Cheer up love
Before I start I’d like to say that I don’t hate Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I think any high quality therapy delivered by a huge hearted and experienced clinician can be useful to anyone. I speak as someone who has had several decades of therapeutic slog without which I doubt I’d have made it past my 40s.
But there’s something about the uses and abuses of behavioural psychology that makes my skin crawl. Actually it’s much more violent than that, as the weaponization of wellbeing brings on a panic attack. The experience of being nudged into denial taking me back to a much earlier infant time when I realised I could see something clearly that wasn’t to be spoken of. Frightened of the parental objects sniffing my rejection of the invitation to go nicely and go quietly, I’m still too easily backed into a psychological corner.
Comply or Cassandra.
This powerful panic made intense now I’m a parent to a small defiant and rude creature in mainstream childcare in all its behavioural self-regulating glory. Feeling like I have to lie to the heroic women who care for him on less than a living wage because deep down I don’t want him to behave in a way that makes him blend into this developmental desert. Damned if I do or don’t use the language of kind hands and listening ears, my son stares angrily at me and my betrayal of what we actually are.
Some years ago I joined 1000 people at Friends House in London to listen to the daddy of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. Agreeably not my usual tribe but I went to get my critical brain working again to help write an academic paper on how we might construct a progressive model of wellbeing at work. We kicked off with a fake listening exercise: think back to the last week about something positive that happened and tell the person next to you. I am stuck with a 26 years old positive psychologist who talked about her boyfriend’s bbq that weekend. I can hardly open my mouth thinking of the young black man I’d talked down from jumping in front of a tube train that week while about 30 people on the platform literally looked the other way. I squeezed something out about being grateful for being able to be more open with my friends about how I’m struggling. She thought I hadn't understood the question.
Having worked in adult education for several decades I’d like to suggest that if you want people to say what their reality is you have to ask them a genuine question rather than signpost them into a neurolinguistically programmed cul-de-sac.
What follows is my stream of consciousness during the event enacted on Twitter with real time reactions.
@SurvivingWk Uh oh flashback to 1983 #RoyalWeek at #MartinSeligman event tonight. Very positive people, plus me (picture of a full hall young shiny mostly women)
@SurvivingWk Always look for the nearest exit in case of #positivitycompulsion at #Martinseligman talk tonight (Picture of the exit I’m sitting next to. I literally could not find a seat any closer to the door)
@SurvivingWk Just realised I saw #Martinseligman outside Friends House looking miserable. I like him more. Damn.
@SurvivingWk 5 minutes in & despair sets in. #richardlayard offering a benign overview of wellbeing industry #happynow?
@SurvivingWk “the past does not determine the future” #Martinseligman #theendofhistory
@SurvivingWk “we have to put critical psychology on its head” aw bless #Martinseligman clearly hasn't heard about welfare reform #mentalhealthcrisis
@SurvivingWk “Freud told us the best we could do is not be miserable…empirically false, morally irresponsible & a political dead-end” #Martinseligman
@SurvivingWk Its all going a bit Pete Tong in my head and we’re only 25 mins into #Martinseligman talk. A real sleight of hand about human experience
@SurvivingWk I wonder if #Martinseligman has ever experienced utter despair and real powerlessness? #viciouspositivity
@SurvivingWk It’s funny how understanding anything has been written out of human psychology in #positivepsychology #keepthemignorant&busy
@Survivingwk “4 million people lie about their happiness” #martinselgiman’s authentichappiness.org. You think that’s because it’s an online checklist?
@SurvivingWk “40,000 women on social media talk about shopping & yay!!!” if I wanted to be patronised #martinselgiman I’d just go to work.
@SurvivingWk I think #martinseligman is predicting the end of psychology research through his analysis of Twitter activity.
@SurvivingWk Shoot me now. Wellbeing education through happiness exercises. Clearly #martinseligman hasn’t done a workshop on bullying in NHS recently
@SurvivingWk Haha actually surreal. #martinseligman advises student who works in library until midnight to use their “humour strength”…
@SurvivingWk Urm shouldn’t you be telling your students that working until midnight is utterly disastrous for their #mentalhealth? #chearuplove
@SurvivingWk I’ve actually stopped breathing. #martinseligman now talking about happiness education of 8000 kids in Bhutan #humanrightsanyone?
@SurvivingWk 700,000 kids in Peru apparently VERY HAPPY using #positivepsychology…deeply challenging un-thought has set in
LinkedInFriend: “Hi…I am using positive psychology as one method in improving employee relations performance. One of the outcomes was a 50% reduction in BME disciplinaries.
