Does the internet really need another blog on psychology, the mind, and mental health? I’ve noticed is that there is no shortage of interest in psychology, and self-help out there. With exorbitant cost of therapy and medical care in general, alongside spreading fear that civilized discourse and social order are degrading rapidly, who wouldn’t want to learn how to help themselves preserve their own sanity!? However, as the demand for applied mental health information expands, my concern is that the content has become generic, watered down, and less interested in the workings of the mind.
Something else has occurred in the last few years alongside the growth of psychological “lifehacks.” As people have either become more mistrustful of “fake news,” or enraged by people labeling it as such, a groundswell of substantive, longform conversations and articles have begun to sprout up outside the mainstream. What’s more, people are consuming it insatiably. While we can all do with a bit of outrage porn, whether your taste be the Fox News variety, MSNBC Flavor, or the CNN brand, I’m heartened to believe that people may be craving depth over “hacks.” With the optimistic belief that people all over are hungry for content grappling with core aspects of our humanity, here are a few of the goals I have for mindsplain.com that, if achieved, I feel confident readers will find both valuable and beneficial:
1. Provide depth and thus value.
If you have achieved your goals using quick tips and tricks to help with debilitating psychological issues, then going deeper may not be what you are looking for. However, my experience with standard mental health advice is that the larger the audience, the more diluted it gets, and the less useful it becomes. While no blog can provide total customization, I aim to provide ways of thinking about mental health challenges that enrich readers’ understanding of what is going on inside of them so they can work towards highly individualized solutions to their problems. I believe greater depth engages more of our minds into intuitive understandings and solutions.
The mindsplain “voice” is one that I hope will resonate both at logical and intuitive levels of the mind.
Michael Kinsey, Ph.D.
2. Offer a unique voice.
I created the neologism “mindsplain” to capture both the playful stance with which I aspire to discuss our internal worlds and to harness the power of language to strike deeper into the reader’s unconscious. Language, symbolism, metaphor are all tools to communicate through existing understandings and sensory experience (N.B. In the first sentence of the paragraph, the words “capture,” “stance,” “harness,” “strike,” and “deeper,” are visual/spatial metaphors that leverage sensory experience to enhance understanding. We all use this figurative language and take for granted that it’s built upon physical experiences in the world. I believe that the more abstract problems become, the more we need this type of language to muddle through the mess.)
The mindsplain “voice” is one that I hope will resonate both at logical and intuitive levels of the mind. I assume that thought is at least three dimensional, and we need to not only broaden, but also deepen our understanding to best leverage inner resourcefulness to move us towards enhanced wellbeing.
3. Make mental health playful (again?).
Depression, anxiety, and the component “symptoms” have become an epidemic in our social and cultural reality. Undoubtedly, these modern “diseases” can have serious and deleterious consequences in our lives. But what if taking symptoms so seriously and humorlessly didn’t help anyone? Would we still insist on labeling mental “illness” a type of malady (We’ll set masochism aside for another day)?
I believe playfulness is the cure to current scourge of depression and anxiety. Play is a form of self-expression, a way we develop a sense of self, and the way we begin to feel comfortable acting without fearing consequences. In other words, play–not happiness or contentment–is the opposite of anxiety and depression. Play is the way we achieve flow states, learn, optimize the use of our attentional resources, and negotiate interactions between our internal and external worlds. And yes, adults play too. In this blog, I aim to strike a delicate balance between respecting the suffering inherent to mental illness, while also nurturing an environment wherein “symptoms” can be used as toys in the playroom of the mind.
4. Combat stigma.
If I have not yet made my point clear, I invite visitors to this blog to engage with their suffering, entertaining the idea that symptoms are important message worthy of respect and exploration. We play with them here, because stigma arises out of pathology. If only for the time you spend here, I encourage readers to treat symptoms as urgent messages from an older, wiser region of our minds. For example, treating anxiety and panic as an urgent (coded) message, a wake-up call, a call to action, a cosmic sign I believe to be more helpful than assuming we were born with a genetic defect.
I do not feel this is a polyannish construction of reality. I see no reason to believe that health and flourishing are not our most natural states of being. Again, this is not new age bullshit. The thought of our hominid ancestors not being able to get out of bed and having panic attacks is patently absurd. Depression-like states are observable in the natural world, but are so obviously the exception rather than the rule.
If health and wellbeing is the norm, then suffering must then be considered a sign that we have deviated too far away from our natural state. From my own personal and clinical experience, suffering is not just a sign that something is wrong. Inquiring into the nature and meaning of the signal usually provides valuable information about what needs to be restored in order to reclaim our wellbeing.
5. Demystify the process and benefits of psychotherapy.
The happenings within the analysts consulting room have long been shrouded in mystery. Often rationalized as a way to promote “transference,” the intimate and confidential exchange between therapist and patient seem to have taken on the perversely eroticized connotations of the Catholic confessional. I’ve noticed that pop culture portrayals of the therapeutic relationship tend to fall into one of two camps: the absurd (e.g., Monk, Analyze This, What about Bob?) and the erotic (e.g., In Treatment, Prince of Tides, Sopranos).
As a psychoanalytically-informed therapist, I am intimately familiar with context behind these portrayals. Psychotherapy can feel powerful, gratifying, intense, shocking, primal, maddening, funny, erotic, and often incredibly weird. It’s designed to be so. If you’ve been in this kind of treatment and don’t really know what’s going on (i.e., it has not been properly explained), it’s bound to feel either absurd or perverse!
Therapists are both rigorously trained and held to the highest standards of ethical conduct. They are also flawed human beings who are not meant to be gurus or prophets. With the proper boundaries in place, therapist mistakes and patients’ expressions of primal emotion are not only acceptable, they are the very things leveraged to create change. Psychotherapy does not have to be mysterious, in my opinion. We’d all be better off, less fearful, and yes, have better movies and TV shows about psychotherapy, if the inner workings of a psychoanalytic treatment were more accessible.
6. Emphasize the journey of growth.
If personal development is like sex, then using tips and tricks to quickly achieve a better life would be like premature ejaculation. This is to say, these tools can be satisfying–especially when the need is most urgent–however growth, like sex, tends to be most enjoyable and satisfying when the process itself gratifies. Exploring the mind is a way of life and does not have to be a mere means to an end.
Learners have become innoculated against psychoanalytic thought by brief exposures to the most outlandish ideas and phrasings, most of which contain shocking, decontextualized sexual taboo.
Michael Kinsey, Ph.D.
7. Spread interest and thus the benefit of depth psychotherapy.
Personal experience with psychoanalysis has transformed my life at both a micro and macro level. My encounters with my unconscious drives, motivations, and imagery have been among the most poignant experiences I have known. Freud has been marginalized to an intellectual quarantine, despite the fact that his biggest and most intuitive ideas have transformed the way we all think about ourselves. Learners have become innoculated against psychoanalytic thought by brief exposures to the most outlandish ideas and phrasings, most of which contain shocking, decontextualized sexual taboo. Has Freud been rightfully exiled from our canon, or does the dissociation of his ideas confirm a principle at the core of his work–i.e., that anxiety-provoking thought must be kept out of awareness?
The question is not merely rhetorical. A case can be made either way (it should be obvious which camp I am in!), but I believe we would all profit from engaging with psychoanalytic thought more thoroughly before making up our minds one way or the other. If you visit this site with a desire to better understand a problem in your life, a curiosity about the mind and/or human condition, or are even trying to be open-minded about the potential benefits of an examined life, my goal is to walk with you on your quest for a richer, deeper, and more meaningful existence. Godspeed to all of us!