What far too many of us learn in our deepest darkest hours – our times of greatest need – is that we truly are alone. There really is no one there for us. We learn that in the face of unbearable pain we are better off not asking for help. We are better off trying to figure it out on our own.
It is not only that others can't fix the problem. While that would be nice, for so many of us the social landscape gets far bleaker than this. What we realize is that, in our known world of human beings, there is no one who sees the world the way we do. Perhaps even more painful, there may be no one who seems to notice or even care why we have come to see the world the way that we do.
If you want to understand behavioral health - and what is going on with far too many people - this is a really important point to get. The fact of the matter is that the four demographics that society loves to hate - 'mental illness', 'addictions', 'criminals' and 'the homeless' - all have one thing in common. An estimated ninety (90!) percent of us are survivors of childhood traumas.
Here's some sources if you're having trouble believing that and want to check it out:
- National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD), The Damaging Consequences of Violence and Trauma: Facts, Discussion Points, and Recommendations for the Behavioral Health System (2004).
- National Council for Behavioral Health (Breaking the Silence: Trauma-informed Behavioral Healthcare (2011).
- Nadine Harris, MD, How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime (TED Talk here.)
- Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, SAMHSA's Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach SAMHSA (2014).
- The School of Life, Sanity of Madness (1/18/2016).
For much in life that is traumatic, relationships are a known protective factor. Johanne Hari, The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think But what if such protection is missing...? Even worse, what if human relationships are a big part of the part the problem - as seems to be the case for far too many of us...?
Diagnosis: Widespread Relational Impoverishment
Here's how the relational impoverishment of modern society plays out to produce the 'behavioral health' movie the industry theatre currently is featuring:
Imagine being a kid - maybe you're a toddler, preschooler, grade school age or even a teen. Something happens. You feel bad. You go to someone in your life for help. But instead of making it better, they make it worse. They laugh or make fun of you. They ignore you or tell you they're too busy. They get mad or irritated that you bothered them. They jump into hyper-drive and fix things in ways that leave you out of your own life. They miss the point, send you in the wrong direction, impose solutions you didn't want. They cause more distress not less. Maybe they actually hurt you or take away stuff you needed. Maybe they expect you to be grateful when you actually feel even more miserable.
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| (Graphic adapted from Shery Mead Intentional Peer Support) |
Maybe it is not with every life issue. Maybe it is not with every person. But it happens enough of the time with enough people that you begin to draw this conclusion:
When you go to human beings for help it gets worse instead of better.
When human beings fail other human beings in times of great need, the options become very stark. We cope on our own, with what we have. We fight, flight, or freeze with whatever resources or personal strengths are at our disposal. Many of us check out emotionally, and some of us never come back. A lot of us use drugs or alcohol, sex, diversion, pleasure of any kind to distract or kill the unrelenting pain.
A lot of us conclude that life is all about – perhaps only about – looking out for #1. After all, we’re actively teaching people that when you really need help, other human beings are basically worthless. The option is to look out for number one – and hope you don’t get caught. Here you can see the origins of what we call ‘psychopathy’ plain as day embedded in modern social relations as usual.
If you want a better model of behavioral health than psychiatry is giving us, think about what this means at different life stages:
If we're really little (infants, preschool, grade school) when this kind of thing starts to happen, we probably don't have much to work with. When feelings get intense and others don't help, the choices are pretty much fantasy, emotions or activity. We withdraw into our own minds and develop our own worlds, losing touch with much that's happening around us. We cry a lot, rage a lot or flip it over into a game where everything is funny. We engage intensely, motor around, get wrapped up in our surroundings, or glued to favorite activities.
A lot of time this is the kind of stuff that gets labeled dissociative, ADHD or oppositional-defiant. A lot of it also goes unnoticed and just looks like regular living. The important shift here, though, is in our relationships. More and more, we're turning inward. More and more, we're relying on stuff instead of people to make our world work.
Think about the impact of this if you're really young. You barely know anything about life, yet there is no one you truly trust to ask about the life questions that trouble you the most. Instead of having centuries of passed-down family and community knowledge to draw on, you're trying to figure it out on your own with the limited life experience and developing brain of small child. It's hardly surprising that a lot of us miss the social cues. We didn't 'get the memo' because we never knew to even look.
Now fast forward a few years and get to adolescence. You're carrying around a lot of questions and pain that you've mostly been handling on your own. If you're like a lot of us, the way you learned to cope set you apart from you're peer group. So now you've got a decade of marginalization under your belt to compound the initial isolation.
