Joanthan Haidt article on why 'emotional thinking' causes depression in young women

[purplevipersgrass]

It's quite a long article and covers a lot of ground, but basically it posits that the kind of catastrophic ('Terfs want to hurt and kill transpeople'), black and white (TWAW, No Debate) and emotional thinking ('Ignore the facts, be kind') that we associate with TRAs and young people is responsible for actively causing depression — particularly among young liberal women. Being conservative and less inclined to being a bleeding heart offers some protection.

Haidt points out that CBT, used to treat depression, is designed to tackle and dismantle these unhelpful ways of thinking, but movements such as genderism instil and rely on them.

jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Haidt's other book is equally insightful- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Poitics and Religion.

In it he uses a framework for understanding why people behave the way they do. There's a set of attributes he calls (from memory) foundations e.g. care/harm and this is what drives them. Well worth a read. There are lots of lectures and interviews on YouTube if that's more your thing.

It has been stated on here before that, because of the protocol of affirmation and the assertion that “being trans” is a natural and normal state of being, rather than a mental health disorder, newer supportive treatments, such as CBT, have never been tried in this cohort of patients.

These patients, in my opinion, are in a situation where they have drawn a false conclusion about themselves (that they are, or should really be the opposite sex). Then as they attempt to maintain that falsehood, they are being encouraged towards paranoid feelings by the constant barrage of negativity from many sources, about how they will be traumatised by minor occurrences and how they will be beset by suicidal feelings if denied anything they think they want.

It seems that CBT to challenge every single one of those false assumptions and hyperbolic negative messages might easily be a more healthy approach than encouraging them in their continued pursuit of an impossible dream.

Yes, very well said. This is exactly how I’ve tried to bring mine up. You’ll have great times, crap times and hopefully mostly fine times. Life isn’t always fair but things usually work out at least ok. Calm down, get a grip and get on with it.

I forwarded the article to a friend in academia who will retire this summer with massive relief. She said it made sense of all the things she'd observed in the last 10 years. She said that once smartphones came in there was a clear change in the attitudes of her students.

We've had a nostalgic chat about our experience of growing up, including setting off for India and America for our gap years with our parents waving casually and asking us to send a postcard every now and then. These days my cousins in New Zealand phone their 25-year-old working in London at 7am each day for a FaceTime session...

Yes, I think that's absolutely a big part of what we are seeing now. And both parenting trends and political rhetoric are feeding into it more and more.

I would say that the fact that in many societies girls have or have had less control over their lives might have an impact. There could be a certain amount of learned helplessness.

Though I am not sure that the locus of control has to be on big picture things necessarily, like what career you choose. I think it's also about things like learning self-control and how to take action in normal society, including play, or learning a new skill and so on. Just the experience of taking something on and doing it. Also learning to control your own body and emotions, which is often a little different for boys and girls, though I think both sexes deal with it.

I think even in the past when there were fewer choices in many ways, young people had more of these kinds of experiences of immediate action and result. Many kids today don't do much for themselves at all, even though they have a lot of certain kinds of choices.

I have really noticed this too. Things like waiting in line at the bank, with nothing to entertain you. Or wearing those awful old itchy tights that keep falling down and ugly clothes for special occasions. Or being hungry until meal time.

In one way it seems like, why would you keep these kinds of things if you can avoid them, they stink. Especially the stupid tights or clothes you don't like.

But at the same time it seems like so so many children now can't bear even the most minor discomforts, and cease to cope when they have to deal with them. But it seems like they are not building up the skills to deal with these things.

Brilliant article expressing much of what I've observed in students over the past few years. I have a lot of compassion for young people as many of them have zero social skills, resilience, courage etc. They have indeed been coddled.

I agree with the vast majority of this however there are also some dangers in teaching people that external factors aren't what drives your emotional responses. I was married to an alcoholic and most of the advice given to someone who loves an alcoholic is very much along those lines. Ie, you need to control how their behaviour affects you. Their actions don't make you sad, your reactions to their actions make you sad. I'm someone who has always had a strong internal locus of control, so I went along with that for years. Finding my own ways to be happy in that marriage.

