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The Sleepwalkers
Omri Ceren is a strategy adviser at the Israel Project. I met him at a conference once, a very sharp and likeable guy. I follow him on Twitter. About four hours ago, he wrote this:
Omri Ceren @cerenomri Asian econ collapse. European fragmentation due to debt crises. Westward Russian expansionism. Appeasment in C Europe. Who’s feeling good?
That’s a rhetorical question to which the answer, I would have said, is “no one.”
A close friend of mine works in the mental health field in London. We chat on the phone several times a week. In one of our recent conversations, I said casually that I was sure his patients were reporting a great deal of anxiety about events in the news. To my surprise, he said they were not. In fact, he said, it was extremely rare for anyone to mention a news event to him. “To my recollection,” he later wrote, “it happens about once or twice a year, so once in a thousand sessions.”
The only news events he could recall anyone bringing up, in his 30-year career, were those involving “the mass death of non-combatants caused by ill intent, so 9/11 and Lockerbie, yes. The tsunami no, not one mention.” He said no patient — not one — had ever mentioned elections in the UK or the US.
Obviously, he’s not polling a random sample of Londoners. The people who see him are a self-selected group, and by definition not in good mental health; they don’t go to see him because they’re feeling terrific and they need some help with that.
Still, I’m puzzling over this conversation, and wondering what it means, if anything. Does what he said surprise you? If so, why; if not, why not?
Published in Culture, Foreign Policy, General, Politics
Well, no, although it’s not your fault for not knowing that, because I didn’t write about the rest of the conversation — though on seeing how you read it, I should have. He treats many people who suffer from irrational and uncontrollable anxiety. The things they worry about are so irrational that they’re considered “mental health problems.” People who worry that if they don’t wash their hands so often that they bleed they’ll die of a contagious illness; people who are in perfect health but have panic attacks because they think they’re dying, etc. So to clarify, he’s seeing a sample of people who are less rational about risk than most people and more prone to anxiety. (His subspecialty is psychosomatic illness, and particularly a disorder called psychogenic dysphonia — the loss of voice in the absence of any structural or neurological pathology. It’s usually put in the category of an “anxiety disorder.”) When we’ve discussed the work he does with these patients in the past, he’s talked about the immense and crippling burden of fear many of them have of something most of us would not find it rational to fear.
My assumption was that the already anxiety-prone subset of people who he sees in his work would report more anxiety when anxiety-provoking items were in the news. My error seems to have been in assuming there would be some kind of relationship, if only a weak one, between the kind of anxiety his patients feel and real events in the world. I would have thought a highly anxiety-prone population would me more likely, not less likely, to react with anxiety to frightening news. But if what he says is typical of what people in his profession hear, I’d have been wrong.
I was with you in the analysis until you segued to foreign policy. The part with which I agree is that politicians who try to rachet up the hysteria about any given issue risk having the public decide, “Okay, he or she is just a scaremonger and a hysteric,” and that it’s thus sometimes counterproductive to focus on risk — even if the risk is real.
But it depends on the issue, the politician, and many other factors. Many people are politically galvanized, to the point of saying, at least, that it’s one of the top issues they consider when voting, by the risk of climate change, even though changing weather always happens and is always expected to happen, and even though we’re unable to predict with any great precision how much it will change over a specified time and how much risk this actually poses. And it’s a cliche of political life that you can pass any kind of legislation, no matter how idiotic, by saying, “If it saves even one child’s life, it’s worth it” — and no politician will get far by saying, “Look, a few fatal accidents involving children have always happened and can be expected to happen, it isn’t reasonable to expect to create a completely child-safe society.” Even if that’s true.
I would argue that if “no one cares” about foreign policy it’s often because they’re irrational about risk, not rational: They discount the likelihood of an event’s affecting them by means of a traditional and usually reliable heuristic, perhaps even a biologically instinctive one: “If it’s far away, it’s less dangerous.” But many recently-invented technologies have rendered that assumption false; we now live in a time where it’s not insane to think people in China can steal very intimate details about the personal life of someone who lives in Minnesota; and obviously, we live in the era of inter-continental ballistic missiles and mass global air travel on a scale undreamt of a century ago. And one in which you and I can chat in real time on the Internet at an extremely low cost, even though I’m on the other side of the Atlantic.
So I think all I would conclude from this — using the assumption that his experience is typical of psychotherapists in the Western world, and I don’t know if that’s so — is that I was mistaken in thinking that the subset of people who seek treatment for anxiety would be prone to feeling more anxious when there are many events in the news that would seem to justify it. Or at least, that they would be prone to reporting that they felt more anxious because of events in the news.
I’d say the opposite. The risk associated with Putin’s invasion of Crimea, for anyone living in the US, is infinitely insignificant. Hence there is no rational reason for any American individual to care about this.
The echo chamber magnifies the noise, but outside of it, I don’t think many care to listen.
That’s probably a good thing. Last time we jumped the gun on an irrational fear, it didn’t end all that well (or it ended splendidly, according to some on Ricochet)
But thanks on the clarification on the type of patients you’re talking about.
The key word there is “imagined.” You live overseas, so perhaps you missed the news of the last few weeks, but in the modern U.S. nine unelected Supreme Court justices make all the important laws and decisions for us.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Think about it this way, if someone had an illness such as cardiac disease that involved surgery and a protracted recovery, we wouldn’t be surprised if politics was not foremost on their minds. Mental health issues work similarly. There is pain and impairment and a focus on improving functioning and coping, it takes a lot of time and energy, and so other things (not necessarily limited to politics) recede in importance.