Reflections – Page 25 – Brimmings: up from the well

The quest for individuation: a Jungian looks at Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life”

Intelligent Life, the free cultural news magazine of The Economist, recently featured a fascinating several day exploration of the labyrinthian stream flowing beneath Paris’ infrastructure with its scenarios ranging from party venues to ossuaries and catacombs.

In those outliers of thought that often follow a stimulus, I found myself musing a poem I had presumed I’d long ago relegated to absentia, seeing I retired from college teaching seven years ago. But there it was, Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life,” in bold dress on my mental screen, refulgent in its own musings, pre-Freud, pre-Jung, cogently exploring in all its ebb and flow the subterranean river of the Unconscious that lies deep within all of us, frequently surfacing to veto or check our best intent with intuitive urgency.

Then I thought of Jung’s concept of the Shadow, that primordial aspect of ourselves that can express itself suddenly, individually and collectively, when repressed or unintegrated into consciousness, disrupting relationships and even contributing to social disorder. It isn’t evil in itself, or some kind of resident demon we try our best to confine. The Shadow, no intrinsically Hyde element spotting the cultured Dr. Jekyll of the day world, has potentiality for making ourselves whole as we acknowledge undeveloped aspects of ourselves.

Arnold’s prescient poem acknowledges the Shadow’s salient wisdom in shaping our psyches, especially in regard to our inhibitions, though of course he comes too early (1822-1886) to use that term. On the surface, the poem muses on how even lovers sometimes paradoxically conceal themselves from each other, given the intransigent ego in all of us. Here, the poem begins its prison imagery, prominent throughout the poem.

Alas! Is even love too weak to unlock the heart, and let it speak?
even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?

But the poem probes far deeper in exploring a resident conflict within ourselves arising from the tension between the Ego and the Unconscious, or Shadow element familiar to Jungians.

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchained;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!

Arnold gives tribute to this dimension working its will in us, instinctually, covertly, as our true source of identity. It works in stealth to keep us from tampering with its design to foster wholeness, for the human proclivity is to falsify true feelings in servility to convention:

Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be–
By what distractions he would be possessed,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity–
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

This is hardly Freud’s dynamic of repression at work, but rather the Jungian perspective that each of us is actually two entities in antithesis. The “unregarded river” can be thought of as our instinctual self, defiant of culture, and a legacy of our evolutionary past, the Shadow entity resident in us analogous to the dark side of the moon.

Amid the often banality of our commercial world, we sometimes long for communion with this alter ego. Adroitly, Arnold coalesces mining and river imagery here. We yearn to track the line of ourselves, plumb to its depths, and extract its ore. At this level, the poem anticipates Jung’s concept of “individuation,” or the quest for wholeness; a pilgrimage for conjunction of the Conscious and the Unconscious:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our True, original course;
A longing to inquireInto the mystery of the heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us–to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

Alas, we never do succeed wholly, so deep is that hidden Self, and so we withdraw from the fray, giving ourselves up to distractions:

But deep enough, alas! none ever mines
.……………….
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on forever unexpressed.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well–but ’tis not true!

But neither can we escape this longing within for something more:

From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

Sometimes, however, there occur those transient moments lovers experience, near mystical, when we intuit and achieve unity with our instinctual self, fathom all things about ourselves, and live genuinely with those we love:

When our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed–
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know,
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth forever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face, and an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose, and the sea where it goes.

Some years ago, psychiatrist Reuven Bar-Levav cogently observed that “most people today are at least superficially aware of unconscious motives, but few realize how powerful and how prevalent they are. Man is not what he claims to be” (Thinking in the Shadows, p. 19). Arnold uncannily fathomed this in “The Buried Life” more than 150 years ago, anticipating depth psychology and Jung in particular. Across the years, I have always found this poem riveting for its profundity, beauty and sincerity.

I hope you will like this poem, too.

Do well. Be well.

–rj

How the East can teach us to master our anxieties

In the daily round of life, all of us are prone to experiencing conflict. It’s just the nature of the beast; but what if I told you that a lot of this conflict is of our own making? As Jungian analyst Ken Wilber reminds us in his insightful No Boundary, we’re often into the habit of creating boundaries, by which he means barriers, walling off a great deal of life’s potentiality of larger experience, since we’d rather feel safe in the confines of the familiar.

