Psychology – Page 10 – a sibilant intake of breath

Mental health and PhD programs

Even without a pandemic-driven lockdown and absence of in-person social life, grad school involves a lot of psychological and mental health challenges. It’s extremely hard to work on a gigantic solo project for years on end and to structure your time with no day-to-day management or supervision. It’s also hard when most people in your life have at least a somewhat distorted sense of what a PhD involves. One well-meaning response which I find frustrating is when people assert extreme confidence in my abilities and probability of success when they have no information about how the program is actually going. Confidence without evidence is wearying rather than heartening for me.

Anyhow, I just came across a paper in Research Policy which looks into some of these dynamics:

Results based on 12 mental health symptoms (GHQ-12) showed that 32% of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder, especially depression. This estimate was significantly higher than those obtained in the comparison groups. Organizational policies were significantly associated with the prevalence of mental health problems. Especially work-family interface, job demands and job control, the supervisor’s leadership style, team decision-making culture, and perception of a career outside academia are linked to mental health problems.

I’m having trouble finding it now, but I remember an earlier article about how PhD students are pretty much by definition those who experienced a lot of academic success earlier in their lives, in the much more structured conditions of undergraduate and perhaps master’s programs. Going from that to a situation where there are far fewer opportunities for incremental successes (working toward getting the whole dissertation done and defended), poor program completion rates, and an extremely challenging (it’s fair to say hopeless for most) academic job market definitely creates mental strain.

When people ask me now about the wisdom of starting a PhD, I give them two warnings. First, I tell them that it’s only worth doing if you enjoy being in school so much that you are willing to sacrifice considerable lifetime earnings and financial security in retirement, since almost all employers would prefer job experience to a PhD and the process of getting through one is expensive and debt-inducing. Second, I warn them that all PhD programs carry a risk that you will not finish because of factors that have nothing to do with your competence or determination. There is always a real chance that the time you have put in to it will amount to nothing in terms of credentials because factors outside your control force you to stop. Indeed, feeling powerless and not in control of your own fate is probably a central reason why PhDs are so stressful, why comparatively few people finish, and why the grad school environment encourages mental health problems.

COVID in winter

Toronto is returning to a partial COVID lockdown because of rising case numbers.

It has limited practical effect on me since I have been in isolation anyway since early March, only going out for groceries and socially distanced walks for exercise.

I suppose the pandemic and the public policy response will always be subject to multiple interpretations. I can’t recall any comparable disease control measures in my lifetime, so you could say that the world has responded with unprecedented energy. At the same time, the pandemic is a constant reminder of how many people put their own comparatively unimportant preferences (like for entertainment and variety) ahead of protecting themselves and others, limiting the effectiveness of public health measures and extending this entire unpleasant experience for everyone. Like climate change, the pandemic provides endless examples of people who begin with what they want to do and then choose beliefs which are compatible.

All told, the behaviour of governments and populations highlights how poorly human beings respond to slow and generalized threats, as opposed to the fast and personal kind. That’s not an encouraging precedent at a time when the future of humanity is in jeopardy if we cannot cooperate, moderate our selfish desires, and do what’s necessary to control the problem.

Living without limits

I find it’s good practice to approach literally anybody, from a municipal worker who I am passing on the sidewalk while they’re performing official duties to clerks in shops with an immediate attempt at a substantive conversation, not just a rote exchange of greetings or well-wishes. By that means the other morning I got the chance to ask why Toronto had removed all the foot-pedals from the municipal garbage and recycling bins (you can see one on the right here), which had been a convenient way to avoid touching the machine and not having to push a spring-loaded cover back with the refuse you’re trying to deposit. The two crewmembers told me it is because people did too much illegal dumping with the footpedal-enabled system, and it let to too much disruption as waste went bad and was gotten into by creatures.

The draw of martyrdom

Describing the period in the 1980s when Osama bin Laden was emerging as a major private fundraiser for the mujahideen resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:

The lure of an illustrious and meaningful death was especially powerful in cases where the pleasures and rewards of life were crushed by government oppression and economic deprivation. From Iraq to Morocco, Arab governments had stifled freedom and signally failed to create wealth at the very time when democracy and personal income were sharply climbing in virtually all other parts of the globe. Saudi Arabia, the richest of the lot, was such a notoriously unproductive country that the extraordinary abundance of petroleum has failed to generate any other significant source of income; indeed, if one subtracted the oil revenue of the Gulf countries, 260 million Arabs exported less than the 5 million Finns. Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true when the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women. Adult illiteracy remained the norm in many Arab countries. Unemployment was among the highest in the developing world. Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies.

