b oo k R e v i e w
On Modern Psychology and Ancient Wisdom by Ben Keaster
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here is a mental health crisis playing out on America’s college campuses. Over the last decade, college students’ rates of depression, anxiety, self-injury, and suicide attempts have all risen sharply. Why is this? Are America’s young people facing more pressure to succeed than in previous generations? Are they too glued to their screens to get proper exercise or sleep? Are they worried about finding a stable career or establishing stable romantic relationships? Are they terrified of rising global temperatures and the future of the planet? In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, and Greg Lukianoff, an attorney who litigates for free speech on college campuses, argue that the primary cause is a culture of “safetyism” that has come to dominate parenting and the academy in the last 10 years. Drawing insight from such varied sources as the stoic philosopher Epictetus and the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they make the case that well-intentioned adults have inculcated the youth with what they call the “three Great Untruths”: ◗ The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. ◗ The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. ◗ The Untruth of Us vs. Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
To understand the authors’ perspective, it helps to start with Lukianoff ’s personal story, which he relates in the book’s opening chapter. Lukianoff has been involved with the non-profit organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which has focused on protecting free-speech rights on college campuses since 2001. He has had a frontrow seat during the last 18 years to see where threats to free speech have come from, and more important, the justifications used to limit speech. Up until 2014, he says, the people pushing for disinviting campus speakers and limiting hate speech (mostly administrators) used as a justification the curtailment of racist or sexist speech. In 2014, the justifications for these events became medicalized. The typical argument jacob's well
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was that certain ideas from speakers, or even in literature or coursework, could interfere with students’ ability to function. Lukianoff was surprised because it was, in many ways, the opposite of what he’d been taught in therapy in 2008, after he was hospitalized with depression. His own journey from being suicidal and depressed to regaining the ability to function was facilitated by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was formalized in the 1960s by psychiatrist Aaron Beck. It is a short-term, goal-oriented method that is widely held to be the gold standard in psychotherapy. One of its key insights is that thoughts, emotions, and behavior are causally linked and proceed from one to the next. Put as simply as possible, if you are experiencing “bad” emotions (such as depression or anxiety), it could be the result of “bad” thoughts (I am unlovable, I am fragile, I am in danger). CBT teaches patients to look critically at their thoughts and to change the ones that aren’t true, as a way to break a dysfunctional cycle of thoughts-emotions-behavior-repeat. As Lukianoff began to get well, he noticed that campus administrators often modeled cognitive distortions for students. One of the “bad” thoughts they perpetuated was that students were in constant danger and in need of protection (whether from hateful words, challenging ideas, or discussions related to specific traumas). It was this new insistence that censorship was needed for psychological wellbeing that led Lukianoff to seek out social psychologist Johnathan Haidt, who confirmed his understanding that there was indeed a contradiction. Haidt and Lukianoff are convinced that many of the discussions about the need for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and, most alarmingly, treating speech as literal violence, contain and promote what CBT would identify as cognitive distortions. The argument is at its strongest in relation to anxiety. There is wide agreement amongst the diverse schools of psychological thought about how to help someone overcome anxiety. It’s firmly established in psychology that the best way to overcome fear and anxiety is from voluntary exposure, in small but increasing doses, to what frightens the patient. The idea
