Discontented Soul

It will always surprise those of the ilk of your “caller-who’s-just-passing-through-Canberra” that Adolf Hitler won the last two elections before he assumed the Chancellorship in 1933.
Not that I’m comparing John Howard to Adolf Hitler — not even a loonie leftie such as I would be so ingenuous. I am merely pointing out that “winning an election” is not the be-all and end-all of life in a democratic society.

Global forces shaping our mental health
Monday, 25 October 2004

ROBERT PIRSIG's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of the defining books of the 1970s. His next book, Lila: An inquiry into morals, published in 1991, had nowhere near the same success, even though he regarded it as the more important book.
A highly original thinker who spend time in a psychiatric hospital after a severe breakdown, Pirsig says in Lila: "Now, years later, his resentment against what had happened in the hospital had lessened, and he began to see that there is, of course, a need for psychiatrists just as there is for cops ... The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society, you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last."
I was reminded of Pirsig's view when a professor of psychiatry, commenting on a paper I'd written, said he thought my "overall pessimism was simply the reflection of an introspective person who is steeped in the data". What he saw as "pessimism" was my linking of the social and psychological problems of young people today to broad social conditions, especially the defining qualities of modern Western culture.
Considerations of mental health are dominated by a medical model that construes it in terms of individual attributes — as the professor's "diagnosis" of my own case so aptly demonstrates — and especially as an illness requiring medical or psychological interventions. But we need also to think of mental health as a societal issue requiring social change — or as Pirsig characterised it, intellectual change — change in how we think about things, in how we see the world and our place in it, in what we think makes life worth living.
The medical model of health reflects a powerful tendency to separate the social and personal worlds: the conditions of social life shaped by large, external forces such as economic globalisation, technological innovation, environmental change, or terrorism, on the one hand; and the features of personal life shaped by internal, psychic processes and personal circumstances and experiences, on the other.
The reality is that change in both the social and personal worlds is being shaped by an extraordinarily complex interplay between the world "out there" and the world "in here" — in our heads — and that we need to understand this interplay to understand what is happening in both worlds. Here is an example.
The American Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Ron Powers has warned of an "apocalyptic nihilism" that is infecting children. Powers focuses on the modern phenomenon of teenage killers — adolescents who murder their parents, teachers or peers for seemingly little reason. He recounts a story told by a young doctoral graduate in comparative literature, Theo Padnos, who was teaching literature to adolescent prison inmates. What struck Padnos was the "language of apocalypse" used by the kids, a message that "in a world stripped of meaning and self-identity, adolescents can come to understand violence itself as a morally grounded gesture, a kind of purifying attempt to intervene against the nothingness".
Padnos tells Powers: "They're a community of believers, in a way. They come from all kinds of backgrounds. But what unite them are these apocalyptic suspicions that they have. They think and act as though it's an extremely late hour in the day, and nothing much matters anymore." The kids are drawn to the mythic violence of movies and television, to stories of post-apocalyptic heroes just like they want to be — "violent, suicidal, the sort of people who are preparing themselves for what happens after everything ends".
Other problems among youth, including eating disorders and deliberate self-harm, can also be seen as "attempts to intervene against the nothingness", a deeply human need, as American professor of psychiatry and law Alan Stone wrote recently, "to transform the passive experience of suffering into something we can actively control". Others might respond in very different ways to this sense that "it's an extremely late hour in the day". They could, for example, become even more determined to succeed, to be a winner at all costs, or lose themselves in the quest for pleasure or excitement. These lifestyles have their own hazards, including the various forms of addiction.
At a more mundane level, surveys highlight another response to what social analyst Hugh Mackay says is a widespread and disturbing perception of "degeneration" in our way of life — disengagement, a retreat to home and hearth, a focus on tending our own patch. The happiest participants in his studies, he says, were "those whose horizons were most limited, and whose concerns were unremittingly local, immediate and personal". So there is a broader social and political dimension to this sense of the world as threatening and hostile, and that ultimately we are all on our own — a fraying of citizenship and democracy, a vulnerability to the politics of self-interest and fear. This link between the social and personal can direct, dramatic and powerful. Philosopher Peter Singer argues in his book, The President of Good and Evil: The ethics of George W Bush, that the President's religious outlook is best represented by the Manichean idea of a force of evil in the world, with an apocalyptic Second Coming imminent and America as the divinely appointed nation set to destroy the forces of Satan.
In a documentary, With God on our side, shown on ABC TV recently, one of the commentators noted that Bush's description of the September 11 terrorist attacks as "evil" and his framing of America's response as a war between good and evil were crucial to helping Americans to rally after the attacks, to cut through all the confusion, uncertainty and complexity, and come to terms with what had happened. This reaction, then, reflects a deeply personal view of the world that has profoundly altered the world. Apocalyptic suspicions are not simply a result of watching too many movies like the Mad Max and Terminator series, or televised images of war and catastrophe. They reveal something much deeper — a sense of being cast adrift, socially, morally and spiritually, of having no idea what life is all about and what makes it worth living. Nihilism is one response; fundamentalism is another, at the other end of the spectrum.
We can see in this story the multiple and complex links between issues of personal wellbeing and global developments, the ways in which broad social changes that affect everyone can, nevertheless, affect people differently, and contribute to problems that only some experience.
We need to examine mental health, not just in terms of individual illness that requires treatment or therapy, but also as an issue having social — even global — causes and consequences. We need to think of mental health as a way of better understanding ourselves and how we should live.

