Jules Evans2013-05-22T21:23:22-04:00Jules Evanshttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=jules-evansCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jules EvansGood old fashioned elbow grease.Should Universities Teach Wellbeing?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28516312013-03-11T06:27:34-04:002013-05-11T05:12:01-04:00Jules Evanshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-evans/
The morning after the dinner, I met for a coffee with Martyn Evans, the co-founder of Durham's Centre for the Medical Humanities. The Centre was set up in 2008 along with King's College London's Centre for the Humanities and Health, both via a £4million grant from the Wellcome Trust, and both with the mission to explore how health issues (like, say, hearing voices) are never simply biomedical, but are also subjective experiences, experienced through the prism of our beliefs, values, and culture. That sort of work is the humanities at its best: re-humanizing experiences which might have been reduced to mechanistic explanations. It's the approach of, say, Oliver Sacks, who asks not just 'what is happening in the brain' but also 'what is it like to experience that and make sense of it?'
This, to me, is why psychotherapy is such an interesting meeting-place between the sciences and humanities - it's the place where our beliefs, values and culture meet and mesh with our bodies. We are flesh, blood and bone, but we are also bundles of beliefs and ideas, and our beliefs can be as good or bad for us as any other aspect of our diet. The word diet, by the way, comes from the ancient Greek diaita, meaning 'way of life' - you can't separate health issues from ethics, as we are slowly remembering.
So let me get to the main course of this post.
While I was in Durham, I read that Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, had called for better measures at universities for the well-being of undergraduates. He sent a questionnaire to 104 heads of secondary schools, among whom 96% thought universities weren't doing enough for the well-being of their undergraduates. Seldon is particularly concerned with binge-drinking among undergrads. He's called for higher prices in student bars (sure to make him popular with students), the introduction of personal tutors for each student, and the introduction of happiness or well-being classes at every university.
I'm a little wary when people use the language of epidemics to justify policy measures. Why would school headmasters have particular expertise on life at universities? In fact, the latest evidence (from a Durham academic) suggests young people are drinking less and taking fewer drugs. Teenage pregnancies are also down. I also think the stigma around mental health problems is much lower now than it was 15 years ago, when I was at university and too afraid to discuss my panic attacks with anyone apart from my long-suffering girlfriend. But other indicators are more worrying: students' demand for counseling services is rising sharply, and the number of student suicides has also risen, perhaps in connection with higher levels of debt and worsening job prospects. There are problems at other levels of academia too: taking a PhD can be socially isolating, while senior academics are often depressed by the amount of paper-work they have to cope with.
Nonetheless, to some academics, the call for happiness classes in universities sounds awful. Shouldn't university teach us to criticise simplistic or politically convenient definitions of happiness? Frank Furedi, lecturer in sociology at Kent and one of the loudest opponents of therapy culture, called Seldon's proposals a 'therapeutic crusade' which would 'infantilise academic life'.
Furedi has previously written an interesting book in which he bewailed the loss of the public intellectual. He's also written many books and articles criticising our culture of therapy and well-being. To me, those two positions are contradictory. The greatest public intellectuals, from Aristotle to Marx to Maynard Kenyes, engaged with the public because they thought their ideas would improve people's lives and enhance their well-being. In this sense, well-being thinkers like Seldon and Richard Layard are good examples of public intellectuals - though of course, like many intellectuals they can sometimes be a little too sure their ideas will help everyone.
I've criticized Seldon and Layard in the past for their certainty that they've scientifically proved precisely what happiness is and how we can all reach it. I'm wary of too positivistic an approach to well-being. I've since been surprised and impressed by their generous response to those criticisms. To me, that's a good measure of a person: how well they respond to criticism (a measure by which I myself have repeatedly failed). I think both of them, and their organisation Action for Happiness, increasingly recognise the need for a more philosophically pluralist approach to well-being, one which strengthens people's critical capacity to choose their own definition rather than accept the definition of experts. However, the work of experts is useful too - whether that be scientific or philosophical experts - as long as we don't swallow their advice without question.