Martyrdom promised such young men an ideal alternative to a life that was so sparing in its rewards. A glorious death beckoned to the sinner, who would be forgiven, it is said, with the first spurt of blood, and he would behold his place in Paradise even before his death. Seventy members of his household might be spared the fires of hell because of his sacrifice. The martyr who is poor will be crowned in heaven with a jewel more valuable than the earth itself. And for those young men who came from cultures where women are shuttered away and rendered unattainable for someone without prospects, martyrdom offered the conjugal pleasures of seventy-two virgins—”the dark-eyed houris,” as the Quran describes them, “chaste as hidden pearls.” They awaited the martyr with feasts of meat and cups of the purest wine.

The pageant of martyrdom that [Abdullah] Azzam limned before his worldwide audience created the death cult that would one day form the core of al-Qaeda. For the journalists covering the war, the Arab Afghans were a curious sideshow to the real fighting, set apart by their obsession with dying. When a fighter fell, his comrades would congratulate him and weep because they were not also slain in battle. These scenes struck other Muslims as bizarre. The Afghans were fighting for their country, not Paradise or an idealized Islamic community. For them, martyrdom was not such a high priority.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, the Peshawar bureau chief for the News, a Pakistani daily, observed a camp of Arab Afghans that was under attack in Jalalabad. The Arabs had pitched white tents on the front lines, where they were easy marks for Soviet bombers. “Why?” the reporter asked incredulously. “We want them to bomb us!” the men told him. “We want to die!” They believed that they were answering God’s call. If they were truly blessed, God would reward them with a martyr’s death. “I wish I could raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain,” bin Laden later declared, quoting the Prophet.

Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Vintage Books, 2007. p. 123-4

Insomnia and activist burnout

The most common physical health symptom described by the participants was chronic insomnia. Heidi explained: ‘One of the first indicators for me is insomnia. . . . I’m waking up in the middle of the night thinking about how I need to do this or bring this in or what time I am meeting with these parents, and that starts repeating itself.’ The insomnia became more serious for Cathy: ‘I would not be able to sleep unless I took sleeping pills.”

…

They described, not just brief periods of weariness, but chronic, debilitating stress, anxiety, and depression that drove them away from their activism at least temporarily. Christopher, for example, felt ‘frayed all over’. Evelyn described feeling ’emotionally devastated’.

Chen, Cher Weixia and Paul C. Gorski. “Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists: Symptoms, Causes and Implications.” Journal of Human Rights Practice, Volume 7, Issue 3, November 2015

Yaks grunted and snorted around the tent, munching closer and closer. I shook the tarp to provoke a retreating thunder of hoofs. Against the distant drone of traffic I could hear the delicate pinging of flies trapped between the tent’s inner and outer walls. I lay in my sleeping bag, aching all over, and fervently hoped humans never made it to Mars. We didn’t deserve a new world; we’d just wreck it all over again. As a kid I’d genuinely believed that the discovery of alien life, whether sentient beings or microbes, would change lives, incite a revolution near-holy in its repercussions. At the very least people would be kinder to each other, whether Turkish or Armenian, Indian or Pakistani, Tibetan or Uyghur or Han Chinese. We’d collectively awaken to the fact that we’re all lost in this mystery together.

Now I wasn’t convinced. Discovering extraterrestrial life wouldn’t change a thing, just as learning to fly didn’t lift us higher as people, just as Voyager’s pale blue dot photograph failed to dissolve nationalism the way it should have if we’d truly seen it. “Look again at that dot,” Carl Sagan pleaded. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Meanwhile we’ve discovered microbes eating sulphur in boiling vents at the bottom of the ocean, Earth-size exoplanets orbiting distant suns, proof everywhere of the rarity, ingenuity, and resplendence of life in the universe—and such facts haven’t budged our priorities an inch. What is the point of science and exploration if people persist in living and dying as they always have, namely selfishly, obliviously?

Maybe infinity begins at the point we can’t see past, can’t love past. How small we are when this point is ourselves. The problem with borders, I was beginning to realize, isn’t that they are monstrous, offensive, and unnatural constructions. The problem with borders is the same as the problem of evil that Hannah Arendt identified: their banality. We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape—at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports—because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desires, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else. Borders reinforce the idea of the alien, the Other, stories separate and distinct from ourselves. But would such fictions continue to stand if most of us didn’t agree with them, or at least quietly benefit from the inequalities they bolster? The barbed wire begins here, inside us, cutting through our very core.

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Alfred A. Knopf Canada. 2018. p. 244–5 (italics in original)

Hindsight bias

In one of the Dan Carlin Hardcore History series, he describes a discussion with a mentor who explained to him that the hardest thing about understanding history is forgetting how we know things will turn out. That impairs our ability to understand why people behaved as they did at the time, particularly because we over-estimate how likely the actual outcome was, and how obvious it should have been to people doing the choosing.

This talk by Nick Means does a good job of demonstrating how hindsight bias works in detail:

As it recommends, I am now reading Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’. The focus is primarily on things like air crashes and industrial accidents — which I find it interesting to read about anyway — but it also has lessons for anybody trying to learn from the past. The central lesson of Dekker’s book, that we can only understand the past if we make the effort to understand why the people then made the choices they did, seems applicable to policy and political analysis in general. In terms of organizing, the shift in emphasis from blaming individuals and treating the problem as solved to understanding what caused them (and likely will cause others) to make an error could be useful for reducing interpersonal conflict and improving performance.

