The Selves We Are Creating

There are a number of teenagers and young adults in my broad orbit who struggle in some way with mental health. I know of multiple parents whose kids have either attempted suicide or given some evidence of suicidal ideation. Teachers in my circles speak exhaustedly of the myriad challenges of educating children in  a world of endless mental health diagnoses and smartphone addiction. Even the most casual glance around my city provides abundant evidence of the simple fact that the kids are not ok. I doubt any of this is news to you. I’m sure you see it, too.

Why? Well, the reasons are myriad and multilayered as most problems are. But I think we would do well—parents, educators, citizens—to ponder the scenario spun out by Matt Feeney in a review of the film Inside Out 2 (I haven’t seen the first or the second, and, after reading this piece, don’t plan to). The whole article is worth reading for its diagnosis of how we increasingly understand the self and how we are socializing kids to understand themselves, but this section in particular struck me:

A six-year-old enters his school for the first time and is confronted with a colourful poster announcing the school’s anxious interest in his Mental Health. Perhaps a school nurse or psychologist makes a visit to his classroom to reiterate the poster’s message, to let all the children seated at their little desks know that if any of them ever needs to talk to someone, about something they’re sad or worried or troubled about, the school takes their Mental Health very seriously. Six-year-olds of prior eras had literally no occasion to ponder their own psyches, especially from the outside perspective of a doctor or school functionary openly worried these psyches might need medical treatment. They just lived in their psyches, mindlessly as it were. But our six-year-old gets to confront his psyche as a topic, an institutional theme, every day, with that poster in the entry to his school, and the occasional visits and solicitations of outside helpers who tenderly address themselves to his Mental Health. And he’ll get to do this every year of school, as his psyche matures and, from the changing perspectives of those different years, revisits itself as a reification, a topic, an object of observation because a potential source of medical trouble.

A 10-year-old gets an iPhone and immediately signs up with TikTok, whose algorithm nudges her to follow near-peers, girls a couple years older who’ve won lots of views and likes by talking about their Mental Health. Thanks to their own training in their own schools, these kids are old hands at therapy-talk. They might even have an entry or two in the DSM memorised. Our 10-year-old, already school-equipped with a therapeutic vocabulary, enters an online market of status and imitation where fluency in this vocabulary gives an apparent advantage. Casually, she and her friends start diagnosing themselves and each other and other kids they know at school. By anatomising her self in therapeutic terms, she may or may not be improving her Mental Health, but she’s definitely adding new symbolic matter to this self, new traits and definitions and layers of significance she can dwell on, wonder about, perhaps worry about.

This is in addition to the intensified self-awareness summoned from her as she consumes and contributes to social media, even when the explicit theme isn’t teenage self-diagnosis — all the new occasions to think about herself and compare this with other girls as they submit their own selves to these new forms of publicity. By this process of constant self-publicising and self-diagnosis, her mere participation in a youth culture formed by social media and informed by psychotherapy, she has made her self much more interesting to itself than was the case with prior cohorts of young people, whose selves were quite neglected by comparison. Thanks in turn to this neglect, these selves had much less symbolic matter attached to them and were, thus, much lighter to lug around.

These are just a few of the many ways in which our culture of augmented selfhood has grown into a many-tentacled system of spiritual meaning that changes those who live within it. I’m trying to limit myself to expressions of wonder at the historical strangeness and novelty of these processes and technologies of selfhood, rather than claiming that they’re objectively harmful. But documents claiming with some persuasiveness that they are harmful are multiplying. Ethan Watters’s 2013 book Crazy Like Us tracks the migration of American-style therapeutic understanding to non-Western countries. It shows how these understandings don’t just corrode the ways other cultures cope with spiritual pain. They sometimes propagate, as if virally, the disorders whose Western names and diagnoses they introduce into these new places. This should make us wonder about our own selves and our own culture, which are much more systematically exposed to the therapeutic paradigm. And more recently, within just a few months, the idea that therapy culture is untherapeutic has moved from figures of controversy like Abigail Shrier to arbiters of mainstream common sense like The Atlantic.

It appears that our modern way of understanding and inhabiting and attending to our selves has turned itself into a feedback loop, a trap, that the greater cultural and institutional influence of psychotherapy begets greater need for psychotherapy. This places the subpopulation of scrupulous, virtuous, therapeutically useful people who work in the larger world of mental health in a tragic bind. At least some of the trouble they’re enlisted to treat is likely the result of the therapy apparatus they are a part of and whose influence they increase as they do their useful work.

Is socializing our children into tunnelling ever deeper into themselves and their emotional states helping or harming them? Is it making them more resilient or more fragile? Is it making them healthier or sicker? I think we have a moral duty to ask.