This article is not an attempt to deny the epidemic of ‘mental health’ problems in advanced Western nations. Rather, it is an attempt to clear away what I take to be some misconceptions which disrupt a proper address of the problem. It is useless for any author to protest that they take something seriously, and indeed it may not only be nauseating—since who is not sick of protestations of care?—but also, perhaps, counterproductive. To treat with lightness, and to seek to paint in the ordinary colours of everyday conversation, is to see by the light of day. And such lights are clear and lovely.
The immediate and obvious conceptual problem with the very notion of ‘mental health’ is that one does not, except in very specific cases, evaluate the ‘mental’ in terms of ‘health.’ The mental concerns the realm of thought. And we evaluate thought in terms of ‘truthfulness’ or ‘appropriateness,’ and usually a mixture of the two. Consider the following conversation, which never happened:
“George! I daresay the bus is coming.”
To which the response might (not) be:
“Oh Lucy! What a healthy thought!”
Naturally, this case of stating—colloquially speaking—‘facts’ is rarely implicated in the case of mental health. The statement that the bus is coming, all will agree, is not to be evaluated in terms of its ‘health’ but in terms of its truth. That is not to say one cannot complicate the matter a little: “George! I daresay the bus is coming. Goodness that reminds me of my dead hamster. I’m scared, George. Hold me…”
To which the response might be all manner of things. Clearly, in this case, Lucy is in something of a bad way. The thought of the bus—packaged as it is with memories of her dead hamster and filling her with dread—is quite clearly of a pathological nature. This is a paradigm example, the mental-health-er will want to argue, of the need for therapy.
Lucy’s expression is of a pathological nature, nevertheless, only in the light of the real object of the bus. It is only on the assumption that the bus is not plastered with stickers presenting the innocent complexion of Lucy’s dead hamster that Lucy is thought to be behaving altogether inappropriately. The inappropriateness, that is to say, is only intelligible to us in the light of the bus itself. Under altered circumstances, Lucy’s reaction could be perfectly proper.
At its core, the problem with ‘mental health’ is that it evaluates the world of thought as though it were a world purely of inner sensations. This means that it cuts off all reference to external objects. Sensations, unlike emotions, do not have objects. They do not involve any element of thought. If one feels a pain in one’s tooth, then the pain is a problem in itself, whether or not the bus is coming. It makes no reference to the outside world.
This may be stated simply. I may have a pain ‘in’ my tooth, but not ‘with’ my tooth. My pain at the collapse of the Swedish Empire, however, is of a quite different variety. It is pain at the thought of its collapse, not the sensation of its collapse. I am pained at an object, and not, so to speak, by an object. No Swedish squirrels were pained, therefore, at the Battle of Poltava (1709), because squirrels cannot think. They lack concepts and thus cannot be pained at the thought of objects (such as ‘events,’ which require concepts, unlike hot water, which heats people regardless of what they think). And, as American Country informs us—on, say, the authority of Clint Black—one cannot readily drug away thoughts:
“You were the first thing that I thought of
When I thought I drank you off my mind.”
—“Killin’ Time,” Clint Black
It is right, on the other hand, to think of ‘sensations’ in terms of health. One ought to feel certain things in response to certain stimuli. But the ‘in response to’ of sensations is quite different from the ‘in response to’ of emotions. The former is a matter of mechanical causality, the latter a matter of rational response. The man who puts his hand on a boiling hot plate, and who does not then jump up in pain in response, has a failure of his nervous system. He has a health problem. Of the man who sees their mother sick, and who then feels elation, we do not say ‘he has a health problem.’ We might well call him ‘sick,’ but we mean morally—which is to say, rationally—sick. Their reason is sick, not their stomach.
Health is a matter of causality. The doctor seeks to fix our circuitry. Sensations belong to health. Emotions belong to thought, and therefore to reason, and by extension to our moral life. Nevertheless, this does not mean that sadness or anxiety constitute moral failings. Precisely because emotions are founded on a proper understanding of objects, the superficially unpleasant emotions may be appropriate too. Because of their connection to understanding, one may only evaluate an emotion in the presence of its object. Consider, for example, the case of being in a pub with a friend. All of a sudden, they begin twitching and screwing up their face. They are shifting in their seat. A number of thoughts might occur to one: “Have they grit in their eye? Ought they have gone to the loo? Are they having a stroke?”
These would be, as it were, sensations which are ‘caused’ by nature. And, of course, part of being an adult is coping with nature: eating, going to the toilet, and so on. Nevertheless, the condition of my friend, in any of these cases, is not primarily a matter of thought. The hungry man certainly may think “goodness, I should have eaten,” but what he needs is food, rather than an urgent rethink of his situation. He is thinking perfectly clearly.
Of course, the primary indicator of how a friend is feeling—of what they are thinking about—is what they say. Nevertheless, what one will do is, I think, look around one for an object in the light of which the behaviour of one’s friend makes sense. This may quite radically change what one thinks they are doing. If they suddenly clutch their throat, they are likely choking. If they seem to let out a guffaw, they are holding in a laugh. But, centrally, one is uncertain whether they are experiencing a sensation or responding to an object.
