Wondeful Scott Siskind essay today, the kind of thing that made him famous but which he hasn't written much of lately.
Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on?
I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog?
Siskind goes over the evidence that politics impacts our mental functioning, for example those studies that show people can't do simple arithmetic when the answer violates their political beliefs. Paranoia is a psychiatric condition, but millions of people consider it a virtue that they are paranoid about their political enemies. And:
Politics can become something between an addiction and an obsession. People can spend hours every day watching cable TV or scrolling through their Twitter feeds, trying to stay abreast of the latest outrage the other side is perpetrating. To be clear, they hate this. Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
As to what offical disorder best describes these symptoms, Siskind says:
In any other situation, a condition with impaired cognition, psychotic symptoms, emotional instability that impaired normal functioning, and associated addictions/obsessions would qualify as a mental disorder. So again, which mental disorder is it? This post is about the possibility that it might be trauma.
If you want the rest of the argument, read Siskind's essay. I wanted to reference this here with more than just a link because I agree that American politics are at least half psychodrama.
I think politics is important; I think America faces real political questions, and I have strong opinions about some of them. But I can hardly bear to follow the political news because so much of it is about the hyped-up feelings of the participants. The worst of it is that millions of people think it is a victory just to make the other side mad. What did that accomplish, except to push your goals farther into the future?
Yes, some of these issues touch on important questions of identity and the kind of society we want. But this is a big, diverse country and we are simply bound to disagree about this stuff. And to me, the biggest obstacle to our reaching compromise on some of these issues, and living with each other over the rest, is how upset people get about them, and how determined they are to attribute the worst possible motives to their opponents.
In a country like this, agreement will always be elusive, and unity is simply impossible. But if we cannot get past erupting in rage every time our opponents are mentioned, we will create the political hellscape that we fear.
2 comments:
I loved that essay too. Most remarkable to me is Scott's broad human sympathy, familiar in him but always impressive (a good quality in a psychiatrist). He does not regard these feelings as the sort of thing other people do but not him--although, as he says, he tries to fight the impulse in himself. My favorite bit was, "When Donald Trump was elected, some people described themselves as “traumatized”. Someone asked me for comment on the record, hoping I would say something like “as a real psychiatrist, trauma is a real disorder with strict criteria, and all you people are dumb”. I did not, in fact, make this comment."
Oops. By "these feelings" that Scott does not regard as foreign to himself, I meant feelings of political trauma etc., not feelings of broad human sympathy.
Once again hoisted on the petard of Blogger's lack of an edit-after-posting option.
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