That said, it reminds me of the fences Robert Frost writes of in his beloved poem, “Mending Wall, that people erect to wall out their anxieties: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Let’s sidetrack for a moment. Have you noticed how many things in life fall into contrary couplings, with one of them tending to be more positive? By way of some examples, here’s my partial list put into categories, and you can add yours:

Spatial: up/down, inside/outside, east/west, near/far, above/below, over/under, wide/narrow

Temporal: morning/evening, today/tomorrow, past/present, sunrise/sunset

Attributes: short/tall, beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, brave/cowardly, smart/dumb

Theological: heaven/hell, good/evil, God/Satan, flesh/spirit

Philosophical: logical/illogical, realist/idealist, rationalist/romantic

Biological: male/female, child/adult, young/old, thin/stout

Psychological: bold/timid, aggressive/passive, introverted/extroverted

My point: These couplings belong to our world, not nature’s, which brings us back to “Mending Wall,” where nature abhors Man’s barrier artifacts represented in the stone wall. While nature may feature its own divergencies such as ripe and unripe, it possesses no mindfulness about them or the accompanying paroxisms that plague us. No dog thinks about its ending or worries about present illness. No bird deliberates on life or death or the hereafter. While nature includes pain and animals respond, it’s physiological and thus without angst.

By contrast, humans hover around their drawn boundaries as bastions preserving their control. In turn, this results in anxiety, limiting their happiness. Ken Wilber sums up our dilemma when he writes, “the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss” (p. 19).

At the heart of what Wilber says, though he doesn’t mention it, lies the concept of polarity, largely an Eastern notion not understood in Western cultures with their foregrounding in dualism. In the polarity approach, which I’m proposing here, we encounter the healthier option, opposites being viewed not as contraries but complementaries, succinctly captured in William Blake‘s dictum that “opposition is true friendship.”

In our Western dualism for instance, we think of good vs evil as utterly opposed and embattled contraries. In the East, this becomes unfathomable as how can you have one devoid of the other? How can you know what good is, unless you have the yardstick of evil? How can you know love unless you also know what lacking it means?

Like virtually all Westerners, I couldn’t get a grasp around this notion of polarities, or two sides to one coin. Then one day it clicked and it’s been a norm for me, informative and helpful, across the years. I had been invited to give a paper at the University of Delhi. Afterwards, I fell into conversation with an Indian delegate and somehow, as often happens in India, it turned metaphysical. I mentioned the Problem of Evil, a salient concern in appraising the credulity of religious belief in the West. His response, simple and direct, startled me: “Problem of evil? What problem? Do we not have day and night, hot and cold, life and death?” The light turned on.

And how does any of this bear on our well-being? If you’re still belaboring this question, go back and review my earlier Wilbur borrowing, as it gets to the very heart of the matter.

When I try to wall out anxieties about what will happen today or tomorrow, or how people will regard me, or matters related to my health, finances, relationships, etc., I invariably allow worry to wreak its cortisol devastation to my health and on my daily well-being.

In the West, we measure progress across the board in science, religion, business and private life as movement towards the positive and elimination of the negative. This is the wrong formula for living the happy life, since it’s foreign to life’s dynamism, or plentitude. Those we love can decline, die, or even engage in perfidy.

Today’s job may not be there tomorrow. Accidents and genes may ultimately define our futures. I think of baseball: very few hitters ever bat 300 and when they do, fewer still repeat it.

To live life well, you need to take the spectrum approach that takes-in the full sweep of life’s potentiality. By the way, this is heart and soul behind why we get life and health insurance. We’re actually better off or lessen our anxiety in facing up to life’s quirkiness.

Opposites aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway. They require each other to exist. I can’t know pleasure apart from the possibility of pain.

Polarity, the notion of complementaries, can ease our wrestlings with our fears, reflected in our desperate folly of erecting fences or boundaries. It also teaches us to simplify our values, particularly the material kind; informs us that nothing is ever really ours, that everything is on lease as it were; helps us treasure what we enjoy now, our families and friends; most of all, enjoins us not to cling. When I give up my exclusions, an unexpected pleasure exhilarates, and I call it grace, for then I am set free. Or as The Bhagavad Gita, or Hindu scripture, has it:

He is to be recognized as eternally free
Who neither loathes nor craves
For he that is free from the pairs,
Is easily freed from the conflict.

Reflections on another New Year

Here we are, once again heading into a new year. With it comes the old anxieties and perhaps even new ones. Calendars are, after all, a human invention. Turning their pages doesn’t resolve life’s events or remove their burdens.

But a new year can also help us take time to cull the clutter of the trivial and reappraise the useful: old habits, bad memories, the good moments.

A new year traditionally triggers new resolutions or priorities. And that’s a good thing.

