I spent years practicing Cognitive Behaviour Therapy methods as well as mindfulness in my experience with mental health “struggles.”  Though some methods were helpful in the short-term, there was much that bothered me about the ideals and over arching beliefs that I perceive to be intrinsic in these methods.  The responsibility squarely on the individual and the assumption that thought patterns are merely neurological and can be changed simply by repetition and without questioning why, are problematic assumptions to carry into life.  Ignoring the power of structures and outside pressures is a set up for failure or at least frustration.  In CBT situations one is encouraged to not fight against those things that cause one suffering and focus squarely on self and what that self can change about what one thinks.  The more I focused on self, the more I believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, neurological or otherwise, and this led to frustration and further questions about cause or whether my self was sick or just having trouble with the social structures and pressures that surround us.

Before we move on, let me just establish that I am not an expert in CBT, mindfulness, sociology, or philosophy.

While constantly focusing on Self for many years while I navigated the mental health labyrinth, eventually there was a questioning of what Self actually was.  What brings us our consciousness and can that thing be measured or tested?  Psychologically/biologically speaking I found the seeming futile push to explain it in terms of genes and neurons to be a pipe dream chased by reductionists and self-help book sellers.  It seemed that this question of consciousness is inevitably philosophical in nature, a group of ideas and theories that can’t be empirically tested or supported.  Marx tried to explain it in terms of our relationship to labour, in the most Marxist way possible, but still is merely an untestable idea about how the Self is created.  Self-consciousness is built on our relationship to labour and to the mode of production and therefore things like greed are not intrinsic to us but created by existing in a system that rewards such things (i.e. Capitalism).  This idea pushes against the self-centred ideas of CBT and that these beliefs about our self is somehow based on neurological patterns.

Durkheim believed that social solidarity was based on a complex division of labour, in contrast to Marx’s idea that division of labour causes alienation, and one could take this idea further and apply it to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.  Extending division of labour in society to this can open many discussions as to the causes of cases of depression and anxiety in society.  If that division of labour is disrupted or one is unhappy with one’s position in that, one can conclude that mental health would be adversely affected.  I may be misusing the term, but anomie could be an explanation for the high instances of mental illness occurring in the western world.  I’m sure many of you know that Durkheim dedicated a good chunk of research to suicides and discovered different types and different patterns.  I’m not familiar enough with those ideas to speak to them at the moment and that will be something I will need to pursue while learning and moving through my degree.  What I can do is form questions about what these things mean and what societal pressure has to do with mental illness.  Another big question that comes out of this is as we understand these problems from a macro or meso level, what is the responsibility of Sociology in tackling these issues?

I’m far less familiar with Weber and what he has to say on the subject of self and mental health, so I’ll flail my arms in the dark and see what gets written on the walls.  The idea of the increasing bureaucratization of our social world awakens ideas pertaining to suffering in our modern, post-industrial world.  If we are increasingly placed in positions in society where we lack the power to change our life chances significantly, suffering will most likely follow.  I believe that Weber’s idea of the Iron Cage and his fear that we would be trapped by bureaucracy is one that can be applied to at least part of the explanation of mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression.  That feeling of being stuck in your circumstance could be a side effect of the movement of society towards an increasingly bureaucratic form.  The question that forms is one of how to stop or change the course of this bureaucratization to alleviate the pressure placed on the agents and their Self.

There are so many theories and ideas within the contemporary world of sociology that I am still chasing to understand.  Ideas like phenomenology and habitus seem to have a huge potential to assist in explaining the increasing instances of mental illness.  There is the post-modern idea that everything changes so quickly that we cannot form norms quick enough to keep up and we merely spend our time trying not to become obsolete and end up in the rubbish heap.  The relationship each of us has to power and authority can bring on feelings of despair and helplessness, our integration into the larger group, the lack of direction from the social order, and so many more pressures need to be examined in order to understand this phenomenon.  I encourage, and even beg for, insights from those who know more about this subject.

In no way am I making a claim that biology and psychology have no place in this discussion.  Knowledge is not produced from a single discipline.  I think each level of study offers unique ideas and good insights that one can use to continue to move knowledge accumulation further and further ahead.  My issue is with my experience with CBT and mindfulness and the lack of understanding why one experiences disrupting amounts of depression and anxiety.  One was never encouraged to ask these questions and I believe that is dangerous and short-sighted.  The ideas presented by social theorists can be quite helpful in this ever more researched world of mental health.