Suffering

 A unique aspect of the character of modern people - something that separates us from almost all other people who have ever lived - is that we view suffering as unusual. Not a part of the human condition but an affront to it.

Witness the behaviour of the 21st century's affluent classes: their neurotic and elaborate evasion of even small degrees of suffering through therapy, mindfulness, yoga, meditation, esoteric workout routines, wild swimming and (more commonly in America) medication.

The desired state is one of "wellness", a perfect peace of mind and body that is supposed to be not only sublime but normal. Suffering represents a kind of failure.

While serious mental illness clearly requires professional intervention, the concomitant of wellness is the medicalisation of experiences that would once have been understood as non-negotiable aspects of being human, such as grief. The fourth edition of the standard American handbook of mental illness, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, excluded grief from the diagnosis of severe depression. The present edition, the fifth, includes it.

There is something eerie about a society considering that human minds might need to be cleansed of grief. It is an attitude that regards human beings not as intrinsically flawed and suffering but as perfectible machines... This view is underpinned by the idea that suffering is extrinsic to the human condition: a consequence of outside forces such as capitalism or technology or, more vaguely, "modern life"...

Suffering will always rise from within us, no matter how many mental handrails and cushions the present cult of of safetyism provides. Nobody put it more compellingly than Schopenhauer who understood that "suffering is essential to life" and that it "does not flow in upon us from outside but everyone carries around within himself its perennial source".

Schopenhauer's characterisation of our existence as striving and struggle relieved by only intermittent periods of contentment is substantially supported by evolutionary psychologists who point out that humans evolved not to be happy but to survive and reproduce. Anxiety, envy, sadness and anger are terrible to experience but we have these feelings because they helped our ancestors to avoid early death and to mate. They are an ineradicable part of our evolved inheritance.

We must not pathologise the human condition... Nothing is more human than to suffer for love and to grieve for death. Nothing, in fact, is more human than to be stressed, or envious or anxious or discontented or bored. These feelings are not problems: they propel us through the world, making us do things, encounter people, seek out new bits of life. This is the reson all great art and literature is about suffering and why the blandest people are always those for whom nothing in life has ever really gone wrong. We certainly do not need more of them.

(James Marriott, The Times, 2021)

Much common sense here and a necessary antidote to the belief that suffering is not an essential part of the human condition.

 

*In the past year British newspapers have reported on the mental health benefits of activities including but not limited to: having a dog, having a cat, having houseplants, keeping chickens, keeping bees, keeping a sourdough yeast going, digging flowerbeds, mowing the lawn, tending an allotment, watching birds, looking at trees, walking, jogging, swimming, horse riding, yoga, cold showers, hot saunas, afternoon naps, knitting, painting, cooking, baking, decluttering and just quietly pottering about the place. They missed some of my favourites: sharpening pencils,ironing handkerchiefs into triangles and sweating an onion to the Six O'Clock News. If these seem basic or trivial endeavours, I mention them only to illustrate how any pursuit, however minor, can be corralled into the campaign to improve our collective mental health...

Patients waiting to see the Doctor with Figures Representing  Their Fears
Rosemary Carson (b. 1962)
Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [CC BY]

I worry, though, that by framing every domestic task, every pastime, every twitch of the cross-stitcher's thread in terms of mental health, we aren't so much soothing the problem as stoking it.

Not so long ago, we needed to talk about mental health. We needed to get it out into the open, shine a light, stop the stigma. Now I wonder if we should stop talking about it. Or at any rate stop talking about it in every context... I am troubled by an increasing tendency to treat mental health as a sort of capricious god to be petted and fretted over, appeased and attended to, offered libations of chamomile tea and sacrifices of darkest dark chocolate. Daily activities are to be undertaken only in the service of the great spirit deity Mental Wellbeing. Light a candle, say a prayer or affirmation...

This isn't turning the compost heap, this is mindfully turning the compost heap. This isn't a swim in the sea on a sunny day, this is a shot of pure psychological resilience. And what you're doing right now? Reading The Times with the cat on your lap? That's disrupting the toxic cycle of stress and emotional burnout...

Maybe we need a bit more art for art's sake, walking for walking's sake, baking for baking's sake.

Far from alleviating stresses, we might be aggravating them. If I tell you to walk around the block to ease the twinge in your back, you'll think about the twinge. If I tell you to roll pastry because it's therapeutic, you'll dwell on the therapy when you might otherwise have dreamt of the tart. When it comes to mental health, we're in danger of becoming obsessed with benefits and outcomes. Where's the pleasure in just being and doing?

(Laura Freeman, The Times, 2021)

Thank God for a much needed spoonful of good old common sense.