Richard Eckersley is a fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU, and a director of Australia 21, a not-for-profit research and development company. This article is adapted from an address given at a world mental health day conference organised by the Centre for Mental Health Research, ANU on October 10.

© Canberra Times, 2004

America and the World
by Parvez Ahmed
Published on Thursday, October 7, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

While much of the country is focused on the polls for the Presidential race, another kind of poll is perhaps equally deserving of our attention. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) recently released a poll about American attitudes towards 'international issues' and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released the results of its survey on American attitudes towards 'Islam and Muslims.' Taken together the results are at once insightful even as they are seemingly contradictory.
In the CCFR poll eighty-seven percent of the public favours working through the UN to combat terrorism; eighty-two percent favour using the International Criminal Court, which President Bush has consistently eschewed.
Half of those surveyed oppose the use of racial profiling in airport security checks; sixty-six percent oppose torture as a way of extracting information from suspected international terrorists; sixty-four percent favour a more even handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; sixty-six percent of Americans favour working with the UN, even when it adopts policies that the US does not like; fifty-nine percent want to do away with all vetoes in the Security Council and seventy-four percent want a standing peacekeeping force commanded by the UN
Contrary to popular perceptions most Americans favour working with international agencies, under the aegis of international law and with foreign nations, even when it means sometimes subordinating American desires. Multilateralism seems more like a mainstream American attitude not an unpatriotic diversion.
Despite such overwhelming evidence, columnist Thomas Friedman recently pointed out that, “each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology.”
Instead of firing an evangelical US general who smeared Islam, the administration sided with their political base. Instead of taking the moral high ground after the Abu Ghraib fiasco, the administration responded belatedly and almost begrudgingly. Instead of welcoming bridge builders like Tariq Ramadan and Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) to America, the administration bars their entry with out caring to explain how such men of peace got to be dangerous for America.
Such repeated misguided policies has hurt America's image abroad. Favourability ratings even among traditional European allies are at all time lows. Meanwhile stereotyping and guilt by association continues to erode civility on both sides of the Atlantic.
In America, a recent CAIR survey shows, more than one-fourth of survey respondents agreed with stereotypes such as “Muslims teach their children to hate” and “Muslims value life less than other people.” When asked what comes to mind when they hear 'Muslim,' thirty-two percent of respondents made negative comments. Only two percent had a positive response.
Just as alarming are the results from a March 2004 Pew Poll that showed nearly fifty-percent of Turks to have unfavourable attitude towards Jews and Christians. In other parts of the Muslim world like Morocco and Pakistan the unfavourable ratings are alarmingly higher.
The CAIR poll also shows that while general knowledge of Islam is low among those surveyed but the presence of Muslim acquaintances drives more enlightened attitudes. Education and dialogue helps. Thus it is not surprising that Muslims living in America, despite the setbacks on their civil liberties, continue to have a positive outlook towards the society they live in. More American-Muslims are running for public offices, more are registering to vote, more are actively engaged in civic and inter-faith organizations.
The overall poll numbers actually present an opportunity of historic proportions — creating a very different American attitude toward the world and a different world attitude towards America. The task notes Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria needs global leaders, “who can take this raw material and turn it into a new politics.” This transformation requires a fundamental commitment towards dialogue and diplomacy over the instinct to fire rockets and drop bombs.

Parvez Ahmed, PhD is a board member for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR is headquartered in Washington DC and is America's largest grassroots Muslim advocacy group.