But good resolves need anchoring by becoming habits. Like newly planted seeds, they need watchful nourishing to assure they root and break the soil and survive Spring’s caprice. This means mindfulness and setting up an inviolable time and place.

New habits often take six to eight weeks to take hold and, even then, require our vigilance.

We can help ourselves to a better year by worrying less about what we’re powerless to change and forgiving those who’ve grieved us, knowing they’re the true prisoners. We can nourish ourselves in thinking the positive, and the reward may often be we we’re right. Through yoga, meditation and enhanced breathing, we can practice mindfulness, yielding discipline and reducing stress. We may not always avoid the stressful, but we can lessen its fallout by learning to bend with it, like survivor trees in high wind.

Maybe in addition to choosing better what we eat and exercising more we might do well to listen less to our daily news with its negative focus on human misdeeds. I’m not advocating an ostrich stance in this, but simply uprooting stress by focusing on life’s good things and how we might bring them about, perhaps by not taking ourselves so seriously and, instead, developing greater awareness of those around us and of nature and of each day’s new possibilities for marshaling happiness. What’s more rewarding than a kind word, a lover’s kiss, a child’s laughter, a red sunset, an airport embrace, etc.

Our resolutions ought to include more love and kindness, less worry, more acceptance.

It’s then we truly affect others, inspiring them to find their own radiance through our example of upbeat living.

All of this doesn’t come easily, so there’s truth to the axiom that bad habits die hard.

But as in a spring field erupting into its extravagant riot of weed and vegetable, we must begin the work of uprooting anything and everything that would overwhelm the tender shoots promising future harvest of what sustains.

As Voltaire reminds us, we can’t always alter time’s events, but where we are, whoever we are, we can till our own garden and make it bloom.

Do well. Be well.

I am what I remember: reflections on memory

What can it be like to not have anything to think about, or to lose the propensities of sentience, that dismal fate of those with dementia or Alzheimer’s? To lose one’s sight, or one’s hearing, or even one’s speech, are among life’s greatest wounds, but they dwarf up against the inability to recall. Universally, in myth and in legend, whether in the guise of the Sirens’ alluring song or the serpent’s Edenic mischief, or in Goethe’s overreaching Faust, man’s greatest quest has been his striving for knowledge. But without memory, his quest is nullified, for knowledge is its source. In Dante’s Inferno, the sinful dead are bereft of memory and hence doomed to an eternal present empty of knowledge.

Flipping through the calendar of years, I find myself more forgetful and, thus sometimes anxious, for I am what I remember. But I draw comfort in learning that even thirty-year olds sometimes lapse and cannot remember where they put the keys or what the errand was they had set out upon, or just what really did happen earlier that day at work.

I’ve learned long ago that there exist two kinds of memory: long and short. I’m pretty good at the former, but lousy at things I really ought to remember, since I had just heard them, like recalling a name. I envy the ability of some to hear a name and remember it for the next occasion; to see a face and know it in Walmart a year later, or even better, in a car at 45 mph, to see through shaded glass, and fetch a face. How does one work this magic? My wife does it daily, but doesn’t share her secret.

There may be blessings to all this forgetting, however, and if this is so, I’m a pretty lucky guy. Do I really want to remember everything I’ve bumped into along life’s road? As actress Ingrid Bergman put it, “Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”

Psychiatry has grown prosperous on clientele unable to forget the past, hence condemned to repeat its burden, each day renewing yesterday’s quarrel, betrayal or loss. T. S. Eliot, that cogent modern interpreter of memory overload, wrote of the coming of spring without revival and a new generation incarcerated by memory: “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory….”

In a landmark book, The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel Schacter, former Chair of Harvard’s Psychology Department, tells us that for all our lapses in memory, memory provides a means to adaptation in helping us sort out the really useful. Memory sometimes blesses us when it malfunctions through transience (the weakening of memory over time), absent-mindedness (not remembering where you put things), blocking (the inability to recall a name or face), misattribution (assigning a memory item to a wrong source) suggestibility (implanting memory through leading questions), bias (the reshaping of memory through influential events or opinions), and persistence (the inveterate recall of disturbing events or information).

George Duhamel puts all of this into succinct summation when he writes in The Heart’s Domain that “We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.”

The poet Wordsworth must have had it right then, for more than any poet I know, he drew from the well of memory, creating a reflective poetry that nourishes us still in its ability to sort out life’s essentials that make for human solace.

But again, without memory we may exist, but without being. If life is in the blood as the ancients had it rightly, then it follows that memory lends it exuberance and hence the source not only of pain or loss, but of joy and renewal.

