Welcome to My Substack
Why the Obsession with Better is Making Our Mental Health Worse and What to Do Instead
I’m starting this Substack because I believe that mental healthcare as usual has failed us.
This failure is deep and wide, because despite objective progress in the science and treatment of mental illness over the past 20 years, mental health has only worsened. And it’s not just social media; or economics; or the death of the American dream; or [fill in the blank]. Or any one thing. It’s all of those, I’m sure, but here, I argue that it’s also because the explicit and implicit ways that we healthcare professionals approach helping people has more costs than benefits. And when we do succeed in helping, it seems that the one step forward is predictably and mercilessly followed by two steps backward.
Why?
Because the system is weighted down by some fundamentally flawed ideas about the nature of mental health. And these flawed ideas can be summarized in one word: Optimization.
Optimize /ŏp′tə-mīz″/: Make as fully perfect, functional, efficient, or effective as possible; To exploit fully.
This is engineering language. And indeed, the optimization mindset has emerged out of our obsession with technology and machine metaphors for the body, mind, and soul. As a scientist, I’ve pretty much towed the line, and pursued at face value the study of things like emotion regulation, cognitive biases, child development, mood and anxiety disorders, and more, all arguably from an optimization perspective. Are your emotions dysregulated? There’s a causal mechanism that explains why you deviate from the optimal. Elevated anxiety? Now you’re suboptimal PLUS pathological, Etc.,...
But in a book I wrote in 2022, called Future Tense: Why Anxiety is Good for you Even Though it Feels Bad, I broke away from these assumptions. My aim in the book was to point out that our mindsets about anxiety are so distorted, and the zeitgeist about anxiety so self-defeating, that we’re actively blocking the advancement of mental health. And somehow, we psychologists have either participated in or failed to correct the concept creep around anxiety. As a result, our ideas about anxiety have become pivotal blockers to learning to live with the inevitable anxiety that life serves up.
Freeing ourselves from ideas is hard. They so easily become our realities. Ideas and mindsets about what mental health even is have become so baked into how we think about and judge our lives and ourselves that we no longer question them. We don’t even notice them 99% of the time.
I’ve decided to notice them and question them.
What are these flawed, albatross-like ideas?
Well, I’ll be writing about them here, including but not limited to:
Life is not a problem to solve. It’s a glorious, messy, beautiful, heartbreaking experience to live.
The optimization mindset: what it is, how it took over, and how it sabotages our mental health and joy.
How the optimization mindset underlies our dysfunctional digital lives - and the role of smartphones and social media in our mental health struggles.
How the unpleasant, messy, suboptimal stuff - negative emotions, failures, mistakes, uncertainty - can become our most powerful allies.
Why I think emotional intelligence (EI) is going to become our superpower as AI proliferates.
The logic of intuition.
Random things I love - music, art, books, movies, theatre, overheard conversations - that counter the optimized way of living.
De-Optimize. This is the way.
And by the way, by mental healthcare system, I mean everything from traditional psychological and counseling services, psychiatry, primary care (where many people start seeking treatment), science-based wellness resources, and even self-help. We are all on the hook. And I’ll be criticizing them all. And myself. It will sometimes be a criticism party.
But it will more importantly also be an ideas party, with alternatives to the stuff that’s not working. It’s what you call constructive criticism - because I’ll be constructing alternative paths to the current dead ends we’re facing. It’s like I’ll be saying, “Hey, this way is a dead end. But we could go to the right here and duck under that bush, and lo and behold, a whole new beautiful path is opening up in front of us.” We’re seriously all in this mess together, and the only side I’m on is yours.
Substack seems like a fun place to share and get feedback on new ideas. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll also use Substack as a home base to announce virtual gatherings and discussions where we can lean into these ideas and talk it out, as well as events and happenings that might be of interest.
Thanks for reading!
Warmly,
Tracy