In the former case, a cluster of patterns of behaviour may indicate—in the form of observable symptoms—that they are, say, choking: clutching the throat, panicked eyes, choking sounds. But, in the latter case—and often with very similar bodily movements—they may well be responding to something. One may, upon seeing that their long-lost brother has walked into the room, reconsider their ‘choking sounds’ as in fact the emotional ‘spluttering’ of one overcome with feeling, and their ‘panicked eyes’ as in fact the ‘shock of love.’ In short, in the light of an object, their behaviour looks different.
I am saying that ‘thoughts’ and ‘emotions’ (and the latter involve the former) are in fact visible. This is not to say that they are ‘things,’ but it is to say that when one thinks of thoughts and emotions, one thinks about orientations: subject and object and verb. All of us know what love looks like. It looks like blushing, nervousness, bursts of ecstasy, centrifugal speech-patterns, and so on. But this is inadequate. For we also understand love as blushing before the beloved, bursts of ecstasy when thinking about the beloved, centrifugal speech-patterns about the beloved. Consider the following conversation, which also never happened:
I say, George, I’m so very in love.
To which George responds:
Oh, how wonderful, Lucy! Who’s the lucky guy?
To which Lucy says:
What do you mean? My emotions don’t require objects.
Lucy, of course, will be in love with someone—and this is not like a toothache, but much worse—and this will be more or less appropriate, according to Aristotle and her dad. Certainly, if she had responded to George’s question with “It’s the traffic cone on my road. It’s so very red and bold” or “It’s Hegel, I just know that he speaks to me through The Phenomenology of Spirit,” then we should consider Lucy quite insane. More subtly, one might still be worried if Lucy said something like: “It’s John … we only spoke once but I love him.”
My point about mental health is that one cannot discern whether the problem regards ‘health’ or ‘thought’ (and thus the object, not the subject) without the object. The person who is without energy, empty of joy, and who cannot face the day, is not necessarily behaving inappropriately. He might live in Belarus. There might be no green spaces nearby. He might have no friends and no sense of meaning. In this case, he does not need pills, but a change in lifestyle. Of course, such a change may be very difficult, but it would be quite self-destructive not to attempt it.
On the other hand, he might have all these things. In this case, we may conclude that his emotions are asynchronous with their objects. There may well be, in this case, some underlying cause which does pathologically impact the man’s thinking. His thinking is pathological; he has a ‘mental’ problem of ‘health.’ He does need a therapist. Nevertheless, the man who despairs at the loss of his children in a car accident does not have a mental health problem. Only in the presence of the object may one draw the distinction and thereby prescribe a sensible course of treatment.
Of course, in order to draw this distinction, I must assert that there is a rational response: namely, a rational emotion. I think, therefore, both that man is rational, and that objects in the world in some real way intimate how one ought to think and feel about them. I think, therefore, that the world is rational, in the sense that it has a significance.
Immediately, the deposing of the mental health paradigm will require an opposition to multiculturalism. Put reversibly, it seems impossible to maintain a distinction between emotions and sensations without firmly rejecting an individualist account of human life. If the distinction between the appropriate and the inappropriate cannot be drawn—or, to say the same thing, if one may draw it however one likes—then the distinction between emotions and sensations becomes unintelligible. And one may only, then, say that there are sad and happy sensations, in the most bland sense.
To say that the emotions have objects is to say that they involve understanding, and this of course means that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to feel. The man who feels differently to me on something important will, from my point of view, be culpable of either misunderstanding, moral failing, or psychopathy. Either he has misunderstood the situation, and with some conversation he will come to agree that Brutalism is awful—perhaps he has conflated it with the more architecturally aggressive strains of art deco—or else he really does love Brutalism and I shall keep him away from my daughter.
It is difficult to distinguish serious moral disagreement from psychopathy. Those who look at blockish concrete cubes and prefer them to Georgian townhouses are beyond the stretch of my sympathy. I am ready to call the liking of Brutalism a mental health problem. Whether I call it a moral or a mental health problem seems simply to depend upon how contemptuously I think of my opponent.
One flashpoint of this politics of the emotions is the insidious phrase, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” If emotions are not regarded as appropriate or inappropriate, such that they get explained away as mere sensations, then there is nothing to say to the man with the unpleasant emotions except “I’m sorry you feel that way.” One must begin, by extension, habitually thinking of others as a nexus of base attractions (unthinking desires) and phobias (unthinking repulsions). If one’s attitudes are without reference to an object—and valuation is truly separate from understanding—then political discourse is completely impossible. All that is left to do is to preside over the management of more-or-less pathological phobias and the encouragement of more-or-less useful desires. To those with whom one disagrees, all one may say is “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Or, indeed, one congratulates another: “I wish I could think that,” as though feeling a certain way is an achievement to which one might say: “Well done for managing to turn the heating on!” Well done for causing happiness. Truly, thou art nice.
Perhaps the darkest thing of all to follow from this terribly poor thinking is the notion of ‘harm.’ If emotions are conceived to be without objects, then their occurrence can only be modelled, like a sensation, as caused. One may say of another, then, that they have ‘caused’ an emotion in another—since who can resist the heat of hot things?—and therefore praise or incriminate them accordingly. If I say things which distress you, then it is not that you have found what I have said distressing. You have not understood my utterance as something to which one might rationally respond with distress. Instead, I have caused you distress. I have ‘harmed’ you. And, in the great nervous system of the state, it is better to remove the more ‘extreme’ and ‘harmful’ elements, as a medical good.
