Technique and Resonance in Mental Health

Some thoughts based on Freya India's latest

Photo by Ousa Chea on Unsplash

I always look with anticipation for

Freya India

’s post, and her latest, titled “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore” doesn’t disappoint. The central thesis is that many contemporary people have medicalized and labeled their personality traits so that nothing is left but a series of diagnoses. That part of her argument is interesting and has some merit I suppose, but it’s the other comments she makes along the way that I think are more insightful. For example, India writes:

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

I’ve written before about Hartmut Rosa’s fabulous little book, The Uncontrollability of the World. In it he stresses the modernist tendency to master and control the natural world. I see this relating to Jacques Ellul’s concept of technique. In both there is a drive toward control. Technique assumes that the natural world can, ought, and must be controlled maximally. As India points out, and Rosa agrees with, what we lose with all this effort to control is mystery or resonance. In the case of mental health, I think we lose the reality of the inexpressibility of suffering, the irreducibility of individual cases, and the unpredictability of recovery (as I’m experiencing this week).

The thing about trying to master or “explain everything” is that you will inevitably fail and that hubris will hurt. If you come to believe that “Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected,” through some mechanical system, when that system lets you down, you will be crushed. When you can’t express your particular mental suffering accurately, when your mental health case doesn’t exactly fit all the other examples you find online, when your recovery doesn’t go as planned, you’ll get disappointed.

And then there’s the larger issue, which I raised on Monday, of the spiritual nature of mental health. Whatever categories and diagnoses and labels we put on things, there’s an entirely other dimension of reality at work. In other words, as we approach our mental health, we shouldn’t do so with a spirit of mastery and thorough scientific explanation, but with resonance with that infinitely and beautifully complex thing that is our mind. We listen, pray, and seek wise biblical counsel in addition to all the formal treatment protocols given to us by our professional providers.

By resonance I’m referring to a positive, fruitful interaction with someone or something that takes place when you allow that person or thing to be rather than attempt to control it or master it. That’s my summary of Rosa. It’s an acknowledgement of the being of the other. In my own field of literature, you can read a poem with resonance by delighting in its beauty and sound and meaning and tone and complexity and form. Or you can try to master it by analyzing it to death and applying the latest Theory. The former produces resonance, a sense of joy and beauty. The later makes you feel haughty and superior to the poem.

In the case of mental health, a posture of resonance would look like allowing your mental health condition to be what it is rather than force it into a tidy box. Which is not to say that you refuse to use a diagnosis when it is helpful to get a treatment, but you understand that that diagnosis is just a tool to roughly describe something intimate.

Part of the appeal to mastery or technique versus resonance is that it promises control and certainty. India continues:

The world is also becoming more complicated; we want control and certainty. We take comfort in the causes of things. And yes there are young people helped by diagnoses, who can’t function and find relief in being understood, but fewer than we think. Many more have been convinced that the point of life is to classify and explain everything, and it’s making them miserable.

I’m glad that India noted that some young people are helped by diagnoses. In my experience, many young people are. I will say that India is much more in tuned with the trends on social media where young people may be using diagnoses performatively. As I’ve said previously, we have to hold both truths simultaneously: young people are actually not doing well and many of them are performatively not doing well. Which is it’s own kind of not doing well, as India points out when she says that it’s “making them miserable.” Self-diagnosing or turning a legitimate diagnosis into a personal brand identity will make people additionally miserable.

Maybe part of the reason of this misery is what India describes as “self-surveillance.” Even when I don’t agree with India, I am inspired by her ability to insightfully turn a phrase:

I find it strange that we think this is freeing, this brutal knowing. That this self-surveillance is the liberated way to live. That we are somehow less repressed, being boxed in by medical labels. There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma.

The point of all this is by “knowing” so much “about” ourselves we actually take on the role of a surveillance state. We obsessively watch ourselves and our emotions for any changes and reactions and triggers. We become hyper-sensitive to our inner life and how it relates to therapy culture language. Of course, being under-aware of your inner life and your emotions is dangerous, too. A good therapist should help you develop a healthy awareness of yourself without becoming self-conscious, hyper-aware, or morbid. The goal of therapy should not be that you walk around thinking therapy thoughts, but that you live your life. And I fear that sometimes we can get lost in our own self-surveillance.

The purpose of surveillance, again, is mastery. And the purpose of resonance is to live your life, to allow your mind the freedom to wander and explore and meditate and contemplate, which can be difficult when you struggle with depression or anxiety, but it should be a goal, as I’ve written about before. The life of mastery through constant application of techniques of therapy is not truly living. A posture of resonance would be to learn and apply those valuable techniques during treatment, but then to allow them to drift into the background, because the ultimate goal of recovery is not scientific mastery of the mind but freedom for the mind to be what it was created to be.

What’s truly fascinating to me about India’s article is that the core of her argument is mastery versus mystery, which I want to reframe as mastery versus resonance. And it seems to me that this theme is just as relevant outside of mental health. The current debate about A.I. is also a debate about mastery versus resonance. When you write, is it more important to master the content, or to resonate with it playfully in a free exchange between your mind and what you write? When we do politics together, is it merely a matter of mastering the masses, or is the goal to resonate with individual people and their needs and desires? Resonance requires the recognition of the other and the belief that it is good that the other exists and is not consumed or mastered. So much of our culture, and especially our culture wars, is premised on the concept of mastery.

In any event, please read

Freya India

’s article. It’s worth it, even if you disagree. And I think all of us would do well to consider, as we consider our own mental health, to what extent we are allowing the (God-given and good!) tools for treatment, like labels, as tools for mastery and control, and how we can adopt a posture of resonance even with our own minds, not accepting suffering needlessly or foregoing help, but acknowledging the irreducibility of our minds.