The October issue of Psychology Today arrives in the mail and I thumb through the titles, curious about whether the editors have included any writing that addresses the unprecedented crises we are living through. Happily, I come upon a piece by a psychologist, Dr. Robert Puff, headlined “Finding Peace in an Anxious World.” I am hoping that at least this one writer will confirm what I have been experiencing: that the anxiety and depression I feel about what is unfolding in the political, environmental and social systems is “normal,” and not some failure of my mental health.
“Think of your anxiety and depression as symptoms of your love for mankind and the planet,” Kathleen Sullivan writes. Raggedstone/Shutterstock.com
Dr. Puff’s picture is pinned to the corner of the article. He’s a smiling, middle-aged fellow who tells me that the reason we are all feeling great anxiety is that our world is becoming more complex. He reassures me that he has tools for helping people “embrace and flow with the changes instead of fighting them.” One of the main things he teaches is that “you suffer when you fight change.” By the time I’m finished reading the article, I want to scream or cry. We therapists are trained to stay far away from speaking about or identifying any ecosystem or political systems beyond the family system as the source of internal pain.
I don’t want to be told to go with the flow, but nor do I want anyone to pathologize the grief I feel when I walk past the hemlocks in the forest behind my house and see the ghostly white dabs of wooly adelgid clinging to their needles – a sure sign of their impending death – or anyone to medicate the anxiety I feel while scanning the paper for news of Putin’s dropping an atomic bomb on Kyiv. I know about the danger posed by narcissistic personality disorders. As a licensed mental health clinician, I’ve diagnosed and treated mental disorders for over 50 years, but I have never lived or worked in a time as existentially terrifying and grief-filled as this.
If we buy in to the mental health experts shilling the “just breathe it will all be fine, honey” shibboleth, or “change how you think about the problem,” we are, as a species, doomed.
In 1971 I was only two years out of graduate school. My beloved boss at the University of Chicago psychiatry department, Dr. Eberhard Uhlenheuth, asked me to speak to a group about anxiety. I had no idea what I was going to say. “Tell them to listen to their anxiety. Tell them it has lessons about what we need, that it’s important to feel the anxiety in order to have the motivation to change what needs to be changed.” Though we didn’t use the word then, what Dr. Uhlenheuth was talking about was how anxiety could inform our sense of agency.
It’s more than 50 years since he gave me that advice. Try, reader, embracing the news from the World Wildlife Fund that there are 69% fewer animals alive today than there were 50 years ago. If this news brings you sadness and anxiety, don’t go to a therapist. Don’t let friends tell you to think on the bright side. Use it to motivate yourself to get involved with an environmental or democracy group, to learn about what you can do to preserve and protect what is so fundamentally threatened.
Think of your anxiety and depression as symptoms of your love for mankind and the planet. Do something to create the kind of change Dr. Puff tells us we have to learn to accept.
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