photo credit: Damir on pexels.com
Circumstances can present you with compelling reasons to change the way you think about things. There are also reasons why you may not want to change your mind about something, no matter how strong the evidence before you. Times of rapid and profound change elicit different responses in different people. Those responses are based on each person’s unconscious models of how the world works.
Here are two examples: looking for comfort in magical thinking and nontraditional alternatives, and taking on the bigger challenge of coming to terms with massive change. The concepts, values and fixed notions that underlie these responses are largely unconscious. It is like having an inner mental landscape of ancient standing stones. Or other, less pleasant, things.
First, some thoughts on how people in general respond to stressors in a society.
In The Spirit Level (2009) two British epidemiologists, Wilkinson and Pickett, demonstrated how almost everything, from metal illness, life expectancy, violence and illiteracy, is affected not by the wealth of a society, but by the degree of inequality within that society. The effect was found across dozens of nations and in all income groups. The larger the disparity between the haves and have nots, the lower the indicators of health and well being. Increased inequality of money and power was associated with numerous indicators of lower levels of the health of a society including mental health, drug use, physical health, life expectancy, obesity, educational performance, teenage pregnancy, violence, imprisonment and social mobility. The more equality, the better off was everyone, rich and poor.
The concept of the social determinants of health, especially mental health, provides a framework for understanding how people respond to the stresses of a fraying social fabric. The quality and quantity of responses follows a continuum along lines of increasing inequality. They begin with slow rises in ill health and poor choices to rampant problems with mental health and criminality.
Within the general picture of people in a stressed nation, the way people may respond may depend on their overall level of security, that is, their position in the economic order of things.
In the late 1990’s I spent some time going through the ads in Toronto’s Now magazine. The paper was awash in ads for various alternative therapies, and I was curious. What is being offered, and who is the target audience? The ads seemed to break down into three main themes. The first was addressing general, undefined malaise with remedies involving agents such as scents, oils, and nutritional supplements. The second was to allay fears about the future with divination methods such as tarot, astrology and the like. The third was about individual mental health interventions by way of spiritual means in the form of yoga, meditation and so forth. This sector of the economy was offering comfort and reassurance. Their target market was probably the worried well that had disposable income and led relatively stable lives.
It was a time when Ontario hospitals were facing severe budget cutbacks. Hospitals were cutting staff, merging departments and in some cases, closing outright. I remember the very high levels of anxiety amongst the staff at the hospital where I worked. Morale was so low that at one point my hospital actually brought in a comedy troupe to cheer up the staff.
Here is a core message offered to the inhabitants of a nation undergoing intolerable stresses: cheer up, do something nice for yourself. Above all, stay focussed on yourself and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
It is the winter of 2024 as I write this and the news is full of big, existential threats on several fronts: climate, environment, war, pandemic, revolution. My LinkedIn page keeps telling me about new job openings to provide any number of mental health services a psychologist, albeit retired, might notice. But I can’t help thinking that, if we accept the premise of social determinants of health, then people in mental health crises would likely benefit more from a reduction in structural inequality and daily threats to survival. People might just be better adjusted and more productive if they had a decent chance at affording rent or a house of their own. They might be less anxious if they could afford sufficient food. They might be happier if seeing friends, celebrating family events, and benefitting in so many ways from the company of loved ones, did not involve the real fear of contracting covid 19. It might not be necessary to offer therapy for insomnia if people could rest easier at night, thinking that the economic and social networks in which they lived was actually doing its job of providing the basics for everyone.
Not everyone will look at these problems and react the same way.
In the past few years I read two separate articles written by people who had lived through revolutions in the government of their countries, one in Indonesia and one in mid Europe. Both pointed out the same thing: revolutions are not too bad for people with some money, influence, social position or some other form of control over their lives. How did the people in these accounts get through national revolution? They knew they were in a position to buy the things their governments was not providing: housing, food, education, health care. The basics. So, there is a segment of society that will not feel overly challenged by big social change. This segment will continue to live as they always have, for the simple reason that it works well enough for them.
But, as inequality increases, more and more people will experience the pinch. What was once a comfortable middle class existence becomes less obtainable. Even for those who do not experience a personal downturn, the quality of the world around them is altered. There are more homeless on the streets, wait times in emergency rooms escalate, more stores are closed and the availability of goods declines. Increasing inequality hurts some more than others, but everyone is affected one way or another.