If universities were to introduce well-being classes, they would have to be philosophically pluralist, exploring the different approaches to well-being and the good life. I also think they could be liberal, in the American sense of balancing the humanities with the sciences, balancing ethics with evidence. There are good precedents for such courses in American universities, such as Stanford's course in the Art of Living, or Yale's course in the philosophy and science of human nature. My ideal course would balance a scientific and a philosophical approach to the good life, balancing evidence-based techniques from CBT and Positive Psychology with more open Socratic inquiry into the different models of the good life that you can use those techniques to build.
I've been running the pilot of such a course at Queen Mary, University of London, for the last few weeks - we have another session coming up on Tuesday evening. The course explores the various Greek and Roman philosophies of the good life - Epicurean, Stoic, Platonic, Skeptic - all of which share the cognitive theory of the emotions and the idea that philosophy can help us flourish, while disagreeing on broader questions of the meaning of life. The course tries to balance philosophical discussions with some ideas and techniques from cognitive therapy.
I think the course is going well, though it's still very much a prototype. Running it has certainly increased my respect for university lecturers who do this work week-in, week-out. I wouldn't say I've been over-whelmed by hordes of eager undergraduates, and those that do come are often texting away on their mobiles. This makes me think that it would be a mistake to make such courses compulsory, but it might help if such courses carried credit, as they do in American universities. Undergraduates are, on the whole, happy-go-lucky, and mainly focused on partying. But a few of them are hungry for meaning and for answers to life's big questions. That search for meaning should be at the heart of the university experience, not out-sourced to counseling services on the fringes of campus life.
The idea that academic work should be involved with the emotions and with well-being is not necessarily 'infantilizing'. Students went to Plato's Academy, or Aristotle's Lyceum, or Epictetus' school in Nicopolis, precisely to learn how to flourish. When Plato founded his Academy, 2,400 years ago this year, the idea was that you brought the whole of yourself to education, not just your intellect. When did we start thinking that academic work should leave out the emotions?
Academics are right to be wary of pat solutions to questions of the good life. It's an on-going conversation, to which we can all bring something and take something. I can't think of a better place for that conversation than universities, nor can I think of a better way for universities to engage with their societies.
PS, here's a great article by Richard Schoch, who used to work at Queen Mary but has now alas left for Belfast, on a debate between Seldon and Furedi back in 2008. Schoch, who is the author of The Secret of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life, also argues that the latest science should be taught alongside the wisdom of the ancients.]]>How Arts and Humanities Can Influence Public Policytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27096142013-02-18T05:46:07-05:002013-04-20T05:12:01-04:00Jules Evanshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-evans/Institute for Government, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to help academics learn how to influence public policy. The seminar brought together 15 academics in disciplines ranging from literary criticism to design and urban planning.The IFG arranged an impressive line-up of Westminster big-wigs to talk to us, including Matthew Taylor of the RSA and Sir Gus O'Donnell, former head of the civil service. They gave us a fascinating look into how politics works, but also showed how hard it is for academics to influence policy.
As one civil servant told us, ministers are extremely busy and rarely get time to read a newspaper article, let alone a research paper. They want any 'action points' to be clearly expressed in a two-page document. Tony Blair apparently said that if you can't express your idea in two sentences, you don't understand it. All of this was quite off-putting for some of the academics, trained as they are to appreciate subtlety, nuance and multiple readings. One academic was particularly horrified by the idea of using an infograph to get their ideas across.
On their side, some policy-makers expressed frustration at how little useful advice they were getting for all the money they were putting into academic research. For example, the government somewhat controversially set aside a pot of money for academic research into the 'Big Society', but apparently, few practical recommendations have arisen from all that research. I think that shows a mistake in timing - there is a lag between 'government time' and 'academic time', and academics can best influence policy in the quieter years before government, when politicians are formulating their broader policy visions, rather than during government when any academic contributions risk being seen as entirely expedient.
Another policy-maker noted that American academics seemed to be better at influencing British policy than domestic thinkers: think of the 'Nudge unit' inspired by Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman; or the impact of Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology on British policy. Why is the RSA's schedule of public talks so full of visiting American intellectuals, with so few British intellectuals? Perhaps, one speaker speculated, American academics are better at selling themselves because they have a much bigger book market to sell into. That emphasis on mass communication makes them better able to deliver TED-style pitches to busy policy-makers.