Ultimately, we are what we remember.

New York’s icon of courage: the Brooklyn Bridge

When I think of New York City landmarks, flashes of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the legendary Yankee Stadium, alas, now gone, leap to my mind. But there’s an underdog landmark I like best: the Brooklyn Bridge, stubborn and stunning in its granite towers and glistening, criss-crossing steel cables. An inspiring story lies behind its construction against formidable odds involving three members of a remarkable family.

Opened on May 24, 1883, after 14-years of construction that would cost the lives of 27 workers, including its designer, it was the wonder of its era as America’s first steel cable suspension bridge. Celebrating its 130th birthday as of next May, it continues as a principal artery spanning the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn with 150,000 users daily.

It originated as the idea of a German immigrant, John Augustus Roebling, in 1863. He had built earlier bridges; for example, the bridge spanning the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, and another across the Niagara Gorge. When it came to the East River, many said it couldn’t be done.

For a time, it seemed the critics had it right. Shortly before construction began in 1869, Roebling’s toes on one foot were crushed in a freak accident when a ferry boat slammed into the dock on which Roebling was standing while taking compass readings across the East River. Following amputation of his toes, he succumbed to tetanus 3-weeks later.

His son, Washington, now took charge of the project. Tragedy, however, knocked on the Roebling family door again, when Washington came down with the bends, or decompression sickness from underwater labor, resulting in lifelong confinement to a wheelchair. Forced to watch the construction from a telescope, he conveyed his instructions to his wife, Emily.

Her feat is remarkable in its own right, since she had no previous knowledge of bridge dynamics. Over the next 11-years, mastering the intricacies of her husband’s calling including mathematics, catenary curve calculations and material substances, she would accurately convey his instructions to the workers.

Appropriately, in the ceremonies featuring President Chester A. Arthur, Emily was the first to ride across the bridge, a rooster in her lap as a symbol of victory.

A super icon of a super city, the bridge was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

One of the best times to view the bridge is at night, when the Gothic charms of its pointed arches are bathed in light.

The noted historian David McCoullough details the bridge’s construction in The Great Bridge (1978) and Ken Burns followed with his first documentary in 1981.

San Francisco has its romantic Golden Gate, just maybe one of the most eye-pleasing bridges in the world. But for me, my first love remains the Brooklyn Bridge, in no small measure because my romanticism clings to the story of a family’s perseverance in the face of tragedy and thus lends hope to all of us.

New Yorkers know this especially well, whether its October 1929, or 9/11, or hurricane Sandy’s more recent devastation.

Reflections on post racist America

“America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight–who can walk into a room and accept with real comfort that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions.”

David Simon, creator of the smash HBO series, The Wire, wrote those words the morning after the recent election (davidsimon.com). And he’s right!

In fact, the President’s reelection has rekindled my hope in the reality of a new, a better America taking shape before our very eyes, a nation where finally e pluribus unum (“one out of many”) takes on reality.

I say this even though I voted Green in my concerns about climate change. It hadn’t anything to do with race. I lost that notion somewhere long ago in the junk heap of the past relegated to the landfill of oblivion.

As a boy, I largely grew-up as a street kid playing stick ball daily against factory walls that lined my neighborhood in waterfront Fishtown, one of Philly’s toughest bastions of crime, meanness and prejudice. Family and environment shaped my early perceptions and the result wasn’t pretty.

Joining the air force at 17 my world grew larger, as windows opened to new breezes. Many of my fellow airmen were black and, along with them, a then small sprinkling of hispanics. Accept for color, we blended in our mutual dependency on each other. I developed a close friendship with one of them and the race issue never came up. We were just plain salt and pepper. One day while eating in the chow hall, I heard rumors of the accidental death of an airman. It was my friend, Keith. He was 21.

As a college student following the end of my enlistment I had the good fortune of initially attending a Detroit school with a strong minority presence. Again, there were no differences, apart from the mix of personalities you would find across the general population. One of my black fellow students went on to executive status with General Motors.

Graduate school at the University of North Carolina changed things once and for all. We were all pretty much competitive academics on equal footing at an excellent institution. Color or ethnicity made no difference.

Teaching students across the years reaffirmed the same truths: that we’re all members of the human community, sharing in the elements that define us for good or bad. Among my best memories of teaching, particularly when I taught part-time in a local community college, are those of my black students who, in several instances, became my good friends. We shared so many of the same values that I once remarked, “I’m white on the outside, but black on the inside.” Our character, not our color, was what mattered.