LinkedinSurvivingWork: “ Sure as a technique its useful but not as a response to poverty in Peru (a country I worked in for 10 years), a failing mental health system or as a substitute for a decent employment relations system. I have heard about your great work through a colleague Mr X. I work a lot with health workers and there is a very important push back against using techniques to control rather than empower people. Very best.”
LinkedinFriend “Completely agree with you.”
@SurvivingWk “happiness is political about the goals of good government” #martinseligman I’d settle for a welfare system & action on climate change
@Friend1 I would settle for holiday money, sick money & a pension #England
@SurvivingWk Yeah but that’s just learned helplessness. If you’re near Euston help me.
@Friend2 Sure you will be a better person for the experience. Just allow all the positivity into your inner self- oh and ignore reality
@SurvivingWk You’re not helping. I’m drowning comrade
@Friend2 In which case its between asking a devastating question, a quick burst of The Internationale or escaping to the nearest pub
@SurvivingWk If I could remember the words random singing would be preferred option.
@SurvivingWk I will be lynched if I show evidence of independent thoughts. Pub by default. Plus side I’m genuinely pleased to be me now.
@Friend2 Surely that just shows the paradoxical power of positive psychology?
On the bus home I have a sinking feeling that I’ve gone too far and expect to wake up to a tirade of violent positivity courtesy of the professional behavioural trolls on Twitter. The next day there is no response, literally none which given my social media reach is a bit weird. Now, it could be that I’m absolutely right and amongst friends on social media. But several decades of saying rude evidence based stuff about the mental health sector, academic writing and low level trolling for being a woman with actual thoughts this just feels a bit spooky.
Although I’m open to nobody giving a bugger about what I have to say, given the religiosity around positive thinking it’s likely that we just can’t think about this. A reluctance to chip away at a ‘magic solution’ to be happy in a complex world and with it celebrity mental health status. Oh, I’m sure we’re all just doing it for the kids and all but underestimate the ambitions of the behavioural brigade at your peril.
For me this reductive version of reality has never been an option and that’s in part because of my relationship with psychoanalysis. For me psychoanalysis is radical because it exposes reality both material and psychic, acknowledges it and makes the links that authoritarian systems try to deny. It does not accept that we as individuals are responsible for getting out of social crisis by cheering up, it gets its hands very dirty in trying to build relationality between imperfect peoples while encouraging us to accept the facts of life. That we are dependent on each other, that we are not the centre of the universe and we all die. And if you can live with that, you get to be ordinarily unhappy. Agreeably a marketing car crash but a welcome release from the gamification of happiness that forms the basis of our current neoliberal systems of care. Psychoanalysis opened the door for me to get out of the Matrix.
Possibly the best book I’ve ever read is Farhad Dalal’s The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami. Managerialism, Politics & the Corruptions of Science. I don’t know how but I only found and read it a few months ago as I researched for a paper I’m writing about IAPT and behavioural economics. It’s so good I can manage my envy of the author for producing such an important analysis of what is going wrong in mental health. He lays out the ‘unholy trinity’ of economics, managerialism and CBT and the fetishization of measurements and the gamification of the evidence base for recovery.
Most importantly for me he articulates our experience of living within the Matrix – what he calls ‘hyper-rationality’ where human experience is decontextualized and atomised and then replaced with diagnostics and performance data such that this actually becomes our reality. Think for a second about that – what I experience when I’m accessing IAPT is a parallel reality one that is fabricated and cut off from reality. Yes, cutting us off from reality which as far as I recall from 9 years of psychoanalysis is precisely the problem with madness. Add to this the dark stuff of political conspiracy that this is no accident, it’s a conscious and explicit strategy for making us mad. We find ourselves unable to box our way out of a system that keeps us ashamed and failing and very very busy filling in positivity questionnaires.
Some years ago when I was doing a project about surviving work in healthcare I went to see a psychoanalytic father to try to convince him to join us. Recognising my inherent adolescent state in a typically psychoanalytic move he gently heard me out, understood me and then went for the jugular in a short tweet-length interpretation. He said.
“Don’t ever lose your delinquency, it’s your ability to stick your fingers up at authority that is going to protect you from the psychological fascism that lies ahead.”
A decade later I hold these psychoanalytic parents and the alternative model of care very close to my heart. The mental health landscape has been corrupted and my inability to sit easily with that and periodically call it out is, despite the heckling and shaming, the saviour of my sanity.