Not always alright
Readers of my previous newsletter may remember I had complicated major surgery back in May of this year. Readers of my third book may also know that I have an anxiety disorder and deal with episodic depression. And new readers of this newsletter may just be thinking: wait, I signed up for something about Gen X and Millennials.
To the last group, rest assured, we’re getting there.
An interesting overlap between the latter half of this year and the question of mental health, age and generational demographic was the number of classes I taught between July and August (two), between September and December (three), the number of invited talks I gave and trips I took to give them (also three, same time span), the number of friends who died within the last year (three), the number of mountains I climbed with a large backback, alone, on my first solo hiking trip in years (one), the number of physical issues I was dealing with as my body figured out how to operate without several major organs, and the number of mental collapses I shoved aside so that I could get to the end of the semester (countless).
Needless to say, grades are now done and I’m not full of sunshine and rainbows. I am, however, still here, and currently up in the redwoods on California’s north coast, where the trees apparently have wifi, or at least this rented cabin does (maybe to get some sunshine and rainbows happening the first stop today needs to be the dispensary, because even the most remote town in California has one now). This is where I come when I need to “recharge,” so to speak, although they’ve installed a wireless tower on top of a nearby hill so we are not exactly off the grid. We are, however, temporarily away from the crashing waves of demands that keep the ever-circling shark of mental health issues away during busy times.
I work with Millennial and Gen Z students, and teach creative nonfiction, so I read a lot of essays about mental health. On rough count, out of the sixty essays I read and graded over the past week, fifty had something to do with mental health — either my students’ own or that of their peers. Some of my students have been on meds or in therapy for years and are only in their early twenties. I knew plenty of depressed people in college — I mean, I was a depressed person in college, studying English… probably everyone in my classes was mentally ill, definitely including the faculty), but I knew exactly one person who saw a therapist, and her mother was a therapist. Nobody I knew went on meds until we had to drive a friend to the country mental health unit when her schizophrenia emerged in an alarming way.
In other words: we were under-diagnosed. What I now know is Generalized Anxiety Disorder coupled with Major Depressive Disorder is both something I inherited and something nobody told me I had until I was in my late thirties, which is interestingly when I also started writing about religion (yes, I wrote a book about this). This problem is not uncommon among my peer group. Our parents just drank, or if they were hippies, smoked weed every day. Our grandparents did the same. This is why my father’s side of the family is all alcoholics while on my mothers’s side, my great-grandfather shot himself. They probably knew something was wrong. But what words did they put to that? They didn’t have language for it, so they drowned it out, however they could.
The upside to younger people being able to be so articulate about these challenges is that it’s not uncommon for people to be open about it. This at least creates some solidarity. On the other hand, the proliferation of memes about mental health can mean people become stuck in a loop. Anxiety and depression become a joke, because we’ve all got them. At Berkeley, where we have some of the highest reported rates of anxious students in the country, the proliferation of memes portraying Berkeley life as a series of horrific stressors is just another Berkeley thing. It’s so normative for instructors to encounter crying, hyperventilating, or distressed students we receive a folder with step by step instructions for getting them help and I now have the student mental health services number programmed into the contacts on my phone.
We have never had a single conversation about faculty mental health.
In some ways, Gen Xers had the same culture of normative depression. We all know about Nirvana, but as a person who loves hip hop, I think more about The Geto Boys’ Mind Playing Tricks on Me, which might be the first hip hop song to talk frankly about suicidal ideation and anxiety. But the difference, again, was that we struggled to access help. We probably didn’t know where to go to find it. SSRIs only became widespread in the 90s, and back then you were either on a whopping dose that made you a jibbering mess, albeit a less depressed one, or nothing. Depression was Wynona Ryder chain smoking and listening to The Replacements, not a chemical imbalance or an inherited genetic disorder. Now there are help lines, text therapists, meds to treat anything on the spectrum of mental health issues. And yet, the problem gets worse. More epidemic. More pervasive. The gig economy, the president, and the fragility of the future; they all mean that younger adults are going to continue to struggle with their mental health.
Ok but Gen Xers, remember us? We have the same problems. The last generation to have the kind of job and financial security that can keep these things at bay were Boomers, but then again, some psychologists think the waves of Boomer retirements in the near future could be the beginning of the next mental health epidemic. The Boomers are not alright. None of us really are.
It’s Christmas Eve, and it’s also Hanukkah, so I can’t end this newsletter on such a down note. There’s a world-changing baby who needs to be born in Bethlehem, that miraculous oil needs to stay lit, and we’re three days into the solstice, with another sliver of sun being gifted to us daily. Our not-alrightness is, perhaps, what this season asks us to examine, to come uncomfortably close to, and to try and understand. It’s painful, and necessary, and perhaps in this never-ending war of generational division, a chance to at least get one thing right, being together, in our not being alright.
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The pattern with most of these end of year newsletters is to send out links to everything someone’s published in the past year, but in the spirit of not focusing on accomplishments as being the point of our existence, I’m holding off on that for now. I do, however, invite you to learn more about spiritual direction via this piece I wrote for America last month or this podcast where I discussed it (with Millennials!), because it’s been one of the most important tools I’ve used to dig myself out of mental health trenches, time and time again.
May you enjoy at least some moments of mental quiet in this season.