Yet the simple fact of the matter is that was bullshit. My husband's actions were making me extremely unhappy. So unhappy that I had forgotten what normal feels like. And the happiness and contentment I'd taught myself to feel within that marriage was keeping me in a state of deep overall misery. Someone was very much making me unhappy and acknowledging that and walking away from it made me very, very happy.

So it's a situation that is often extremely complicated. I was being told to take control of the situation by being responsible for my own happiness because my husband wasn't responsible for my misery. Where as the reality is that I needed to take control of the situation by recognising that someone outside of my was making me miserable and removing myself from the situation. So there are plenty of situations where it's actually very, very helpful to realise that an external factor is causing you misery. Because that's essential to taking control.

I don't think Haidt is arguing that it's all in your head. Of course our circumstances affect us. But we have to take personal responsibility for changing those circumstances when we can.

Telling children that they need other people not to recognize what sex they are, and that if other people do recognize their sex, they will feel terrible, has to be the ultimate externalisation of that locus of control.

It places them as tiny boats adrift in the ocean of other people's reactions.

Interesting observation. Being nosy, where was the pressure on you to manage your feelings regarding your husband's alcoholism coming from? I once had a friend married to a man who eventually drank himself to death in his 40s. She stayed with him because she was a devout Catholic and felt she'd made a commitment she couldn't break.

I'm interested because I think stoicism is generally a good thing. I was brought up by a mum who was a teenager living in London during the war and had her own perspective on what was catastrophic and what wasn't. But I do think the downside is that stoics can stick in there being stoical for too long at times.

This, this! This is the tragedy, isn't it? A life spent obsessed with how the world perceives them and how to change the world to fit their self-image/ identity.

Al-anon and a number of other support groups and therapists I went to that used the Al-anon/AA model as the basis of their treatment. The only people who ever told me he was making me unhappy and that I should consider leaving him were my parents. And they did that very, very carefully as they were worried about pushing me away if they were too forthright.

(It's not really the topic of their thread but I've since looked a lot into the roots of al-anon and it was founded based off Bill Wilson's (creator of AA) chapter in The Big Book that he wrote as if written by his wife Lois, to essentially tell women to stay in their marriages and leave their husband's to it.)

I read somewhere that 2/3 of Mother's would prefer to stay economically inactive and stay at home with their children, for whatever reasons they don't. Guilt can so strange things to patents.

What have all these support groups, therapists and MH services achieved?

I don't know anyone they have actually helped, I have seen some drugged zombies and some brain damaged from Electric shock treatment even worse than had they not visited.

I seriously thinks all these theories, attachment, Queer, Freud, AlAnon stc have some elements that may be slightly helpful to a few, none are the answer to life or for everyone, yet their cult members get angry at blasphemy and non believes.

But one of the things you could control was whether you stayed. Whether you prioritised him above yourself.
It's not just about feelings. How we feel is one thing, what we do about a second.

When someone is in an abusive situation. Being told by the people that you have gone to for help ia that your own reaction to the abuse is what is making you unhappy as opposed to the abuse is extremely dangerous. That's what I experienced for years. The control I had to leave could only be exercised by understanding that someone else was actually responsible for my unhappiness. It was only my fault in that I stayed with him. But "just leaving" is incredibly difficult and is something that should be supported as opposed to carefully encouraged.

I'm extremely extremely sceptical of the majority of the mental health field. I saw firsthand how very simple it was (and still is) for my XH to manipulate the vast majority of the therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists he saw. And how easy it was for him to move on to another one as soon as they started to see through him. I saw him get addicted to supposedly non addictive SSRIs, get prescribed benzos which he became highly addicted to. I saw how he'd cycle through drug assisted functional states which he'd inevitably crash out of. I saw him absolutely coddled.

After I left him I had his then psychiatrist call me (despite me making it clear I had no more interest in engaging in his treatment) to tell me I was wrong about what I'd experienced with him. That his relapses were inevitable and I should just accept that. It wasn't until I outright asked him why, if he was telling me that he'd never be sober long-term that I should spend my life and raise my DS with him, that he didn't have a smooth answer for me.

