Login | April 26, 2024
The news can make you crazy
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: April 28, 2017
As a podcast fanatic, I naturally binge-listened S-Town, the latest sensation produced the seven-part series put out by Serial/This American Life team.
I am pulling one element from the podcast which requires obliquely describing the arc in a way that will be something of a spoiler. So if you really want to listen to it cold, set this column aside until you’ve had the chance.
Done? Great. It becomes apparent early on that the main character, John B. McLemore, suffers from what turns out to be profound mental illness. Much of the podcast, involves following reporters as they investigate possible reasons for a rather sharp turn in the his mental health.
Early on, much is made of one of the clearest manifestations of the character’s mental illness: He could not stop talking about global warming. He badgers his friends about it constantly, emailing out the most pessimistic forecasts, bringing it up in conversations, and generally repelling his friends with his relentless pessimism.
He is pathologically negative about more than that: Government corruption, resource depletion, the willful ignorance of people around him. But he is especially obsessed with global warming.
This aspect of McLemore’s story is an extreme manifestation of a growing phenomenon that involves people suffering psychological distress based on current events.
The link between relentless negativity and mental illness is not news—I’ve experienced it personally. But I was brought up short by hearing about someone manifesting it in terms of an ongoing current issue like global warming.
This spotlights a troubling fact of the age that we live in. On the one hand, our society is grappling with potentially existential threats for which we have no easy solutions. The direst among these is climate change, but it is by no means the only one.
But while these are genuine and imminent threats, dwelling on them constantly is not mentally healthy. Mental health professionals have reported spikes in anxiety and depression since the election. Constant doomsaying is a sign of mental illness in the case of John B. McLemore, but it can also be a cause.
Listening to how this played out in McLemore’s life illuminates a few things about how people are dealing (or not) with our political climate.
For example, as the evidence of warming has become more obvious, a segment of the population has become more adamant in denying climate science. That may seem counterintuitive, at first. But as climate change looks more intractable, it shouldn’t be too surprising that some people lapse into denial as a defense mechanism.
But while denying the science of climate change may be understandable, it is at best a maladaptive solution to the problem. In the words of my wife’s favorite protest sign at the March for Science, “There Is No Planet B.”
Of course, climate change is not the only serious threat facing us. And we have a White House that seems more interested in score-settling and self-dealing than addressing actual problems.
All of this points out a fundamental difficulty in our political age. We live in times of genuine danger and will need broad-based citizen engagement to resolve the problems, but over-engaging is not mentally healthy.
And this is not a new phenomenon. People have been documenting the way Fox News and other right-wing media induced panic, rage and resentment throughout the Obama era. Granted, believing impending doom about the Obama administration (death panels, sharia law, dismantling of the military) required a person to ignore any evidence not vetted by Sean Hannity, whereas believing the worst of the Trump administration only requires believing his campaign rhetoric. But the principle is the same.
I don’t claim to have an easy solution to the conundrum. The advice from the professionals is the best I can muster: do what you can, take breaks from the news, find ways to reset. Sometimes, being a little selfish is the only way to keep up the energy to stay in the fight.
That’s less than satisfying because, like the problem itself, it’s complicated and takes work.
And it’s important to remember that for some people taking breaks isn’t an option. People regularly called out by the White House—immigrants, Muslims, inner-city minorities—face threats based on who they are. Like far too many problems, this one is worst for the already vulnerable.
It has always been a project of my little corner of the media ecosystem to encourage readers to engage deeply with issues as a predicate to repairing the world. I still want people to engage. But we need to recognize the necessity of taking care of ourselves.