In this hemisphere, vibrant Brazil with its many handsome men and women has long had the reputation of being a multi-racial nation. In America, while we’ve been multi-ethnic for quite some time, we’ve not truly been multi-racial and, sadly, much of our history is fraught with our mistreatment of minorities among us, with enslavement of blacks for the first 250 years and the necessity of fighting a civil war to end it, followed by a century of segregation in the South; genocide against our indigenous people, stealing their land, and confining the survivors to reservations; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the legalization of discrimination in our immigration policies beginning with the early 1920s.

But the new demographics are fast writing a vastly different chapter in our history that promises equal opportunity to achieve the American Dream for everyone. Hispanics now comprise a majority of California’s population, portending their national status a few decades from now. Asians, the fastest growing minority, are currently 5% of our population, with their numbers doubling every ten years. By just 2043, or a mere 30-years from now, whites will become the new minority. America has always been about assimilation, except for race; that is, until now. Currently, 15% of our marriages are interracial. And, of course, our president is bi-racial.

In 2008, we gained our first African-American President. A few weeks ago saw his reelection, not because of his color, but because a majority agreed with his overall policies.

And let’s not forget that not only is America transcending race, it’s also putting aside sexual, gender and religious purviews.

This is as it should be. This is America at its best!

Reflections on living the simple life

Simplicity is about
subtracting the obvious
and adding the meaningful.
–John Meeks

There is a movement afoot known as minimalism, and by this I mean a lifestyle characterized by simplicity. The movement deserves a better name, something like simple living, since minimalism nearly always denotes a movement within the Fine Arts, e. g., music and painting.

You can view a growing number of websites and blogs dedicated to simple living. One of the more prominent ones, and my favorite, is Rowdy Kittens with its 100,000 readers, a quite lovely site filled with wholesome counseling for uncluttering our lives,

The simple living movement traces back to ancient history. Samson in the Old Testament was a Nazarite, or follower of an ascetic mode of living. The early Christian community was also noted for its communistic regimen, with goods shared in common. In Grecian times, there is Epicurus who cautioned moderation in all things and the danger of accumulating goods.

The East is even more famous for its preachments of the simple life. I think of Buddha, Lao-zi, and Confucious.

In America, there’s my favorite, Henry David Thoreau, with his remarkably quotable Walden. I have read this work several times over and you can see my enthusiasm for it abundantly evidenced in my omnivorous underlining and scribbled notations.

In fact, America, a country of abundant wealth, has a surprisingly vibrant tradition of simple living advocacy: the Shakers, now extinct, and the Plain People, or Amish, for examples.

Abroad, I think of another favorite author of mine, Leo Tolstoy, whose asceticism following his religious conversion, got him into considerable domestic difficulty as he sought to give up his wealth. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” somber, intense, and profound, has always resonated well with me in its cautions again excess, and I have it almost by heart, as I taught it for nearly three decades as a college prof.

The greatest exemplar of this way of life in more recent times is Mohandas Gandhi. I remember seeing the possessions of this man I have always loved: a mat, cup, sandals, a pair of wire glasses.

A nation where simplicity has been a traditional staple is Japan. I will always remember the simple life I lived in the mountains surrounding the Nikko temples as a young serviceman on R&R: an unadorned kimono, raw fish and seaweed veggies, a hot bath, followed by a bed on the floor with a hard pillow, and sunset and sunrise setting the parameters of sleep.

Will this rediscovery of simple living take hold? I think not, though to our great loss, for it has much to teach us, if we will listen. We live with economies that preach growth, not sustainability, which may be the death of us.

Simple living is good not only for ourselves, but for our wounded planet that can only right itself if the majority of us, worldwide, heed the wisdom of simple living.

I wish I could be more hopeful. It’s just that there exist two primary lifestyles: of possession and of being, with the former having the upper hand by a large margin.

Possession, or accumulation, leads to inequality, founds classes or social hierarchy, fosters envy, social strife, and spills over into war.

Being, on the contrary, begets concern for life’s essentials, our needs and not our wants. There is no rancor when people live by their needs and do not exceed their fellows in goods. Being means to prize people and not possess them; to see nature for its own sake and not as a quarry. Being means an ability to let go.

Replacing anxiety born of compulsion, we find blessedness.

Do well and be well,

Spare me your heart: the plight of the mentally ill

In the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, a shocked nation seems finally to be taking a hard look at mental illness, although for the wrong reasons. Gun control, with 250 to 300 million guns out there, owned by 60 million across the United States, would be a hard nut to crack even if legislation, unlikely, were to become law and remains the salient issue. Unfortunately, indicting the mentally distressed is subterfuge for not dealing with the primary source of our national mayhem.