I've seen soooo many friends end up in clearly worse places after starting therapy and/or antidepressants. I'm not saying that either of those things are never good or necessary but too often they are applied in a way that is utterly disempowering. When people generally need to feel empowered to improve their situations. Sometimes that empowerment means making radical changes like leaving a partner/job/country. At other times that empowerment comes from learning to live through a situation you can't change. But way, way too often mental health treatment encourages people to do the opposite of what they should be doing.

I read it at the weekend too in I think the Free Press and thought it was very good. And while I’m sure it’s not quite as simple as “reverse CBT” it’s a good model to explain what we are seeing.

As others said the 3 untruths are spot on.

What the article doesn’t do is explore the link between the high status of marginalised identities in this cohort and the reverse CBT effect. It’s not just that people divide the world into good/bad oppressed/oppressors it’s that they develop personalities around traits which allow them access to the more highly prized Good/oppressed categories. But whether or not your feelings are justified, feeling oppressed is pretty miserable so we have the bizarre situation that something that is harmful is simultaneously recognised as such and also desired, a form of self-harm.

(I am also interested in the role of tumblr. I was too old when it was big to pay any attention even though I was aware of it, so the impact on teenage girls completely passed me by.)

What the article doesn’t do is explore the link between the high status of marginalised identities in this cohort and the reverse CBT effect. It’s not just that people divide the world into good/bad oppressed/oppressors it’s that they develop personalities around traits which allow them access to the more highly prized Good/oppressed categories. But whether or not your feelings are justified, feeling oppressed is pretty miserable so we have the bizarre situation that something that is harmful is simultaneously recognised as such and also desired, a form of self-harm.

I think that's very insightful and I haven't seen it articulated so clearly before. But I think it's true. I can remember, as a younger person, the temptation to fall into that kind of thinking and perceptual reality. And I've seen a lot of other people almost force themselves into it, I think for the reason you say, it's a way to claim a higher spot in the power hierarchy.

This sentence jumped out at me as being very sad: “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” It's long bothered me that in teaching people about sexism, racism etc (which we do need to do) we also feed the message that you are a victim because of you innate characteristics and the world is unfair to you. And that seems like a horrible view to go through life with.

It's not that I think it's an untrue statement, but if it assumes too much significance in your life it's unhealthy. I'm actually really glad that I grew up with a message of mostly, 'Sexism is shit, but it's not pervasive any more.' I didn't have my identity built around the fact I was female too, because I thought it didn't matter that much.

As I've got older I've come to see it as a little optimistic, but I don't think it was a bad attitude to grow up with.

Wow, this has been a wonderful thread to read.

Absolutely right. Genderism is an ideology, nothing else.

I think this is insightful and it resonates with my experience of support groups/communities in various ways.

I’ve got an autoimmune condition and a neurodiversity condition. One of the bits of advice everyone gives you when you are diagnosed and at any point where you try to resolve any problems you might be having is to direct you at groups for people with those conditions. Or social media materials produced by the ‘community’ for the ‘community’.

But my experience is that these kind of groups (however well intentioned) very easily fall into a kind of reverse CBT dynamic, an us and them mindset and a kind of victimhood narrative. As a result I’ve always found that engaging with any of this stuff tends to make things harder for me - it actually exacerbates my symptoms and the problems I might be trying to resolve in various ways.

The objection that tends to be raised if you discuss this psychological effect is that you are dismissing the reality of the condition. My autoimmune condition is painful, does affect what I can do, and so on. But considering how a focus on this and how the world doesn’t understand/care/makes things harder - even just a focus on the need to compensate for it all the time - might actually exacerbate this too easily is cast aside as dismissing the experiences of /people with these conditions.

But what I find most useful is things that help me to function in a society that’s composed of all kinds of people. Viewing myself as separate from that and victimised by it really doesn’t help
me.

As I said, mostly the people in these communities are well meaning and trying to do their best/support each other. This article is helpful to me in thinking through why I find that this makes things harder for me.

Outstanding essay thank you so much for sharing. And I agree, it is exacerbated by the competition for most oppressed.