However, it's still the case in the US that arts and humanities scholars have little influence on public policy, with a few notable exceptions in history, law and ethics (Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum). English literature and cultural studies have little influence on policy, and perhaps that's as it should be - novels and poetry thankfully resist the utilitarian bent of our times.
To be provocative: is it possible that the huge influence of critical theory, and particularly of Michel Foucault, on arts and humanities academics have, ironically, rendered them less capable of influencing power and changing the world? Doing an arts and humanities PhD sometimes reminds me of initiation into a cult - you go through a three-year period of social isolation, by the end of which you emerge fully inculcated in the radical doctrine of critical theory. This world-view puts you at odds not just with public policy, but also with mass society, including your friends, family and lovers. One academic told me that few relationships survive a humanities PhD, and that she herself had broken up with her boyfriend half-way through her studies (she's now happily married to a Lacanian). The initiate in critical theory can end up so sceptical of power, they become incapable of influencing it. This limits their influence to the 'in-culture' of academia - a culture which is ironically very hierarchical. I say this as an 'outsider' - someone without a PhD who came into academia through journalism (so perhaps I'm just insecure about my lack of qualifications!)
Four ways that arts and humanities influence public policy
Let me end on four positive ways that arts and humanities research can and do influence public policy. Firstly, through investigating stories and their impact on our emotions. The arts and humanities are right at the centre of public policy because political communication is to a large extent about stories, words, symbols and how they move us. The scop, the bard, the story-weaver, has always been an important part of court politics. The most obvious way that the arts and humanities could influence public policy, then, is through the exploration of rhetoric, narrative and its effect on the emotions. This exploration would include the recent work of social scientists and psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and George Lakoff into values and metaphor and how they move us.
At the moment, as far as I'm aware, there is only one centre for the study of rhetoric in the UK, which was opened in Royal Holloway's classics department in 2010 - though I note that Philip Gould left money in his will for a 'visiting professorship in rhetoric and the art of public persuasion' at Oxford. There's room for much more research in this area, and it would have the benefit of being very interesting and (dare I say it ) useful to politicians and their speech-writers. What are Shakespeare's history plays if not explorations of the rhetoric, narratives and myths of political power? Winston Churchill was able to 'mobilize the English language and put it to battle' (as JFK put it) by studying rhetoric, by reading Shakespeare. Our political culture would be greatly improved if more politicians followed his example. Politicians improve or debase our political culture through their language.
Secondly, history has an obvious role to play in public policy. We heard, for example, how the History and Policy project helped the policy-makers working on pension reform in the mid-noughties to unearth the history of the existing pension legislation and see how it had grown anachronistic. History helps us see how aspects of our culture that we might take as natural and eternal are in fact recent and constructed. It also gives us useful historical scenarios to think about where we are and where we're going (think of Paul Kennedy's work on imperial over-reach, for example, which might have been usefully read by the Bush government). Sir Adam Roberts is an example of a historian who has frequently contributed memoranda to parliamentary debates.
Thirdly, applied ethics has usefully engaged in public policy for several decades, from Baroness Warnock and others' work on euthanasia, to the contribution of academic philosophers to the Leveson Inquiry's debate on balancing press freedom with the right to privacy.
Finally, arts and humanities scholars have a clear contribution to make to the politics of well-being. This new movement in politics has so far been dominated by economists and psychologists - the Office of National Statistics' committee to define 'national well-being', for example, didn't contain a single representative from the arts and humanities. Now, well-being economists and psychologists like Richard Layard and Amartya Sen are increasingly engaging with the humanities, particularly with philosophy. They are engaging with the history and plurality of philosophical definitions of well-being. This is good news, as it means well-being policy will become less top-down and dogmatic and more democratic. For example, I hope to work with Layard's Action for Happiness to design a 'well-being course' for adults, which won't try to shoe-horn everyone into one pre-fabricated definition of well-being, but will instead enable people to consider the scientific evidence, while also debating and forming their own idea of the good life.
