Arts and Minds

Economic Recession and The Psychological Ecosystem Around Individual Depression and Violence

Economic recession and depression are part of the larger psychological ecosystem that interacts with individual human depression. If we were too busy to notice these relationships before the current economic ‘downturn’, we cannot fail to be aware of it now if we read the headlines.

We all live together in a largely unnoticed greater context of nested interacting ecosystems. This is a way of describing and interlinking environments of all sorts—physical, social, economic, educational, climatic, geophysical—I could go on naming them until the list and their interactions became too complex to imagine, let alone sort out. That is the work of science, and this is a brief article of opinion.

People are killing themselves and each other at an increasing rate. While what the media casually refers to as ‘gun violence’ has always varied quite a lot, in the United States statistics have been more or less consistently bloody with up’s and down’s but the yearly totals of deaths by violence of all kinds is usually written in red ink. Murder is probably easier with a gun, but without guns, psychotics would kill with knives or bats or automobiles. We cannot hope to limit the uses of sticks and stones, bats and bullets, but we can and must deliver mental health intervention to desperately needy families and individuals even in tough times. Most especially in tough times. Everyone knows of at least one such example. Every community institution is aware of several or many. We pile up the papers, overwork and underpay our health delivery workers and ignore the problems until the spike on the desk is suddenly bloodied.

Since the downturn, there has been an up-tick, a compulsive thumb cocking the hammer and releasing the safety; taking aim at the mirror or through the window. Desperate times trigger desperate acts and the times are becoming increasingly desperate.

The feeling of helplessness, or real hopelessness and helplessness for that matter, is at least in part a mental and emotional trap, a closed dark room. For some this room has only rage and a gun as an exit.

Will we change our attitudes about emotional stress, depression, and the potential for destructive acts like murder and suicide, or quite often murder/suicide and rid ourselves of the stigma of being human and terribly upset?

Probably we will not be effective in large-scale public education and healthcare delivery for some time to come, as financial resources for preventative care are being cut from budgets. Can you see the downward spiral?

We may complain and grow fearful for our lives and for our children’s safety, but it is our collective responsibility, not our guilt, that needs to be recognized. In these desperate times, we desperately need legislation to assist in the early identification of children and adults who are at high risk of committing mayhem, and get some kind of help delivered to their doors, whatever the cost.

There are far too many privately owned guns in the nation to effectively reduce their use in psychotic attacks. There are, as most of us have been figuring out, far more crazy people, seriously crazy people, in every group than we used to believe. Believe it now.

As a nation, we have jealously guarded both our first amendment right to peaceably assemble, and our second amendment right to keep and bear arms. These two positive aspects of our national heritage are coming into increasing conflict. How long will you or anyone feel safe in a crowd that (statistically) must contain a few depressed people with fear, helplessness, self-hate, rage, and homicide blocking their minds?

Gun control, or perhaps more realistically an acceptably intelligent negotiated legislative effort leading to ‘gun management’ will be of some limited help.

We must focus our attention on matters of mental health, childhood education and safety from abuse, and job creation.

Mayer Spivack, Wednesday, April 8, 2009

 

 

 

Electoral Psychodynamics and Senator Obama

Many Americans, and especially the press and media, fear, talk about, and impugn strong confident women who enter the generally hardball realm (or kick-boxing ring) of political power. While we are all free to talk in any way we wish to, expressing ourselves in either healthy or unhealthy ways, the media and the press have a greater impact on government then the rest of us when they pronounce or broadcast prejudicial speech, sly winking innuendo and personal neurosis in place of balanced measured opinion and factual journalism.

The media therefore have an obligation to us all to hold their opinion and journalism to the highest possible standards. They cannot behave like a snickering high-school locker-room gang if they are to maintain credibility as the Fourth Estate. Some members of the press and media (and ourselves) would benefit us all if they had their heads examined.

