individual and to be affirmed as a person.
There are positive and negative means of appealing to that almost biological desire to be protected and empowered. Sadly, Mr. Trump has known how to make that appeal better than anyone on the national stage so far. He addresses himself to the meanest, basest sources of emotion, and this has the effect of making everyone who is indifferent to his appeal feel imperiled and unnerved.
A positive alternative had better come along soon. In the absence of a national resolve to address surging mental illness in America, our politics and its social consequences will continue to toss on waves of depression, anxiety and despair, themselves both a cause and an effect of our collapsing public realm.
As for me, I will keep thinking octavely and grasping my pitons; I will do whatever I can to go on living and to flourish, my loving wife by my side, my rare and precious children ever in my mind.