At the moment, there are two main Centres for Well-Being in English academia - Richard Layard's team at the LSE, which is mainly economists; and Felicia Huppert's Well-Being Institute at Cambridge, which is mainly psychologists. Hopefully we can get the Well-Being Project at Queen Mary started up in earnest this year, to bring thinkers and practitioners from the arts and humanities more into the conversation.]]>Top Ten Tips for Recovering From a Mental Illnesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21652122012-11-23T19:00:00-05:002013-01-23T05:12:01-05:00Jules Evanshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-evans/ 1) Know your enemy
If you have a particular condition or group of conditions, research them and know them. Know your enemy: know the kind of negative thoughts and behaviour patterns you might fall into, and watch out for them. Don't let your condition lie to you or control you. Instead, learn how to manage it, and minimise its control over your life.
Go on to support sites and see how the condition affects different people. Go on to reputable health and psychology websites and research what sorts of therapy seem to work well with it, and where you might find those therapies. Learn to be your own doctor. Recognise the thoughts and attitudes that are messing you up and causing you suffering. You're probably all familiar with the CBT bingo list of cognitive distortions. Get to know your own particular biases, and watch out for them, guard against them.
2) Your thoughts are not 'you'
If you have a mental illness, the thoughts in your head will sometimes cause you pain. And then some of us will freak out at having those thoughts and being a rotten or weak person. Thoughts are just thoughts. We don't have to let them bully us or cause us pain. We can choose not to listen to them. We can say to ourselves: "I refuse to let those old negative thoughts cause me suffering any more". When we stop believing in negative thoughts, we take away their power over us. We can raise our negative thoughts and beliefs over us like a God, and hand them a whip to beat us. Or we can choose not to believe them, not to give them power over us. We can free ourselves from the prisons we have constructed for ourselves.
3) We are habitual creatures. Changing habits takes long-term effort
Human personalities are bundles of automatic habits, lit up by a small ray of conscious thought. We can shine that ray onto our habits, think if they're working for us, and if not, we can change our habits.
Our personalities are always changing, all the way through our life. That's the good news. Neuroscientists call it "plasticity" - our ability to re-wire ourselves. The habits we grew up with are not written in stone for eternity. We can change them. But you have to work hard, challenging the bad old habits of thought, challenging the bad old habits of behaviour, facing your fears, and going through some painful moments. It takes energy and effort to change yourself but we can, in fact, change ourselves much more than we typically think.
Change is slow - it happens over month and years. But then you look back and see how far you've come.
Part of Tip 3 is keeping track of our progress. Our intuitions about whether we're getting better or not are often wrong. So we need to keep track of our progress more objectively and accurately. Don't focus on the day-to-day fluctuations, focus on the long-term trend.
You win some battles, you lose some battles, but are you winning the war? Keep track of your progress in a journal or on smartphone apps, keep track of your depression levels, for example, or your binge-eating, or how often you get panic attacks, or how often you are getting out to see your friends. Be scientific in your approach to mental health recovery. Keep track of your success in reinforcing good habits while weakening bad ones.
4) Focus on what you can control, while accepting for the time being what you can't
Be efficient in your energy. Focus your energy on what you can control and change. With the things you can't immediately change, learn to shrug and say "f*ck it". Lots of things will happen to us in life, and we don't always have a choice over the people we meet or the situations we find ourselves in. But we do have a choice how we respond to them. Likewise, our childhoods are not our "fault". But our adult lives are now our responsibility.
Staying sane and mentally healthy in this world involves recognising the limits of our control. We're in a big, complex world and we only have limited control over it - over the economy, the weather, the government, other people, our friends, even our own bodies. If we fixate on things beyond our control, we'll make ourselves feel helpless, angry, paranoid, insecure and disempowered. Instead, we can focus on what we can control, even if it's only small things. Here's a nice quote from Albert Ellis, which my housemate just sent me:
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
5) Get support
You can't do it all on your own. You need help and support. This is the fight of your life, and you need a team in your corner. Tell your family what you're going through. Tell some close friends. Be careful who you confide in though - not everyone you tell will be helpful. If they're not helpful or sympathetic, go easy on them - they're probably a bit frightened, or just ignorant. Find a local support group. Find a good therapist. Find a good support site and make contact with the more useful and positive voices on that site. Find stories of people who have come through the condition you are going through - then get in contact with them and ask for advice. And share your successes as well as your setbacks with other people. Celebrate your victories with your team.
