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Meg-John Barker

Six short posts about mental health 5: Self-monitoring culture and distress

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A friend of mine recently posted a cartoon on Facebook which had Sigmund Freud saying 'before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, surrounded by assholes'. I responded that I thought this said something rather profound about mental health at the moment. Could it in fact be said that a key aspect of many experiences of suffering is the problem of being 'surrounded by assholes' or - to be more generous - being surrounded by damaging cultural messages perpetuated by those around us?

When I first started counselling I became very aware that virtually everybody I saw was convinced that there was something wrong with them that needed fixing, mostly based on the fact that - when they looked around themselves - nobody else seemed to be struggling the way they were. Conversations with close friends, and self-reflection, suggest that this is an extremely common feeling: that everybody else is managing fine so there must be something wrong with me. Of course, when I asked clients how they thought they appeared to other people they recognised that they generally put on a 'happy, managing everything fine mask' which probably gave off the impression that they weren't struggling either.

It strikes me that many experiences of depression, anxiety and other common mental health problems have a strong element of self-scrutiny and comparison to others in them (whilst, of course, I am wary of proposing any universal explanation because these experiences mean many different things to different people and at different times). Michel Foucault used Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon to explain how people self-police in contemporary society. In the Panopticon prison there is a tower in the middle and cells all around an outer circle, such that a guard in the centre could – at any time – be looking into your cell. Because of this, prisoners begin to monitor their own behaviour rather than having to have huge numbers of guards. This idea has been linked to the high degree of surveillance that we now have, meaning that we could – most of the time – be being watched or recorded.

Foucault suggested that contemporary culture worked in this way more broadly. People are encouraged to scrutinise and judge themselves at all times, with advocations to self-improve, to work on themselves, and to present a positive and successful self to the world. This is linked to consumerism which is all about seeing ourselves as lacking and needing something to fill that lack. Advertising, and many other forms of media, create fears (e.g. we might look bad, be out of date, or be a failure) and then offer products to allay those fears (e.g. beauty products, the latest fashion, recipes for success in various arenas).

Within such a culture it is no wonder that people would be particularly driven to constant self-scrutiny, comparison to others, and presentation of themselves as happy, satisfied and successful (even when they may not be any of these things). This shores up the 'us and them' that I wrote about in my second post. Rather than distress and suffering being an inevitable part of everyday life, it is seen as a problematic lack which must be addressed, and is probably outside of the power of the person who is suffering to address.

Perhaps the major challenge for mental health practitioners, counsellors and psychotherapists is the danger that our work can perpetuate this perception: creating new diagnoses and categories and offering an ever-increasing menu of products to fix these (at a price). Even the one-to-one therapy situation is at risk of exacerbating this sense that people are wrong and need fixing, given that one person (the client) is encouraged to express their distress to another person (the therapist) who is generally fairly quiet and certainly not expressing any of their own problems. This is not to say that therapists and counsellors should be inappropriately burdening clients with all their difficulties. But we need to find ways to challenge the idea that the client's struggles mean that there is something wrong with them, and the perception (which most clients have, even when they are therapists themselves) that the therapist has no struggles, or deals with them all perfectly.

Existential therapy includes the idea, not only that all people will inevitably suffer, but also that all responses to this suffering are sensible so long as we properly understand the person who is responding in this way. This, to me, is a very useful counter to the common assumption of something being 'wrong' and the person being flawed and lacking in some way if they do not respond in ways that are deemed culturally acceptable.

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Meg-John Barker

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The final post in this series is here.

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A BIG yes to the first paragraph smile . There is another reason too, why some people feel they have to try 'fix' themselves - the person doing the wrong to them needs to maintain the power, and so gets the other to blame themselves and look inwards, rather than looking outwards and straight at the one doing the wrong. (Normalizing the abnormal). We are taught all our lives that we are not good enough as we are. I call it 'The Lie Of Consequences' . Getting someone to believe they aren't good enough is 'The Lie' part, and it's enforced by 'The (very real) Consequences' if anyone dare not buy into it. Those who are controlled by it, then suffer the double whammie, when they try to get free of it - the pain and confusion of the 'prison-break' and the 'consequences' threat becomes a reality. The section where you speak about client and therapist and it's apparent lop-sided appearance. I don't know the name for it, but response is a good word, is there some kind of 'Response Therapy' whereby the therapist, whilst maintaining the boundaries, could give a genuine human response. I think the humaness is what's missing. Humans would themselves respond better if the therapist did not deal in icy clinical dissection!
Meg-John Barker

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Hmm very interesting. I think there may be another reason in play here. Perhaps people sometimes see their own distress or questionning mirrored in other people, and the desire to control them and not to see it is about not wanting to recognise it in themselves. Sometimes we want people to be more like us rather than acknowledging that we could (or could have) been more like them.

'The Lie of Consequences' is a great way of putting it. The belief that we are not good enough is a big and powerful lie which so many people buy into and has a massive impact in so many areas (I locate a lot of problems in romantic relationships here as well).

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Yes that's true too, it is as you have said, the reasons behind the whats and whys of peoples actions, are as complex and diverse as the people. For anything to change and heal, each person has to be willing to really look honestly at themselves. I call it 'Being willing to listen to the monster with my eyes'. The journey to owning and knowing all parts of ourselves, is hard, but worth it.