While I agree with those voices calling for attention to our mental illness epidemic, I think it’s kindled by media sensationalism that would indict millions who suffer grievously as it is. I must point out that only 4% of our annual murders are committed by someone mentally ill (Richard Friedman, NYT, December 17, 2012). These vociferous voices simply add to the stigmatizing of the mentally ill. On the other hand, guns are very much the public health issue, if we define health as well-being. In the wrong hands, they foster tragedy, and most of these guns are found in American homes as happened with the Lanzas.

I want to outline here, however, just how serious mental illness is as a pervasive and growing presence and the compassion it should elicit from us rather than lynch mob condemnation. At the conclusion, I’ll offer some final commentary.

What is mental illness? When we talk of someone being mentally ill we’re not necessarily dealing with hard core psychotics such as schizophrenics. Mental illness affects how one feels, thinks, and ultimately behaves. While all of us occasionally experience ups and downs, those suffering from a “mental disorder” are simply overwhelmed and unable to cope. They may suffer, for example, from acute depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, and addictions that simply won’t go away. This frequently results in problems at work and at home and needs prompt, professional intervention.

What are its causes? Possible causes may include

Heredity: Genetics may be suspected when mental illness affects several family members within or across generations. Certain stress situations may trigger it.

Trauma: an experience such as a death of a loved one or break-up in a relationship, being a crime victim, group rejection, war violence, declining health, a financial loss and a problematic childhood leading to low self-esteem and distorted thinking can be tipping points.

Chemical imbalance: Changes in brain chemistry affecting neurotransmitters and/or hormonal abnormalities may affect mood.

How common is it? Mental illness is pervasive world-wide. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports an incidence rate of 33% . In the United States, the figure approaches 46%. It affects all social-economic sectors.

Key symptoms:

Inability to focus
Constant sadness
Excessive worrying
Insomnia
Difficulty managing anger and hostility
Detachment from reality: hallucination, delusional thinking, Paranoia
Obsessive-Compulsive rituals
Sudden mood fluctuations
Excessive anxiety
Suicide thoughts
Feelings of abandonment
Eating disorders: anorexia, bulimia, etc.
Substance abuse (frequently addiction is associated with mental illness).

How is it treated? Treatment includes counseling, often accompanied with medication; brain stimulation such as electroconvulsive therapy for those not responding to traditional methods; treatment in a residential community (hospital).

Prognosis: Outcomes can be positive for milder forms of mental illness, provided the individual adheres to treatment protocol, has a network of support, and makes lifestyle changes such as reducing stress, exercising, making friends, finding interests, and developing a positive outlook. There are many others, however, who can only be managed, not cured.

Cost impact: The costs of mental illness are staggering, both direct and indirect costs. Direct costs include therapy, hospitalization and medication. Presently, these outlays consume nearly 20% of medical expenditures annually. Indirect costs, more difficult to measure, outweigh direct costs by a hefty margin in lost income (an estimated $192 billion in 2008), educational attainment, disability payments, homelessness (one third of our homeless population is deemed mentally ill), social violence, litigation and incarceration (22% of prison inmates have been diagnosed as mentally ill). (Thomas Insel, “Assessing the Economic Costs of Mental Illness,” Journal of American Psychiatry, June 2008).

And then there are the suicides, those thousands who have simply surrendered to their depression. (Suicide numbers, by the way, have been increasing, not helped by the economic recession, and currently are the 10^th leading cause of death annually.

Final Reflections: The mentally ill, unfortunately, are frequently stigmatized as “maniacs,” “loonies,” “crazies,” “weirdoes,” “zombies,” etc. I think we know the litany. It’s so bad that a large number of the mentally distressed are afraid to get help. Psychiatry itself hasn’t helped the situation. Many psychiatrists in private practice turn down Medicare patients in favor of more lucrative insurance payouts, or cater to a more affluent clientele. They eschew paper trails and generally require cash payment in full for each session, though they may allow you the convenience of your credit card, but don’t bet on it. Like all professionals, they differ in quality or competence.

Psychiatry itself, since the 90s, has primarily surrendered therapy to the psychologists and social workers, opting for chemical treatment instead and, for this, a client can expect a usual allotment of 15 minutes to periodically check on the SSRI effectiveness at $100 plus. The truth is that much of this medication may be dubious, as new research continues to confirm that those given a placebo do virtually as well.