6) Let go of the shame
Mental illness is as normal as physical illness. You wouldn't feel ashamed or mortified if you had flu, for example, or cancer. So why feel ashamed if you have a period of mental illness? A common statistic suggests that one in four suffer from a mental illness at some point in their lives. but in fact, just about everyone will have at least one period of mental instability in their lives at some point, even if it's not a diagnosable condition. There is nothing shameful about mental illness. In fact, facing mental illness with dignity and courage is morally laudable - it's an achievement - particularly if you then use your experience to help other people going through tough times.
7) Think of others, fight for others
Getting over mental illness isn't just about you - it's about all the other people struggling with poor mental health. As sufferers from it, we're in position to become experts, front-line correspondents from the trenches. So keep notes, get informed, share your experience, and if you get out of the labyrinth, go back and help other people get out. Remember how much it hurt, and don't forget there are people still hurting. Here's a quote from JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye that I find inspiring:
Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
And here's another, from Seneca, that I pinned up on my wall while I was writing Philosophy for Life:
There is no time for playing around. You have been retained as counsel for the unhappy. You have promised to bring help to the shipwrecked, the imprisoned the sick, the needy, to those whose heads are under the poised axe. Where are you deflecting your attention? What are you doing?
8) Take care of your body as well as your mind
We sometimes don't realise the extent to which our mental health is connected to our physical health. An important part of recovery from mental illness is learning to take care of our bodies too: taking exercise can be crucial to getting better. If nothing else, going for a run or a swim gets rid of some of our nervous mental energy. Exorcise the demons through exercise! Also be careful of what you eat and drink - too much coffee might make you anxious. You might drink a lot in the evening to overcome your inhibitions, but end up making a fool of yourself, and then feeling extra-anxious and paranoid when you're hungover in the morning. Take care of your body - you need as much energy as possible for the fight. Sleep is also hugely important - try to get to bed at a proper time and get at least seven hours. Try to live on a steady, even keel, however boring that sounds.
9) Don't romanticise or over-intellectualise your condition
I don't mean this in a harsh way, like 'pull up your socks and stop making a fuss'. What I mean is, let go of the drama. Let go of the romantic myth of yourself as a tragic martyr, singled out for suffering. Let go of the myth of yourself as a unique snowflake, whose problems are deliciously interesting and complex. Let that sh*t go! It's just another way to hold on suffering - to make love to your disease. I did that for years, then I realised the millions of people suffering from social anxiety had exactly the same thoughts and beliefs as me. Beneath all our drama and intellectual sophistication, our mental illness conditions are often pretty basic, even humiliatingly so (we long to be complex). This is why a lot of clever people would rather spend thousands of pounds on Freudian psychoanalysis - because, even if it doesn't make them better, it flatters their unique complexity. Instead, try to define the beliefs or attitudes that cause you suffering as simply, clearly, humbly and undramatically as possible.
I also think it can be useful to see the ridiculousness in your situation. Having a mental illness is, often, ridiculous. It puts us in ridiculous situations. If we laugh at that, it means we're not turning it into a big tragic drama. I like the Woody Allen scene at the end of Hannah and her Sisters about this. Woody's been trying to find the meaning of life, then he stumbles into a cinema and sees a Marx Brothers film and decides, even if he doesn't know if there's a God, he can still relax and try to enjoy the strange experience of being alive.
10) Enjoy the little moments
I have my reservations about the 'happiness movement' and its exclusive focus on happiness as the meaning of life. But they got something right: we can learn to cultivate moments of peace and happiness. That's not the meaning of life, but it helps, because experiencing mental illness means we're probably soaked in negative emotions. So we can try to cultivate little moments of positivity along the way. Learn what gives you pleasure - reading a particular author, maybe, or listening to music, or going for a walk, or seeing particular friends, or even tidying up your room. Drop by drop, we can get into the habit of happiness. We can choose not to beat ourselves up, but to let ourselves be happy, here in this moment. Eckhart Tolle may be a weirdo, but he got that right. All we have is this moment. We can take a breath, let go of our worries and regrets for just a second, and enjoy the moment, without putting any demands on it.