I am not attempting to present a psychobiography of either Democratic candidate but instead to inspire all of us, especially individuals in the media, to examine and outgrow a few of our attitudes, fears and prejudices. Each of us manifests our own personal psychodynamics, and those effect how we might correctly judge or misjudge the characters of the candidates. In the interests of writing accurate reportage or making sound decisions each person in the media and press should strive to identify and separate our neurotic reactions, resentments and old childhood fears, particularly regarding powerful women, from the real issues of candidacy and presidential office.

As a lifelong Democrat and a retired psychotherapist I watch and listen to the debates between two fine Democratic candidates for nomination to the presidency with the fabled psychotherapist’s ‘third ear’.

My ‘third’ ear hears a great deal of intolerable, underhanded anti-female rhetoric, particularly from within the media. I also hear that both candidates are locked into a sorry three-way zero-sum battle with the press and with each other while the rest of us watch or cheer the fight. I hope that we can learn what our unconscious positions are, become more aware of them, question them, and that all might benefit from some self-searching for the benefit of the democratic and Democratic Party process.

One Person, One Ballot, One Envelope

National Public Radio, that great national radio university, announced that voters in some states were unable to vote because some polling places ran short of ballots and envelopes. Voters waited outside polling places in freezing weather for their moment in the voting booth. Many waited patently while many were too cold and could wait no more. But worse still, many were stopped at the door after waiting for hours because ballots and ballot envelopes had run out. Why do we allow this?

Every mailbox in this nation is stuffed with junk mail every day. Nearly all of that goes directly into the trash. We accept or tolerate that situation.

We also tolerate denying voting rights to eager voters because we are afraid to waste a little more paper. We have to expect the waste of some paper ballots in order to preserve our votes. The assurance that every voter can vote is worth the cost of additional trash, and is a worthwhile and manageable risk. Our failure to print one ballot and provide one envelope for every registered voter in the nation is a silly false economy.

We should require federal law to mandate every state, district and county to protect the right of every voter by providing enough voting ‘stationary’ for everyone. We should assume and expect that some ballots and envelopes will remain to be recycled. No person or agency should be permitted to estimate or guess future voter turn-out based upon previous election figures.

Compared to the annual gross national paper junk-mail waste-stream, two additional sheets of paper per possible voter per election-year (recycled at that) is more than a fair trade and expense for the guarantee of our individual voting rights. This change would also put an end to one form of voter manipulation that is no less than a sub-rosa form of gerrymandering. This should become our next, or first, electoral reform. If this voter fairness requires government subsidy, so be it, no matter how poor, we all can afford to add it to our income tax. A penny for your thoughts.

Time Is Our Event Horizon

We stand at the edge of time, onlookers and participants in a swirling cosmos that we have neither understood or imagined. It is our illusion that we look ahead at tomorrow or next year. This moment is our event horizon. We cannot see beyond it. We cannot anticipate if our passage in this solar system will either continue or end. We do not know if what we view is a beginning or an ending. Because all moments mark the end of now, all moments are finite singular end points. Restricted to such a foreshortened view, what business do we have causing destruction? All we can achieve in this mode is to restrict and narrow the course of the future, essentially contributing only to entropy, not to life.

Anger With Denial Yields Violence

V = (a)d2

A Discussion of the Social Consequences and Individual Psychodynamics Within The Violence Cycle

The social and personal processes of abuse, anger and denial fuel a psychological chain reaction— the violence cycle. Our psychological defense process of anger-denial promotes and maintains this violence cycle by further denying that violent events are cyclic phenomena, and denying that they are endemic to our culture. We hide their presence in nearly every family, so that the painful or violent events experienced by nearly everyone from earliest childhood onward must be systematically suppressed. This denial uses the building blocks of suppressed childhood anger to produce adult rage that is too often expressed as violence.

This personal and social process of denial serves both the individual's neurotic psychological needs and the needs of society by identifying and punishing only the most recent perpetrator of violence, exonerating ourselves and our parents. Most protected are the particular parents (and/or others) who aimed the original and causative and determining violent painful experiences at the helpless, powerless and once innocent, child who has now become the latest violent actor in this millennial drama.

School Shootings—What Was The Motive?