Harrer on Iraqi WMD

However, by concealing their past intentions, the Iraqis encouraged the assumption that those were their future intentions as well. In the first phase of the Iraqi cover-up, the hidden past intentions certainly did reflect the goals for the future of the political leadership, even though Iraqi scientists and experts knew that restarting the programs would be virtually impossible. But why did Iraq not come clean later? Here again comes the problem of the past: admitting a filament-winding machine after the inspectors seem to have forgotten about it, would merely instigate new questions about what else remained to be declared. The piecemeal approach of the first years – with few exceptions always admitting only what would have been discovered anyway – destroyed the credibility of Iraq’s attempt to really come clean in the years 1996 to 1998. In the words of Jafar:

Our adherence to Aziz’s four principles — conceived to limit damage to Iraq’s credibility — actually triggered the opposite effect. One cover-up led to another, and another, which became a stressful exercise … a course which never failed to boomerang and blow up in the face of Iraqi officials.

However, Jafar, who has not only studied in the West like many other Iraqi scientists, but actually lived there both as a child and later, attributes the Iraqi approach in part to “cultural reasons:” in Arab Islamic culture the concept of the “confession box” where “you go in and tell the whole story,” is missing – the process is done in bits and pieces.

Harrer, Gudrun. Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme: The Inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991–1998. Routledge, 2014. p. 146

Minsky on government-guaranteed employment

As recently as March 5th, The Economist published an article entitled: A recession is unlikely but not impossible

The April 18th issue reports: “On April 14th the IMF warned that the global recession would be the deepest for the best part of a century.”

I can’t find my note about it, but somewhere I recorded that a particular figure recommended that their staff read Hyman Minsky’s Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, which I have added to my non-thesis reading collection. It is somewhat difficult going as I am not especially well grounded in economic theory and terminology. Still, the central ideas seem accessible and somewhat surprising, especially the argument that governments should act as employers of last resort. Once I get through it, perhaps I will get the chance to ask Hugh Segal about how that approach compares with his preferred option of a universal basic income. Minsky argues:

Social justice rests on individual dignity and independence from both private and political power centers. Dignity and independence are best served by an economic order in which income is received either by right or through a fair exchange. Compensation for work performed should be the major source of income for all. Permanent dependence on expending systems of transfer payments that have not been earned is demeaning to the recipient and destructive of the social fabric. Social justice and individual liberty demand interventions to create an economy of opportunity in which everyone, except the severely handicapped, earns his or her way through the exchange of income for work. Full employment is a social as well as an economic good. (p. 10)

I can already see some of the appeal in government guaranteeing decent employment to anyone who requests it, since it would establish a floor for what private employers could demand in terms of working conditions. If nobody was forced to seek work through private job markets it would be helpful both in times of economic crisis when unemployment becomes extreme and at normal times, when the greater power of employers over employees may drive the latter to accept unacceptable working conditions or illegally low wages. Especially with the degree to which labour unions have become enfeebled, having the government offer acceptable alternative employment to anyone who wants it could play an important role in rebalancing power toward employees and avoiding labour exploitation.

Harris on wilderness

Besides, the historian William Cronon argues that there is nothing “natural” about wilderness, that it is a deeply human construct, “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.” Though I might be appalled by Marco Polo’s failure to swoon at mountains and deserts along the Silk Road, wilderness in his day implied all that was dark and devilish beyond the garden walls. The fact that I’m charmed by the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert and the breathtaking expanse of the Tibetan Plateau doesn’t mean I’m more enlightened than Polo, more capable of wonder. It means I hail from a day and age—and a country and culture—so privileged, so assiduously comfortable, that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal.

It probably also means I read too much Thoreau as a teenager. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote, priming me to pine after places as far away from Ballinafad as possible, like Tibet and Mars. Provoking such distant wanderlust was hardly Thoreau’s fault or intention—he himself never travelled beyond North America—but I enthusiastically misread him, conflating wildness with wilderness, substituting a type of place for a state of mind. Cronon finds the whole concept of wilderness troubling for how, among other things, it applied almost exclusively to remote, unpopulated landscapes, fetishizing the exotic at the expense of the everyday, as though nature exists only where humans are not. This language sets up a potentially insidious dualism, for if people see themselves as distinct and separate from the natural world, they believe they risk nothing in destroying it. What Thoreau was really saying was that he’d travelled wildly in Concord, that you can travel wildly just about anywhere. The wildness of a place or experience isn’t in the place or experience, necessarily, but in you—your capacity to see it, feel it. In that sense, biking the Silk Road is an exercise in calibration. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Alfred A. Knopf Canada. 2018. p. 149–50 (italics in original)

Category: Psychology