Enter alcohol, drugs, sex, cars, money, mobility, freedom. In effect, access to a whole new realm of potential 'pain-killers' has just opened up. And with all that stuff going on inside, we're primed and ready to go. Experience has taught us that there's no human relief in sight, so the moment the doors open we're off and running without a look back. This is where a lot of us get labeled with conduct and substance use disorders.
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| (Graphic adapted from Shery Mead Intentional Peer Support) |
This is also where a lot of us learn that the socially designated helpers make things worse rather than better. All too often, these systems reinforce our views of human relationships as unresponsive, callous, burdensome. ineffective and out of touch with the reality of our minds and lives. The policies and protocols of health and welfare offices all too often replicate the social dynamics that injured us in the first place. It's not very long before we cross the provider industry off the list as well:
Even the 'expert' helpers can't, don't or won't help. So much for expertise. We're definitely on our own.
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| (Graphic adapted from Shery Mead Intentional Peer Support) |
Fast forward again to early adulthood. Now we're old enough to have enough freedom to really do some damage. We've already been labeled and identified as outsiders. We already respond and relate to the world in socially-denigrated 'outsider' ways.
As a consequence, we have little felt connection with - and therefore little loyalty to - the rest of humankind. We may even have tried peer support and found it wanting. For us, it may just have seemed like more of the same.
Suffice it to say, at this point, a lot of us have become thoroughly convinced that no one has your back when you really need it and human society is basically worthless. It's a dog eat dog world. So, if you're going to get what you need to survive, you'd better look out for number one.
Some of us do that 'lawfully'. Others of us don't. Again, it's a matter of survival.
People Who Need People
If the problem is relational, then the solution is relational too. Huge numbers of us feel disconnected and cut off from the rest of humanity. We would give our eye teeth for a principled way back. We don't know how to create it. Moreover, we've been disappointed or betrayed so many times that we don't know whether to trust it if it's offered.
Nevertheless, in our heart of hearts, this is what a lot of us want. (That is not to discredit those who have given up on society altogether and simply want to be left alone. This is a valid - even rational - perspective given what society has been offering and what so many of us have experienced.)
What does real help look like?
Real help starts dignity, respect, regard for our potential. Real help treats us as members of a human family. Real help acknowledges that we are where we are for good reason. Real [ractices what it preaches and offers what it hopes to receive. Real help risks taking the first step, making the first move. Real help honestly attempts to grapple with the harms the dominant culture has perpetrated. It refuses to blame victims and works to repair the damage created. Real help looks for ways to restore trust on both sides of the locks. It levels playing fields, flattens hierarchies and corrects unbalanced privilege and power. Real help not only opens up opportunities but actually cares that they are meaninful and accessible.A lot of real help is free. It's a matter of intention, not funding. It's about attitudes and values and belief in people as people -- as opposed to goals, objectives and performance monitoring to measure, once again, if someone has met or failed the grade.
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| (Graphic adapted from Shery Mead Intentional Peer Support) |
We have to start offering each other this kind of real help. Our lives, literally, are the ones on the line, no one else's. No one cares about these issues as much as we do. No one has as much to gain or lose as we do.
We have to start figuring out, together, how to make things better rather than worse in our darkest hours. The moment we do that - the moment we reliably are able to do that - the mental health system as we know it - will begin to end.
On some basic level I suspect the thing keeping the mental health system going is not the dominant culture, it's not Pharma, it's not the healthcare industry....
What keeps the mental health system going is that, by and large, our relationships with each other are still making things worse instead of better. As human beings and a movement, we still need to figure out how to make our relationships work. And not just in the good times when we all agree. We have to learn how to do this when the stakes are really high and the going is really rough. We have to learn how to make things better rather than worse when our needs conflict and everyone involved feels uncomfortable and scared.
Until then, we don't have a meaningful answer to what troubles a lot of our people and much of the world.
Once we have that, potentially, we have it all.
Want to talk about this more...?
Alternative Conversations
Join us for a free online series of conversations to explore and envision alternatives to the medical model and conventional mental health responses.
Monday 7-9 PM EST: Conscience, Not Coercion - Respecting self-determination when needs conflict and discomfort rises.
Tuesday 7-9 PM EST: Facing Life Instead of 'Treating' It - The high cost of psychiatry on our collective social development
Wednesday 7-9 PM EST: Adaptive vs. Broken Biology - How the human survival response explains away 'mental illness'
Thursday 7-9 PM EST: In Our Deepest Darkest Hours - Why authentic relationship must become part of the solution
Friday 7-9 PM EST: Conflict Revolution: Getting beyond shutting each other up and shouting each other down
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W 0 W powerful pondering this thank you Sarah
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