Inequality has increased dramatically in my lifetime, and continues unabated. Current metrics involve comparing the income of the top earning CEOs of a large corporation with an average individual income. In times past this might be an income difference on the order of, say, 20 fold. Currently the highest paid corporate heads have an average income two hundred times the average wage earner. The highest paid CEO now has earned, in the first few days of the year, the same as the average worker will earn in a full year. The Guardian warns us the billionaires are just getting richer and we are on the way to seeing trillionaires emerge:
(https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2024/jan/15/worlds-five-richest-men-double-their-money-as-poorest-get-poorer).
There are those who feel the existential threats keenly, because the resources they had at one time, perhaps in their parents’ generation, are eroding. Year by year houses are less affordable, food is more expensive, education is harder and more expensive to get and health services are collapsing.
This sector of the economy is on their own, and, they know it. A yoga class won’t bring down the price of tuna in the supermarket. Online CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) for insomnia won’t fix the worries that keep them awake at night.
The promise of alternatives is that the right hacks can bring the fear of existential threats down to a manageable level. It takes a variety of forms. There are ways to take control of food, by choosing food differently, such as vegan, vegetarian and low processed alternatives. There is interest in a variety of housing practices, such as shared housing, tiny homes and coop housing. In some cities, empty parking lots are made available to the growing number of people who live in their cars, campers or vans. There is growing popularity for different consumer practices in the form of recycling clothes, shopping in second hand stores, and the like. These adjustments to lifestyle can be both a financial necessity and a mental health intervention in the form of individual control.
There has also been a rise in the popularity of tarot and astrology, addressing the anxiety of too much unpredictability. The answer comes in the form of pesudoclarity: here is what is going on, and here is how that is going to play out.
With increasing stress, the need for better fixes brings different internal mechanisms into play. It can take the form of well worn, almost automatic responses, when you say to yourself, I know what that is. Equally, some responses might take the form of a reality check. Do you really know what is going on here? How well do you understand new circumstances? Do your ideas limit or assist your grasp of a situation? How effectively do they guide your responses?
This is the territory that the unconscious prediction function covers in our minds. It uses the available information held in long term memory to advise us about the nature of a situation and how to respond to it. The prediction function serves to relieve some of the burden of constant monitoring of the environment by predicting what will be around the corner, how you view events and how to react in a new situation. It takes the accumulated data from your life experience and feeds a type of real time virtual reality to the conscious mind.
The predictor function of the unconscious mind relies on the memories you have acquired in a lifetime. But the same lifetime also teaches how to consciously think through a challenge. This capacity to stop and think prepares you to consider big events instead of just reacting. The two functions, unconscious prediction and conscious thought, are both available to guide your behaviour. But in the face of big challenges, what is called for is a change in habitual thinking. The models of unconscious prediction need updating. It is my experience that this sort of attitudinal change can take time. The accumulation of years of experience forms ways of thinking that do not change abruptly or easily.
The habitual response is seen in the shape of loyalty to family despite human frailties. It works on a broader institutional level in maintaining a management system that is failing. It works on a national level as support for the ally nation that has gone to egregious war.
The attitudes people hold about how the world works are not very fluid. This feature of the mental landscape, the set of fixed ideas, is not briskly adaptive when the systems from which one has benefitted in the past are failing or compromised.
The individual mental structures, the models that describe how the world works, can take different forms. The ideals that fuel a lifetime of prosocial behaviours are an example. Think of a field of ancient standing stones as the values you live by. Sturdy and unchanging over time. Then there is the mental equivalent of icebergs that get in the way of shipping lanes. Oversized, outmoded and not too helpful in a changing world, these prevent new ideas from getting through. They can eventually be worn down. Then there are the simmering resentments, an undertow of anger that erupts at the slightest of openings. The bad drunk, snarling after a few drinks. Think of the mental equivalent of a fatberg that does no good and is hard to break down.
The time can come when mental structures that have been useful in the past no longer adequately serve. The need for updating or even wholesale change takes some effort. It is my experience that this effort is conscious. It involves deliberately revisiting old assumptions with new information. This is, for example, the case of the physician staying current on treatments for disease. A mental model for prescribing is more than a data base in memory; it is by necessity open to fresh data.
When the established mental models are not refreshed, the thinking is said to be stale. The ability to consider new information and think through the implications of various outcomes provides flexibility. Rather than rote responses, such a model allows for a shift in direction. This is more like a tree in the landscape, responding to seasonal and climate variation.
These ways of thinking about how the mind processes and holds information show how durable a mind set can be. No one has to change their mind. People do indeed die in ICU, convinced they do not have covid.
But we can. While our ideas can get in the way of clarity, we can have knee jerk responses and we can have bedrock values, we can also exercise growth and flexibility. We have the capacity to change how we act in the face of all this.