Reading Notes

Normal does not equal mental health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Mental Health. By Steven Bartlett. ISBN 978-0-313-39931-2 

ebook 978-0-313-39932-9

 

99

"It is possible to accommodate those who, overcome by the barrenness of a world of total work and material acquisition, become conscious of its depressive nature and feel the sapping effect of its superficial, frivolous, and empty gratifications. This is the "disorder" that the DSM calls "adjustment disorder, with work inhibition." It is the closest that our current classification of psychological disorders comes to acknowledging, albeit very indirectly, the potential contributing role to human suffering of an exclusionary focus on work that is out of control."

 

"The essential feature of this disorder is a maladaptive reaction to an identifiable psychological stressor .... The maladaptive nature of the reaction is indicated ... by impairment in occupational (including school) functioning .... [T]he predominant manifestation is an inhibition in work... occurring in a person whose previous work ... performance has been adequate. Frequently there is also a mixture of anxiety and depression. (American Psychiatric Association, 1987, code 309.23, pp. 329, 331; in APA, 1994 and 2000, absorbed under code 309.9)

"Adjustment disorder, with work inhibition" is a diagnosis that perhaps reveals more about contemporary psychiatry than it does about the correspondingly labeled patient. The label expresses psychiatry's assumption that engagement in the world of work is normal, adaptive, and desirable and that a person who isn't able to be engaged in work, due to "an identifiable psychological stressor," must be afflicted with a "disorder of maladaptation."

100

"It is clear that a life of total work and consumption, along with its resulting cultural impoverishment, can come to be felt as a severe and self-undermining source of stress. When it does, and as seen through the lens of the Scholastics' acedia, work-engendered depression results."

"There is indeed, as Thomas Szasz (1957/1961) has protested, a temptation for society to justify its prejudices through its classification of psychological disorders. In a society that believes in the critical value of universal work, leisure in the sense developed here - beyond minimal, restorative vacations, which we accept as we do the nee for the other type of regularity - inevitably is felt to be a contrary value. In our devotion to utility and technology we can find no room for culture in its root meaning.

Leisure and idleness are therefore equated, and in that equating we have allowed nonutilitarian values, the antidotes to mediocrity, to slip away."

"Because of our loosened grip on higher ends we live in a time when "culture" is glorified as a kind of trivial pursuit (exemplified with pride in a book such as Hirsch's (1987) Cultural Literary: What Every American Needs to Know). In this social context, not only is work-engendered depression promoted, but finding a cure for it is made all the more difficult."

"Treatment for work-engendered depression requires a meningful prescription for living. It requires the cultivation of values beyond utility that can balance an unbalanced and now altogether normal obsession with jobs, money, and things. Therapy for work-engendered depression cannot be effective as long as acedia is identified with idleness, as long as we construe depression due to the aridity of work without end as an undesirable and maladjustment away from a desirable state of psychological normality, as an "adjustment disorder, with work inhibition."

89

"A psychologically accurate and clinically appropriate understanding of many creative people requires that we recognize the individualized way in which an artist relates to the world - taking into account the creative individual's sensibilities and sensitivities, how he or she derives a sense of meaning from life and creative work, how the artist reacts to contact with the "normal world" that frequently is unresponsive to the efforts of originality, and related factors. Such a perspective seeks to acquire a situational understanding of the creative person and sees psychological problems of the artist as inherently a function of the individual person in relation to a highly individualized context of interests, needs, sources of meaning, and challenges to these."

"I want to extend this discussion by examining a certain widespread psychological disability that remains virtually unrecognized and undiscussed. We have seen how a contextually sensitive understanding of the creative individual's "situation" vis-a-vis the psychologically normal world can involve a "mismatch" between self and world, resulting in much of the debilitating struggle against the world that typifies the lives of some artists."

"Look at the highly adaptive relationship between our society's majority - workers who are consumers - and their highly industrialized, commercially driven society. Like the highly creative, today's worker-consumer can experience difficult psychological problems, but they are of an altogether different kind. The particular problem that will concern us here may be called "work-engendered depression.""

"The condition is increasingly prevalent in highly industrialized societies, where an exclusionary focus upon work, money, and the things that money can buy has displaced values that traditionally exerted a liberating and humanizing influence. Social critics have called the result an impoverishment of the spirit, a state of cultural bankruptcy, and an incapacity for genuine leisure. From a clinical perspective, the condition has been diagnosed as widespread narcissism and obsessive work. But this misses a great deal."

"A therapist who subscribes to any of these ways of implementing psychotherapy will, to speak in inclusive terms, treat depression by attempting first to make explicit, and then work to strengthen or change, the patient's or client's most basic, relevant attitudes about living. In this perspective, depression is believed to be the result of a fundamental mismatch between a patient's beliefs and values, on the one hand, and the realities and goals with which he or she must deal, on the other. Such a state of affairs, it is claimed, brings about chronic frustration, emotional suffering, and potential demoralization. More specifically, these theories of psychotherapy claim that clinical depression is brought about by a group of "basic mistakes" in perceiving the world (Adler), by a self-defeating or self-confounding way of construing the world (Kelly), by an inadequate or unrealized framework of meaning (Frankl), or by an irrational set of expectations (Ellis)."

"Today,we recognize two extremes: On one side, we locate work and the desirable traits that we associated with it, such as diligence, industry, competitiveness, ambition, and so forth. On the other side, we situate leisure, having time on one's hands, being idle, even lazy - in short, having time away from work. Time away from work is useful to the extent and, we now increasingly believe, virtually only to the extent, that it serves as a restorative that, after the usual two weeks for an American, enables a man or woman to return to money-making work with renewed energy and zeal."

It is impossible to understand acedia in this context. To understand the medieval conception, we need to think in three-value terms; Work, diligence, and industry make up one extreme. Idleness, laziness, and time free from the demands of work make up another. And leisure, in the special meaning the Scholastics associated with the concept, is separate from both of these."

In this three-value context, acedia in the medieval view is an inability to experience leisure. Leisure, as it was then conceived, is opposite to work, but it is also, as we'll see, opposite to idleness or laziness, to merely having time on one's hands. Idleness is of course contrary to work, while leisure is the contrary both of idleness and of work.

In our bivalent attitude to work, not only do we fall victim to acedia, but we cannot realize that this has happened to us. This is not verbal trickery, but a psychological reality we should be able to appreciate if we will bear with the three-valued medieval view a little longer.

Leisure meant something specific to the medieval mind. It was not synonymous, as we've said, with idleness or taking a vacation. Leisure was instead associated with culture, with the cultivation of the spirit, with cultus. What is at stake in this conception of "culture" has a radically different meaning than we find in such phrases as "corporate culture,'" "the culture of the New York Giants," or "U.S. culture." These uses of the word 'culture' are diametrically opposed to the Scholastic conception. In the Scholastic's religiously based standpoint, the human capacity for leisure was one with the ability to be spiritual, to be conscious of the self as a divine creation, to cultivate spirituality within, and to accept one's place in a universe that contains both matter and "higher values." those that transform one's daily life and suffering. Leisure, however, as we shall see in a moment need not be tied to a religious perspective in order to maintain its capacity to elevate."

"The values that the Scholastics thought were higher bestowed upon everyday life a significance that transcends the workaday world. In the same way, higher education was called higher because its aim was to encourage cultivation, specifically the cultivation of nonuseful things. The ends of "higher education" had nothing to do with utilitarian pursuits, nothing to do with the acquisition of the technical, social, or other skills necessary to get a well-paying, secure job. Genuinely higher education, as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, was devoted to those things that are of value "in and of themselves," as it was then commonplace to say.

Leisure, then, was an attitude of mind, an attitude of silent affirmation, of feeling at one in a world in which a person is and cannot but be at home, from birth and throughout his or her life. This form of "letting go" is not inactivity. Leisure is active contemplation, enjoyment, and appreciation of being and of being oneself. To be capable of leisure requires taht a man or woman affirm his or her own sense of identity apart from a role as worker, father, mother, or consumer. To be incapable of this is acedia.

Acedia, in short, is an inability to see reality in other than mundane and mediocre ways. It is an inability to perceive reality under the guise of the transformation that "higher values" make possible. During the Middle Ages, these values were rooted in religion - as it happened, in Christianity. But higher values need not be Christian or even theistic. reality can be transformed by myth, by poetry, by music, art, philosophy, by abstract theoretical research that has no practical application in view, or by imagination. When these powers of transformation diminish or are lost, the minds of the people are blunted, and they beign to suffer from a disability of values. Acedia is just such a disability.

In the impoverished state of mind brought about by an exclusionary obsession with work and its financial rewards, acedia leads to despair - an unwillingness and an inability to be fully and richly human. It is a state of mind without hope, a condition of demoralization that is an impasse to realizing one's full human potential.

The scholastics realized that despair is a block to growth: in the words of Saint Paschasius Radbert, despair "closes the door" (1857-1866Z, liber II, caput VI,2 ). As with the meaning of leisure, the medieval meaning of despair is more comprehensive than is ours today. It is not sadness or grief but a barrier that stands between the man or woman who is slave to the world of work, and higher values. It handicaps a person's ability to transform the mundane, to see beyond and to apprehend what stunted, mediocritized people cannot see or appreciate.

The overemphasis of our society upon work and purchasable things has exactly this stunting effect. Our perspective becomes foreshortened: "greater" and "less than" are reduced to inconsequentialities. The great no longer stand out, the ordinary encompasses all, and indifference and indiscrimination replace the respect that we once bestowed on the extraordinary. we see this in the insistent, exaggerated tendency to make everyone a "hero," to consider everyone a "winner," to "leave no child behind," and to praise every performance with a standing ovation and frenzied cheering. This histrionic and indiscriminate mindset is the product of a psychology that opposes differentiation - the ranking of levels of natural endowment, talent, and attainment - and so loses the capacity to tell and to respect the difference between excellence and the commonplace.

Aquinas identified the other members of acedia's family, the psychological sequelae of this self-imposed narrowing of the human outlook. They are the filiae acediae, the partners and companions of despair (Aquinas, 1269-1272/1949, Vol. Ii, 4; and 1265-1274/1921-1925, Part II of the Second Part, Ques. 35 Article 4, answer to the Second Objection). They spell out, with greater clarity and in more detailt han the DSM, what work-engendered depression means in human terms.

In addition to despair, acedia leads to what Aquinas called evagatio mentis, an uneasy restlessness of mind that expresses itself in

in quietudo - or inner restlessness;

verbositas - a need for the distraction and stimulus of unbridled, mindless talk;

instabilitas loci vel propositi - instability of place or purplse;

curiositas - an unfocused, unanchored, indiscriminate surface interest in any and all things; and

importunitas - the urge to scatter oneself in many pursuits.

In addition to despair and restlessness, the symptoms of acedia include

torpor - repudiation, indifference toward, and neglect of higher values;

pusillanimitas - antagonism toward higher values;

rancor - resentful rebellion against those who represent and seek to cultivate higher ends; and, finally,

malitia - the pure malice that reflects a deliberate choice in favor of evil and a deep-seated commitment to hatred for whatever may be capable of elevating human beings above the trivial, the fatuous, the superficial.

"The locus of depression for these essentially phenomenological theories is wholly internal. According to them, depression is born and maintained thanks to an internal dynamic that renders a person vulnerable to demoralization and despair. Here, Adler, Kelly, Frankl, and Ellis refuse to applly the category of disease to psychological disorders: their clients are not "sick," for they believe there is no "disease" there to be treated; the problems they face are problems of living. This was also Thomas Szasz's (1967/1961) view and the basis for hsi criticism of medical psychiatry: it frequently reifies problem of living into varieiies of illness, as we saw in Chapter 2. In doing this, it makes what philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a "category mistake" and falls victim to Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" (which we also saw in Chapter 2). Mistake or fallacy, thinking goes astray when we assert the existence of what has only the rank of phantom pathologies."

preface

"Szasz opposed the diagnostic labeling of contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology because their conception of "mental disorders," in his view, expresses the not-so-hidden agenda to force people to conform to social and political interests."

intro

"The deeply rooted connection between what we like and what we believe has imperssed itself on me. The beliefs we embrace, as I see again and again, express what we prefer to think. History unfortunately makes it all too clear that what we like to believe all too often turns out simply to be wrong."

"Our often passionate commitments to beliefs, ideas, principles, paradigms, and all the other ingredients that make up the approaches, methods, and theories which, in one way or another, we like  better than others and to which we give our allegiance and defend with sometimes confounding hardihood even when confronted by contrary evidence (and sometimes especially then!)."

"Conventional thinking is the way average people think, not because the majority just happens to think that way but because conformity with convention gratifies many people int erms of reinforcement, security, and comfort."

"Unfortunately, what we like to think, what we prefer to believe, can be false, misleading, and at times harmful precisely because we resist putting our ideological preferences into question."

"Conservative thinking - adherence to and defense of conventions that are dominant at any particular time - therefore automatically brings with it a limited field of vision and a self-chosen myopia."

"Individuals who are willing to do these things [question conventional beliefs] tend to be few, and they should expect to meet correspondingly deeply rooted resistance, which of course indeed they have throughout the past."

"Practitioners of a discipline very naturally often feel that one must step into an altogether different discipline - into "philosophy" or "metatheory" - which is then judged to comprise a separate area of study, one that can safely and conveniently be ignored by the scientist when his or her paradigm, tools of thinking, and habitual approach are made objects of explicit critical evaluation. This reaction has led to an unnecessary and undesirable compartmentalization of science and a divorce of science from "foundational questions" that are held at arm's length and encapsulated as alien- as just so much pure theory entirely divorced from practice.

As a result, the critical examination of the conceptual foundations of science is often disconnected from science and considered to be a distinct discipline, so that responsibility is transferred to philosophy of science of perhaps to epistemology studied within cognitive science. This has served both as an excuse for scientists to  shift the responsibility for their conceptual clarity to others and as a source of encouragement for philosophers of science and epistemologists to take on such metathinking without the requirement of firsthand competency in science."

7 quoting Arendt

"Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of the "banality of evil" and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps an extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think. (Arendt, 2003 p. 159, italics added)."

11

"psychologically normal people are predisposed, when the situation is right, to inflict harm on others and often on themselves in the process. ... the majority of psychologically normal people are "sleepers" - that is, they are dispositionally inclined, when the situation is right, to aggression and destructiveness. ... they have a pathogenic willingness to inflict harm, which remains latent until an appropriate situation arises. Such a situation may, for example, come in the form of war, ideological conflict, unrestricted power over others (as in an inadequately supervised prison), narcissistic injury, or in many other ways. Such "adequately provoking situations" unfortunately, as we know, arise with great frequency and prevalence."

16

"For a long time traditional psychology embraced the view that to be mentally healthy a person should be realistic, "in touch with reality," that is, among other qualities, to be nondelusional about one's place in the world and about what one can realistically expect from life. But in the past few decades, the pendulum has swung the other way, affirming that "positive illusions" play a central role in a healthy, satisfying life."

LOL. It's just because reality is too depressing that if you were to actually see everything for what it was, you'd not want to be a part of this society. And in the absence of a revolution to affect change on society, or possibility of living apart from society - either believe in fairy tales or lose your mind.

"Three general types of illusion have occupied researchers: distortions of reality that enhance self-esteem, illusions that support and maintain the conviction of personal efficacy, and distortions of reality that encourage optimism toward the future. All of these have been linked to psychological normality and hence to what contemporary psychiatry and psychology believe constitutes mental health: "These three illusions, as we have called them, appear to foster traditional criteria of mental health, including the ability to care about the self and others, the ability to be happy and contented, and the ability to engage in productive and creative work" (Taylor and Brown, 1988, p. 204, italics added).

... Positive illusions can be harmful and destructive, as when an individual's positive illusion that his or her set of beliefs is superior to those of others results in prejudice, persecution, and violence

...

should make us hesitant to associate the average, psychologically normal person's propensity to engage in illusion ... with genuine mental health."

"Stubbornly entrenched, collective positive illusions that magnify group self-esteem and the conviction of the group's effective control and that promote a collective delusional optimism about the future are not only counterproductive but serve as obstacles if we are realistically and responsibly to face and solve the problems for which our species is responsible."

It's not so much delusion to be optimistic, as much as finding potential paths to a better future - well maybe blind faith optimism is, but to think positively is to put your head where your goals are, and to actively seek ways to bring them about. That they probably won't come true, doesn't mean it's misled; it's just accomplishing what we want isn't all that straightforward and readily attainable. Expecting our desire to come true, just on their own accord of course is delusional optimism, which many people are guilty of, but using our intention, willpower, and effort toward a goal with optimism is rational and realistic, but with a purpose.

103

What higher education meant

"First, it was thought that certain intellectual and artistic pursuits have an intrinsic importance to human life. They have no special utilitarian purpose, they do not satisfy particular social needs, they do not tend to bring financial affluence or material comfort, yet they are essential to fully human life. They are of value in and of themselves, without connection to external gain or vocational advancement.

Secondly, it was accepted that there are comparatively few individuals who are well suited to these pursuits. Only some possess the personal qualities of intelligence, discipline, dedication, and interest to cultivate them. It was nonetheless believed to be important to the well-being of a civilized society that some people devote their lives to intrinsic values of this kind. It was believed that among the students of higher education are some who are destined to become scholars, scientists, poets, artists, and religious leaders: men and women who can offer to others experiences of a distinctive kind that lead to a freer, higher, and richer level of consciousness."

Such is the way of the alchemist.

104

"

American society today believes that there are three interlinked truths: (1) opportunity should be equal for all, (2) equal opportunity will yield equal results, and (3) equal education for all equalizes opportunity and therefore brings about equal results (van den Haag, 1974). This myth of egalitarianism has very little to dow ith democracy.

... [Dewey]

The democratic faith in equality is the faith that each individual shall have the chance and opportunity to contribute whatever he is capable of contributing and that the value of his contribution be decided by its place and function in the organized total of similar contributions, not on the basis of prior status of any kind whatever. (Dewey, 1949, p.60).

"

"In America, the only evidences of superiority that we will comfortably tolerate are in sports, in the accumulation of monetary wealth, in military success and rank, and in show business."

"The performances of outstanding fine artists, and here I am referring to virtuoso performances of classical music and ballet, though they are physical in nature, reveal a superiority of accomplishment that is too distant from what the majority can aspire to. Such displays of attainment are intimidating."

"To be tolerable in our egalitarian democracy, intellectual superiority must be excused, disguised, and brought down to a commonplace level."

"A society that favors laxity in its educational expectations and that unquestioningly neglects and repudiates values not closely linked with financial aggrandizement."

"Caught with a host of student vacancies to fill, colleges and universities in the early 1960s found the public outcry that everyone has a right to be in college very agreeable. The challenge posed by the student recruitment problem was met by making higher education easier and more entertaining to students.

..

Virtually anyone could attend college, without regard to aptitude, preparation, or dedication.

...

The Vietnam war added another log to the self-fueling blaze. Legions of students enrolled in universities to avoid the draft. In response, faculty whose social consciences were disturbed by the war eased their academic demands on students who, if they received the lower grades they merited, would become cannon fodder.

...

The offerings of "higher education" now included such tantalizing attractions as Electronic Existentialism (the "philosophy" of rock groups) and Philosophy of Physical Education...

bachelors' and graduate programs in Food Distribution, Packaging, Agricultural Journalism, Ice Cream and Wine Making, and courses in the then-burgeoning, vague new field of "Communications."

..

During the decade of the 1980s, leniency and anti-intellectualism spread more quietly. Declining numbers of students pushed standards lower still, as colleges and universities scrambled to attract even less qualified students to fill their classrooms and wallets.... their teachers turned from the more serious and demanding academy... to the radiant, freshly polished idol of financial aggrandizement."

"Attending college is now no more and no less than the most direct road to material gratification. Mass education is America's springboard to economic development. The university has relinquished its control the the marketplace. Higher education knows that it now pays only lip service to culture: its real purpose is to cater to students who want, more than anything else, to make money. 

Students and their parents now commonly apply a two-step decision process in choosing a university: the costs of attending name-brand private institutions are compared with those of less expensive state universities, and the totals are compared with the projected dollar value of the two varieties of degrees once a student has a diploma in hand and enters the workplace. (Money Magazine)"

119

"Culture is humanity's link between a world of mortality, finitude, work, and everyday cares, and a world of freedom from these burdens."

"Those for whom this world of freedom from utility does not exist are trapped in barbarity. Their shrunken sphere of concerns is limited to the satisfaction of immediate biological needs and desires. The only growth of perspective that can be expected of them is that they may develop an anxiety concerning the future satisfaction of those same immediate needs."

"Narcissism, mediocrity, and indiscrimination; a mythology of egalitarianism; the raising of normality to serve as a gold standard of desirability; a denial of individual accountability; and a base focus on work and money have combined."

Denial of individual accountability is an attitude, that if something bad happens to you - it's automatically someone else failing to be good to you. Whether or not that is a reasonable assertion is relevant. It's the attitude that immediately jumps to that assumption that is a failing of character. First one should look, at oneself, at the circumstances, and the offending party and with all three make a balanced assessment. It is not automatically blaming oneself if one does not blame another, that is excessive self-blame, lack of confidence - and not our goal. Neither is always finding a way to exculpate any blame from either party and let patterns of behavior extenuate, choosing to excuse everything as an unavoidable misfortune of circumstance alone. Considering all three might not make the right assessment every time, but that is the grounds - an essential requirement on which a fair assessment can be made, so the very first thing we should learn is to take consideration of each perspective in forming any opinions.

Normal should not be the ultimate role model for a person or society. Normal is simply adequate, acceptable, unobjectionable, but undeserving of any notable recognition. The exemplary individuals whose base level of performance is above normal should be the basis of our expectations. We should strive to do as they, to surpass them as well, and not let our limitations in reaching that ideal demoralize us from a wholehearted, and not rat-racey ambition to keep working at it.

But normal is highly desirable quality when humans are viewed as an living fuel. Something that generates a profitable byproduct by working, consuming, and living - at a nominal cost. You want your fuel to be uniform, behave predictably, not be volatile, not generate too much or too little of anything to throw the combustion engine out of whack. Humans are the fuel of society.

124

"There are different ways to reject propositions that we don't like. One way is to ignore them and go on with our usual lives, retaining our beliefs and practices unchanged. Another is to get mad, feel that we've been offended, and reject the offending propositions not because they're not true but because they've given rise to offense... Taking offense gives us an excuse to reject what we dislike, with no other needed justification than the offense taken."

"Underlying all three of these intellectually dishonest responses is, very frequently, a deeply rooted opposition to propositions that, if we should accept them to be true, would take away from us a more cheerful, optimistic view of things. To put the matter directly: we are, most of us, equipped with a mental "circuit-breaker" that kicks in if our need for optimism is short-circuited. It is, to speak diplomatically, "as though" most people cannot bear to live with the real truths about their human condition and so seek refuge in optimism, in the "positive illusion...

As Nietzsche expressed this in his Birth of Tragedy (1992, p. 18), such avoidance borne of a need to maintain illusion is "morally speaking, a sort of cowardice."

"Without work all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies. - Albert Camus (quoted in Rohrlich, 1980, p. 231)"

128

"Faculty burnout is due to the gradual erosion of a usually young professor's idealism in an environment lacking in gratification. The reasons given for this lack of gratification are multiple. In general they tend to fall into two categories: the frustrating blocks that young faculty often encounter when they wish to bring about changes in the way higher education is managed and offered to students, and the general absence of direct recognition and approval received by younger faculty from their administrations and older colleagues."

"Burnout is formally defined and subjectively experienced as a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding. The emotional demands are most often caused by a combination of very high expectations and chronic situational stresses. Burnout is accompanied by an array of symptoms including physical depletion, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, disillusionment, and the development of a negative self-concept and negative attitudes toward work, people involved in work, and life itself." (Pines and Aronson, 1988, pp 9-10).

There is a psychological profile which is often typical of people who experience career burnout. More than does the average person,

they tend to be idealistic, in that they expect their work to give their lives a sense of meaning - "burnout most often happens to people who initially cared the least about their paychecks" (Pines and Aronson).

They tend to be especially caring about their work and its value, sometimes so much so that they regard their work as a "calling"; and

they are often highly motivated to achieve, in a way that goes beyond routine high achievement, due to a strong and unquestioned belief that success in one's discipline is closely associated with one's worth as a human being.

People with these qualities tend to burn out when their work environment has these characteristics:

it frustrates, and may completely block, their aspirations. The frustration they experience, given their high expectations and need for meaningful work, soon erodes their spirit.

Their work offers minimal personal rewards in the context of inescapable stresses that cannot be lessened or changed.

their work load is excessive, or else work itself does not provide sufficient challenge because they are overtrained and do not feel well utilized.

Victims of career burnout experience one or more of the following:

mental exhaustion: difficulty concentrating, impaired creativity, and negative attitudes toward one's self, others, one's work, and life generally

emotional exhaustion: feelings of helplessness in situations they cannot control, entrapment, and depression

physical exhaustion: chronic fatigue, lowered resistance to illnesses, headaches, neck and back pain, eating disorders, and problems in sleeping

Unfortunately, the unreflective tendency among the majority of mental health practitioners is automatically to pursue a course of treatment that encourages the person to adjust to the existing work environment. Pines and Aronson's study opposes this tendency by emphasizing that the major causes of burnout reside in the work environment itself. Their outlook is hopeful, even if unrealistic: "Since we view environments as more amenable to change than persons' personalities, we prefer to direct our efforts to work environments" (Pines and Aronson). They believe that it is the work environment that must be changed, rather than the individual:

...

our work has made it clear that, in the vast majority of cases of burnout, the major cause lies in the situation. (Pines and Aronson)."

132

"The help that is offered seeks to adjust individual attitudes and biochemistry until a more compatible, comfortable fit between individual and environment is accomplished. Seen from this point of view, clinicians serve the purposes of social adjustment, normalization, and conditioning: They help people to continue to carry on with their conventionally endorsed social roles and responsibilities."

Yeah fuck em. Don't change the problem, change the objection to the problem. Cause the problem is a racket that wants to keep profiting off the general population.

"Sensitive to the situational relationship between an individual's depression and his or her life goals, values, perception of obstacles, hopes for success or expectation of failure, and so on.  From this point of view, Klinger (1975, 1977) and Nesse (2000) have observed that depression can serve to motivate a person to find a way out of blind alleys, to give up unreachable goals, and to become free from a sense of entrapment in a destructive situation. In this sense, Klinger and Nesse proposed that depression can be adaptive because it may serve as a healthy defense against circumstances that are harmful and demoralizing. However, such a situation understanding of depression, which claims that an individual's depression is attributable to or largely due to outward circumstances, is relatively infrequent among clinicians"

147

"Peer review of publications has become the "gold standard" in scientific, academic, and scholarly publishing, in spite of the fact that (2) virtually no serious qualitative or data-based studies have been made to establish, when compared with publications not subject to peer review, that those which are peer reviewed are "better," "more reliable," "more valid," "more accurate," and "more important contributions" to significant advances in any discipline, and (3) for the foreseeable future, peer review is here to stay. (See, e.g. Enserink, 2001; Roy and Ashburn, 2001; Marsh, Bond, and Jayasinghe, 2007.)

"Peer reviewers have frequently been found (by critics) to be incompetent and to lack formal training in the review of manuscripts; much of the time they are chosen from younger and less experienced faculty, scholars, and scientists, who are least qualified to serve as an expert author's "peers".

In evaluating manuscript submissions there is little agreement in the judgment of reviewers, less than would be expected by chance.

Many authors find that peer reviewers' criticisms are irrelevant to their manuscripts' intent and content.

A host of prejudicial factors can play a central role in peer reviewers' judgment, such as the professional paradigm or ideology they embrace; their political and social biases; professional jealousy or vested interest in protecting their own turf (status, reputation, research approach, and results); favoritism toward graduates of their own alma maters, toward colleagues from other institutions they admire, and toward authors who are already well-known; and so on"

The author makes statements I sometimes agree with. But more often than not, his body of evidence is lacking to support his arguments. The quotes of other authors, their arguments are more to the point, and backed up by their logical development; and yet Bartlett often times misuses their original intent, or at the very least skims a thin superficial accord with the quoted author, then moves on to state his own opinion far beyond what the quote goes to prove.

Bartlett seems to state some of his own biases as truth; and throw society's priorities in line with his personal, incidental motives - the ideas about acedia and leisure, importance and justified elitism of higher education, - all those things weigh importance on his own position in society, which is hardly an encompassing model of the majority of individuals. He may accurately see the deficiencies of the society as it is, but that does not immunize him from making the same errors of within his own construct of 'what ought to be'.

And the most disappointing thing of his book is, he fails to rectify what is wrong with a better model of what might work. His objections and critiques fail to come together, neither as an antithesis nor a new synthesis into a sustainable alternative societal framework. His world would have too many dangling loose ends, where the current model has a shitty but functional mechanism. And he fails to have a vision that is inclusive to people beyond his limited profession, career, and societal role - so really, his entire book boils down to personal misgivings about his own lot, rather than a universal awareness that we can use to achieve greater purpose.