Struggle-based identities: When are they worth it?
Blogger and psychiatrist Scott Alexander wonders when, if ever, “naming and pointing to a mental health problem make[s] it worse.” Some of that debate is about very concrete mental health problems that are relatively easy to measure, such as suicides. Raising awareness about the problem can save lives by prompting better treatment of at-risk people — but it can also prompt copycat deaths. There’s a huge scholarly literature about how to discuss suicide without making it worse: one panel of experts in 1989 urged journalists to avoid simplistic or sensational coverage, and avoid providing “how-to” information to readers. Fair enough.
Similar dynamics arise for things like anorexia — there are important benefits to highlighting the problem and offering help to those who suffer it, but there is also strong evidence that public attention to the issue can spark people to mimic the behavior and suffer from the disease.
There are a bunch of other, less severe psychological challenges where one can likewise wonder, are we approaching this in a way that makes it worse?
A big area where this comes up is in identifying with trauma or harm — that is, treating negative experiences as if they are a defining part of your identity.
To some extent, negative experiences impact us whether we want them to or not. But it can still be hard to say whether making a bigger deal out of something, and treating it as a central plot point in one’s own or others’ story, is for the best.
I’ve wondered about this personally with physical disability. One version of my story has disability at its core: I had a mild physical handicap, as a kid could hide it if I tried, and learned to pay a lot of attention to where I stood with others, to how I stood. On the playground, I retreated into books and learning, deciding I’d rather be good-different by being a nerd than bad-different because I couldn’t play sports. I got teased, saw the fear and vulnerability in the kids who were meanest to me, and ended up curious about the weak places in others.
When I became a Rhodes scholar, I didn’t mention my disability to any of the reporters who wrote about the scholarship win. I told friends at the time that, having worked as a journalist I could just imagine how “Crip wins Rhodes” would be the easy headline to write, and I didn’t want that. I was — and am — afraid that if I give the tough bits any space, they’ll loom over everything.
It’s not purely up to me, how much CP matters to my story. It’s some weird mix where I get influence, but not control, over — and where there are both very real benefits, and very real costs, to every possible way of handling things. That’s part of why this has to be a shared conversation:
In the part that’s outside individual control, we’re all deciding whether or not to shift the spotlights toward one another’s weaknesses.
Conservatives are afraid that we’re raising a generation of fragile kids and young adults, who’ve been taught to focus their biographies on what is weakest or most broken in them or what they’ve been through (and yet at the same time — paradoxically — to seek protection from reminders of these adverse experiences).
The Oppression Olympics — an ironic term I first heard from a friend, describing conversations in woke circles — refers to how people can seek recognition for the worst of what they’ve been through. It can be an incentive, at times, to amplify or exaggerate bad experiences. Also, once an experience becomes a key plot point in your biography, it kind of congeals: You've gotta keep seeing it the same way, or else the story breaks.
The detrimental experience or condition can become a kind of bizarro asset, valuable currency in a culture that is mesmerized by stories of harm and unfairness.
In tandem with this odd pressure, the range of human experiences that we count as socially significant harms is also growing. In Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology, the social psychologist Nick Haslam traces how the definitions of five different psychological problems have stretched wider over recent decades: abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice. These concepts now encompass “milder, subtler or less extreme phenomena than those to which they referred at an earlier time.”
For instance, back in 1980, the official definition of a “traumatic event” used by American psychologists required that the event “would evoke symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and that it was “outside the range of usual human experience.” Illustrative examples of traumatic events were “rape, military combat, natural disasters, car accidents and torture.” Hard but common life experiences, such as chronic illness, the death of a family member, or marital conflict — these rules explained — generally did not rise to the special level that the label “traumatic event” was meant to describe. Today, however, those strictures are all gone. According to a more recent U.S. government definition, Haslam explains:
A traumatic event need not be a discrete event, need not involve serious threats to life or limb, need not be outside normal experience, need not be likely to create marked distress in almost everyone, and need not even produce marked distress in the traumatized person, who must merely experience it as “harmful.”
Similarly, “abuse” historically meant sexual or other physical violence, but has now been broadened to include “emotional abuse” and even the nebulous category of “abuse-and-neglect,” a tent so big that low-income parents of color can be charged with neglect for even momentarily leaving their children unattended. And “bullying” in one early diagnostic instrument meant only direct aggression: being hit, teased, called names, and so on. Now children filling out surveys are told they may have been bullied if someone “gave you the silent treatment.”
Is this pattern good? It doesn’t feel nice to tell a person that their story falls short of some severity yardstick, and thus doesn’t count as an example of the bulling, the abuse, or whatever that well-meaning people are trying to remove from the world. On the other hand, the more of everyday life we put under these labels, the less obvious it gets that we can, or should, get rid of all the labelled stuff. It’s an inflationary pattern that ultimately makes it harder to pick out and focus on genuinely severe problems. Haslam argues that the consequences are mixed: More problems may be addressed and more people may qualify for help, but also (for instance) it may be disempowering for people to regard more of their own experience as pathological.