Health insurance, meanwhile, more often than not, discriminates against those with a “history,” that may simply be a prescription for anxiety or depression. Formularies have a way of being akin to finger prints in tracking down the mentally distressed, even if now recovered, under the guise of pre-existent illness. While the Health Reform Act when fully implemented in 2014 prohibits using pre-existent illness as a pretext for rejecting an applicant, it does not prohibit insurance companies from setting higher rates, which is like trusting the fox to take care of the chickens.

The one tool that has helped a good many to cope is cognitive therapy, sometimes called Rational Emotive Therapy) in which patients are taught how to think past painful emotions by substituting positive thought alternatives. We need more of it—a whole lot more.

One of the dismaying aspects of the mental illness syndrome is how neglected it has been, from the homeless right down to the incarcerated. While you can find a plethora of resources for the mentally challenged, not so for those suffering mental distress and we, as well as they, suffer the consequences.

All of this should not be! Consider that every year nearly 60 million Americans wrestle with mental illness. It knows no social/economic boundary. It could be your neighbor, your fellow worker, your spouse, your child. It could someday be you.

Returning to Richard Friedman in his NYT article, he hits the nail on the head in summarizing the wolves howling to get at the mentally ill when he writes, “All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.”

In the 1930s there was a landmark song that defined those tough times: “Brother, can you spare a dime?” There’s a new song in town: Brother, sister, can you spare your heart?”

POSTSCRIPT: I came upon this just published article on the paucity of mental health resources since publishing this post two weeks ago. it reinforces what I’ve written in my post:
Families Face Mental Illness Barriers

The enigma of coincidence

Chance often plays a key part in our lives. In fact, it’s how we got here.

It also sometimes saves our lives. I’ve come close several times, escaping only by a hair.

You might even say chance rules our lives, determining where we’re born, the culture that shapes our behaviors and beliefs, friends we make, and our life mates.

On occasion, I find myself asking What ifs. What if I had chosen to do that instead of this? Frost wrote a famous poem about it called “The Road not Taken” with its telling rejoinder, “And that has made all the difference.”

In short, chance has this mysterious aspect to it, a sense that it’s more than randomness or simple caprice; that just maybe it’s the work of an entity transcending both ourselves and nature. This is especially true when coincidence, a kind of sub-species of chance, occurs. The famous Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, thought so and called it synchronicity, a way of happening whose effects are to be associated with meaning rather than cause. Jung wasn’t alone here, as Arthur Koestler gave it prominence in his compelling, The Roots of Coincidence.

All of us can probably recount those odd, inexplicable intrusions of coincidence in our lives; for example, you’ve just been thinking about someone you’ve lost connection with and, lo and behold, there they are.

Or you and your spouse suddenly come out with the same word or phrase. When my wife and I were first dating we both simultaneously blurted out “deciduous” on that one autumn day graced with beauty.

Coincidence, or synchronicity elements tend to fall into the two categories of time and space. Those I just gave deal with convergency in a temporal way. Those of space, on the other hand, deal with place. For instance, years ago, I was changing trains for Vienna in a small German town, Fūssen, when a woman with an American accent came up to me asking if I spoke English, as she needed train information. As we talked she asked where I was from, and I told her Kentucky. She then inquired if I had ever heard of Wilmore. She had a sister teaching at Asbury University. It so happened that I lived in Wilmore and was teaching at the same university. And all of this in a remote station in a foreign land. For most of us, that kind of synchronicity is hard to explain away as simple coincidence. and we remember it always.

The most remarkable occurrence of coincidence, however, happened when I was in India many years ago. Taking advantage of the several hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany, I wandered into the airport bookstore and ultimately purchased Erich Fromm’s To Have Or To Be. I didn’t suspect the rebound of this choice with its brilliant critique of Man’s insatiable penchant for acquisition that conversely preys on his well-being. A few days later, I was at a tiger sanctuary in India, having supper at a long table with mostly Aussies and a fair sprinkling of Europeans, when across from me sat this Swiss couple talking about Fromm’s book! Now mind you, this wasn’t exactly a hot, top ten item out of the NYT’s listing. A densely written book about economics, most people wouldn’t bother, and yet here this couple was into it. And then there was the oddity that had I been just a few places down the table, I’d have missed all of this.

Coincidence didn’t stop there, however, as three weeks later there I was sitting in the Bombay (as it used to be called) airport waiting for my flight to Germany, and took out my Fromm again to pass the time. Nearby sat the crew of an Air France flight waiting to board their plane to Paris. Out of the blue, this beautiful French flight attendant got up and sat down beside me. She told me she had been reading this book recently, too. No sooner were the words out of her mouth, and she was whisked away as the call came to board.