>School Shootings—What Was The Motive?
© Mayer Spivack 10/10/2006
Permission to reproduce this work is freely granted for educational, non-commercial purposes. I would appreciate notification.

We see it every week, nearly every evening on the news. Another violent crime in a school is discovered. The victims relatives and friends and sometimes the whole community or nation is saddened, outraged and frightened. The life of the suspect, already in custody, is examined. ‘He was always such a nice quiet guy— so good to his family and kids in the neighborhood’, or— ‘She kept to herself, didn’t bother anybody, no one expected that she would kill kids. “How could she (or he) do that?”

Quietness in extremes in an indicator of suppressed expression and of depression. We should become especially aware of children who have a severely narrowed emotional repertoire. These children need help now. By helping them we may prevent a violent future.

Their crimes all seem senseless because we cannot sense their causes using only our unexamined but still popular premises. The sense of these crimes eludes us. We search clues for a motive— which we mistakenly equate with— a reason. But motives are not reasons. We confuse the idea of reasons (with it’s whiff of reasonableness) with the idea of causality. The kinds of motives that satisfy the police and the courts may be probable causes but they are not reasonable causes, they are usually only thetriggering circumstances (literally and figuratively) of a particular act of violence. They are the immediate causes, the formative determinant causes causes are far older, and predate perhaps by decades the recent circumstance of motive. Facts as they are quoted and discovered by the press and the police cannot and do not explain the action to our satisfaction. We hear neighbors left pondering an image of ‘human nature’ presented as a mysterious and unfathomable dark (animalistic, wicked, sinful) horror. Yet there remains some sense to be discovered. Were we to use the right questions with more reflective, and self-reflective intentions we might pull straight the psychodynamic thread that runs through all this violence and killing.

Must all governments fail us?

All institutions will eventually fail because institutions comprise gatherings of fallible people. Any institution can only be as successful as the combined strengths and weaknesses in each individual member as described and moderated by the set of the strengths and weakness of their belief systems, mental health, and power within the institutional process. Great institutions of government may fail more spectacularly, and with more severe consequences than small institutions because the kinds of individuals attracted to the greater power and influential positions of high office carry their personal needs for power, entitlement, mental illness and greed along with them into official positions. As an institution grows it gathers like-minded powerful cronies to it’s bosom, As it grows the probability for failure increases proportionally because if is also gathering the flaws, illnesses and weaknesses of all into the process of the institution. It follows from this that the more powerful the institution, the greater will be the probability that it will fail dangerously and do harm to all of us just when it is needed most.

Make a mental list of institutions in your city or town, your state and region and your national government. Try to think of an exception to the rule of eventual catastrophic failure, or at the minimum, nearly ruinous scandal. These are about half of the events comprising what we call history.

Now a further caution: individuals who seek or demand great power (and who are sometimes referred to as ‘an institution unto [himself/herself])’are apparently likely to display greater rates of mental illness as ‘ordinary’ people. But among the power-seekers we may reflect upon the high number of individuals even within living memory who have demonstrated tragic psychotic or psychopathic personal characteristics. It they had worked as gardeners their destructive influence would have had less catastrophic impact.

A-B-C's Of Violence

We, the people of the world, teach violence to children by our actions. I offer this phonetic alphabet, the 'A-B-C's Of Violence, as evidence. To be chanted to any a dirge in any language, anywhere.

A Alfa > Afghanistan
B Bravo > Beirut
C Charlie > Cambodia
D Delta > Dunkirk
E Echo > Eritrea
F Foxtrot > Fallujah
G Golf > Guadalcanal
H Hotel > Hiroshima
I India > Iraq
J Juliett > Japan
K Kilo > Korea
L Lima > Louisiana
M Mike > Mogadishu
N November > New York
O Oscar > Okinawa
P Papa > Philippines
Q Quebec > Qatar
R Romeo > Republic of Armenia
S Sierra > Stalingrad
T Tango > Texas
U Uniform > Us, USA
V Victor > Vietnam
W Whiskey > Washington
X X-ray > Xiangyang
Y Yankee > Yorktown
Z Zulu > Zambia