Academia: What Went Up Now Comes Down

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

Reading in the New Yorker about attempts to use AI (pre-GPT-3 AI at that) to handle overflowing need for mental health therapists, particularly for veterans, brought me back to a blog essay I wrote years ago. In that essay, I suggested that maybe the reason why suicides among American veterans were on the rise was that many of them had served in long, punishing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan where they could find themselves under attack at any time and sometimes were involved in attacking civilians, in wars where there was no strategic vision of goals and no real hope of a definitive victory. Despair is an understandable, reasonable response to being put in that situation, to being unable to square the circle between honor and duty on one hand and hopelessness and futility on the other.

Despair is at least one of the roots that can grow into self-destruction. It’s why some public health officials have come to call increased mortality from addiction and poor self-care among middle-aged Americans “deaths of despair”. But health care professionals, especially those treating veterans, aren’t really allowed to talk about this kind of plain truth, that the ugliness of military service in a long occupation with no exit strategy corrodes the soul, that those wars were in and of themselves a cause of suicide and mental suffering. Not generically, because war is hell, but specifically, because a wasted war where ordinary people sometimes died—and sometimes killed—is a different kind of hell.

Just as “deaths of despair” are perhaps a response to the specific grimness of the American present, especially as it presents itself to middle-aged Americans: governments at all levels with no vision and a host of limitations, a bitterly divided society, employers eager to shed older employees, children who will almost certainly have a lower of standard of living than their parents, communicative technologies that bewilder and alienate, a deeply confusing and isolating pandemic, and the threat of apocalyptic war and climate catastrophe looming not as a problem for the future but a menace in the present. I understand that it’s possible to look at things more optimistically, but credit at least that it is reasonable not to. That you don’t have to look for hidden pathologies or irrationalities in a mound of data to understand “deaths of despair” or military suicides. And if so, the quest for some exotic new therapeutic strategy is more about avoidance of the hard truth that the most effective way to save lives and preserve health involve changes that we aren’t going to make or decisions we’re going to avoid. (I have heard absolutely zero indication that policymakers and military leaders have learned any lessons about wars like Iraq and Afghanistan; in the current political environment, those kinds of lessons are profoundly unlearnable.)

Which brings us around to the mental health crisis facing younger Americans. Mary Gaitskill has a republished essay in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education that focuses on her experience teaching creative writing to college students, most recently at Claremont McKenna. She reviews a lifetime of teaching creative writing in different places and at least some of it has always brought disturbing imaginaries into her view: students envisioning horror and grotesque suffering, students playing out sexual fantasies, students dreaming of violence against others—including, possibly Gaitskill herself. In some sense, she knows, there’s nothing new about any of it—about the darkness of the creative unconsciousness in young people particularly, about the genres of popular culture that have played with violence, horror and sexual assault, about using creativity to cope with a world that feels out-of-control much of the time.

But, she concludes, “terrible things were happening in the 1980s, and terrible things have always been happening, but … not like this”. She ends up in much the same place I do, which is that the best explanation for a mental health crisis among young college-aged people is that they are reasonably, even objectively, processing a world that is going to be much worse for them than it was for their parents and grandparents and there is nothing much to be done about it, that the people in charge have either got their billions of dollars and don’t care what happens to the NPCs or that they’re members of a vast and farcical orchestra fiddling away while everything burns.

So of course many students are focused, as she says, on the things they can change: using the proper words for transgender people, calling out celebrities for transgressions, boycotting hummus, making TikToks that explain why you shouldn’t use certain phrases. Because they can’t even begin to imagine how to affect the things that really matter, the gathering darkness around them. The institutions around them keep acting more or less as if everything is normal. Universities offer help with career placement at the same time that they relentlessly turn towards casualizing their own labor force. They call for students to vote while they stay on the 501 c 3 straight-and-narrow and refuse to talk about what is actually happening to politics, through politics. University leaders act out of fear of liability, not commitment to values. They only talk about their choices in a reductive language of austerity and economism. The future is only framed in terms of demographic cliffs and scalability, unless it’s framed instead as it is in certain red states in terms of cruelty and vengeance.

The courses sometimes speak to the moment, but the only solutions on offer are based on models and abstractions that hunt for actionable variables like a starving child hoping to find a single Easter egg hidden randomly in the Amazon rainforest. The classes that speak most plainly to the full character of our time are those which are just as mired in despair, or just as distracted by the small things that we can actually affect.

And so yes, despair; and so yes, a “mental health crisis”. Like Gaitskill I do not know how to give them the cure. But I can’t help but think that the one helpful thing we could do is start being honest about the future and its challenges—to have career centers that talk frankly about what work has become, to have therapists who acknowledge the wider contexts, to have leaders who are willing to talk about how broken our civic and political institutions have become, to be employers who try to show the way back to a square deal for everyone, to stop being motivated primarily by protecting our nest eggs or relentlessly growing our wealth. To have courses that are in the moment and conversations that look at the darkness without flinching. To stop with a small-minded solutionism that treats transformation like the trick of a confidence man and instead to start thinking about what it might take for our students, our children, our people to put their hands on the wheel and steer towards the possible futures that we can all see plainly enough—futures where most of us own more of our collective wealth, where attainable goals like a functioning health system aren’t treated as absurdities, where lunatics boast of their contempt for facts while controlling the government, where democracy isn’t always one election away from being destroyed. We can’t offer a cure, but we can talk more honestly about the reasons why people are sick from despair, fear and uncertainty, and stop thinking that if only we could find the right therapy or another hundred or thousand or hundred thousand therapists we’d have the answer.

Image credit: Luis Prado, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons