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An article that pretty much sums up why us humans NEED structure in our lives.
An excerpt:
https://quillette.com/2022/06/14/pro...ental-illness/
Mark
An excerpt:
The progressive account—that LGBT identification is like left-handedness, that persecution explains mental illness, and that rising toleration leads to more people coming out—cannot account for the patterns in my data. A more parsimonious explanation is that left-liberal culture, especially among young people, inclines people to identify as both LGBT and as having a mental health problem.
This could stem from a partly heritable psychological disposition of high openness and neuroticism with low conscientiousness, as some researchsuggests. Another possibility is that a culture which celebrates divergence and transgression may be nudging those with intermittent same-sex attraction to label themselves LGBT, or inclining people with occasional melancholy to say they are depressed.
More seriously, it may be that modern culture is, as Boston University’s Liah Greenfeld suggests, anomic. That is, by breaking down established identity roles, narratives, and boundaries, it introduces dissonance, indeterminacy, and choice, increasing the rates of identity crisis and, by extension, psychological distress. The rise in mental health problems, she argues, is worse in the West than elsewhere in the world, reflecting the cultural specificity of mental illness. Her analysis takes a Durkheimian approach, which focuses on how a loss of communal regulation of desires and identities can produce higher suicide levels as the mind becomes unmoored from social givens in the external world.
In a recent article for the Wall Street Journal, Greenfeld adds that:
This could stem from a partly heritable psychological disposition of high openness and neuroticism with low conscientiousness, as some researchsuggests. Another possibility is that a culture which celebrates divergence and transgression may be nudging those with intermittent same-sex attraction to label themselves LGBT, or inclining people with occasional melancholy to say they are depressed.
More seriously, it may be that modern culture is, as Boston University’s Liah Greenfeld suggests, anomic. That is, by breaking down established identity roles, narratives, and boundaries, it introduces dissonance, indeterminacy, and choice, increasing the rates of identity crisis and, by extension, psychological distress. The rise in mental health problems, she argues, is worse in the West than elsewhere in the world, reflecting the cultural specificity of mental illness. Her analysis takes a Durkheimian approach, which focuses on how a loss of communal regulation of desires and identities can produce higher suicide levels as the mind becomes unmoored from social givens in the external world.
In a recent article for the Wall Street Journal, Greenfeld adds that:
The more a society is dedicated to the value of equality and the more choices it offers for individual self-determination, the higher its rates of functional mental illness. … Equality inevitably makes self-definition a matter of one’s own choice, and the formation of personal identity—necessary for mental health—becomes a personal responsibility, a burden some people can’t shoulder.
Mark
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