How can something so unlikely like this even happen? To this day, I can’t explain it. At the time, I thought there might be some message being sent me from above, a signal if you will. Jung, whom ironically I would take up in serious study just a few years later, held that it was important to be sensitive to such moments as they hinted at a higher reality transcending the causal that can only be perceived intuitively.

I suppose you can resort to the law of higher numbers to explain such phenomena; for example, the more people in a room above 25, the more likely you’ll find two of them sharing the same birthday.

This is why many scientist believe there exist other worlds among the myriad galaxies that populate the universe. Sooner or later, the unlikely proves probable, given the high numbers.

Still, this law of numbers seems incongruous to me in unraveling my Indian moment as I really don’t fly that much, or read Fromm-like books frequently, or am into making myriad connections with others, or simply encountering a stimulating focus that filters out competing dissonance.

One thing I do know is that life with its quirks can sometimes prove stranger than fiction, which of course makes it all the more interesting.

Do well. Be well,

Death with Dignity: the last great civil-rights crusade

My biggest disappointment in last month’s election has to do with the Death with Dignity proposal going down to defeat in my native Massachusetts. I was surprised, given the progressive politics of the Bay State. Early indications suggested it would win public approval easily.

The story behind its defeat is a familiar one featuring a pile on of reactionary interests, conservative and religious, who vehemently oppose gays, and free choice seemingly habitually. I won’t bother you with specific details of Question 2’s defeat, as Paula Span has touched all the bases in her informative NYT piece (December 6, 2012), except to note that it came down to, as it usually does, big bucks and, in Massachusetts, largely from out-of-state.

I speak for myself, but I find it galling when people attempt to impose their moral and/or religious views on others. History is replete with the bloody violence of parochialism, and it continues as one of our primary challenges globally since 9/11. In America, the violence gets transposed to highly charged rhetoric such as “assisted suicide,” as if words possess truth density.

When it comes to wanting to die with dignity, we’re talking about an individual’s right to choose in its most fundamental sense as an exercise in personal sovereignty. In violating that space we perpetrate suffering at another’s expense and, frankly, what’s moral about that? We do better by our pets when we withhold compassion for our terminally ill loved ones.

I remember how my father died in the VA hospital in Chesea, strapped in his bed to subdue his thrashings. It went on for days. Where lies the nobility in all of that?

I remember my brother after his surgery for brain cancer, no longer himself. He languished another six months, dying on his 47th birthday.

How would they have opted had they been granted a choice? I don’t think I need to go there.

We forget that should luck and genes lengthen our days, that ultimately we may wish they hadn’t, given the many exits death provides, In the distancing of our complacency, we can too easily forfeit our humanity. But we needn’t wait for whatever our last years hold, since none of us knows his daily fate.

Forgotten in all this is the landmark case of 21-year old Karen Ann Quinlan (1954-1986), who lapsed into a vegetative state for several months following her alleged drug use at a party, leading to her parents’ request to remove her from the ventilator. The hospital refused, culminating in a torturous litigation. The same voices we heard in last fall’s discussion of the landmark proposal were heard then. Finally, the New Jersey Supreme Court would rule in her parents’ favor and Karen Ann was removed from her mechanical ventilator. She would-live on for nearly ten years before her succumbing to pneumonia.

Today, we don’t blink an eye at “passive euthanasia,” including those who have vehemently opposed Death with Dignity legislation. What’s more, we grant individual wish in such matters universally via that early question they always ask in pre-surgery registration: Do you have a Living Will? What provides the difference in the Death with Dignity Act is that I can exercise that right for myself, fully conscious, in the context of my final 6-months of life and exclude a hydra-head of suffering that profits no one and weighs down my loved ones with both grief and expense.

Only two states have passed such legislation, but I’m not discouraged. As one embattled New Englander, Paul Revere, put it long ago concerning his resolve not to yield to his foes, “We have not yet begun to fight.”

Vermont, my favorite state, both for its green mountain beauty and fiercely independent people, is a coming battleground. I think we shall prevail.

I hear rumblings from all over this land as state legislators become more mindful and wrestle with progressive proposals. While we haven’t yet succeeded in states beyond Oregon and Washington, the groundswell is there for achieving a civil right long past its due. The seed has been planted.

Someday our children will look back in disbelief at a society that once embraced slavery, denied women the vote, free choice and equal pay, railed against unions, bullied gays, upheld segregation and, lastly, denied dignity to the terminally I’ll.

What a wonderful day that will be!

—

Do well. Be well,

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