And finally, a last quote, from (I think) Winston Churchill: if you're going through hell, keep going. Don't give up. You're in this fight for all of us. And we're in it too, shoulder-to-shoulder with you.]]>Self-Help Shouldn't Be a Dirty Wordtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19474962012-10-15T19:00:00-04:002012-12-15T05:12:01-05:00Jules Evanshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-evans/
"Oh", she said, "well, I'm a socialist, so I don't believe in self-help."
Her attitude is pretty much the norm among intellectuals. There is a widespread feeling, particularly among sociologists, that self-help is an ugly manifestation of neo-liberalism (see, for example, 'The Age of Oprah: A Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era'). Self-help, for many, particularly on the Left, means Zig Ziglar telling you how to be a winner, or Anthony Robbins getting you to walk on coals, or Rhonda Byrne telling us we can all be rich if we just think rich thoughts. It brings to mind corporate seminars with Steve Ballmer jumping up and down like a bald gorilla, or Annette Bening desperately repeating positive affirmations in American Beauty: "I will sell this house. I will sell this house!"
Not only is self-help wickedly neo-liberal and individualistic, according to the intellectual consensus, it's also stupid. The best way a book reviewer can diss a book, these days, is by calling it 'self-help'. Naomi Wolf's new book, Vagina, for example, has attracted incredibly vitriolic reviews, but surely the lowest blow was calling it 'self-help marketed as feminism'. Ouch. You want to diss Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer? Call them 'just self-help dressed up in a lab coat'. Ohhhh SNAP!
Academics would admit to reading anything, even 50 Shades of Grey, before they admitted to reading a self-help book. When the great novelist David Foster Wallace killed himself in 2008, and around 40 self-help books were discovered in his library, everyone was a bit, well... embarrassed. And when the University of Texas created an official archive of Foster Wallace's books, the self-help titles were surreptitiously removed, like a pile of porn mags under the bed of a dead relative.
Well, it's true, a lot of self-help is pretty awful. You can drown in all that Chicken Soup. A lot of it is badly written, full of dodgy statistics and falsely-attributed quotes (my favourite is the idea that Plato said "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Plato would never say that!). And some of it is a weird religion for capitalists, what C. Wright Mills called the 'theology of pep'. But that's not the whole story with self-help. It's just the direction self-help took in the 1980s, and unfortunately most people strongly associate the word with the Reagan era.
There is an older history of self-help - a history of mutual improvement clubs, corresponding societies, lending libraries and friendly societies. It runs through the 17th Century via Protestant groups like the Quakers and Methodists, into 18th Century mutual improvement clubs in London, Edinburgh, Philadelphia and beyond. It runs into the working class education movement of the 19th and 20th Centuries, through Chartism, the Co-operative movement, the battle for universal suffrage (Samuel Smiles, the author of the 1859 book Self-Help, was a supporter of universal suffrage and the Co-operative movement, and his books were widely read by Labour activists at the turn of the century).
It runs through Gandhi's theory of swaraj and the Indian self-governance movement of the 1940s, and through Malcolm X and the Black Nationalism movement of the 1960s (X declared, in his most famous speech, 'We need a self-help program, a do it yourself philosophy, a do it right now philosophy'). It is still alive, and vibrant, in the Indian women's self-help movement, and the UK Refugee Community Organisation (RCO) movement. It is also a huge movement in mental health, leading to life-saving organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous or Hearing Voices.
I feel a strong affinity to that history, partly because I come from a Quaker family, and partly because self-help helped me, when I was suffering from depression and anxiety in my early twenties. I went to two psychotherapists, both of whom cost a lot, neither of whom helped me. I then found a support group for social anxiety through the internet, and together we practiced a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy audio-course, every Thursday evening.
That helped me a lot. So did reading ancient Greek philosophy, which I discovered had been the inspiration for CBT. Over the next decade, I tracked down and interviewed many other people who had helped themselves through reading ancient philosophy - none of them were 'intellectuals', they were ordinary people who'd self-medicated themselves with philosophy. I called my book self-help, and I wore that badge with pride.
What appeals to me about self-help is its autonomy. I like the fact that people help themselves rather than being subjected to the theories and power structures of their 'betters' - whether that be psychiatrists, or academics, or Party officials. I like the fact that the advice people share comes from their first-hand personal experience rather than academic theory. I like the democracy of it, the lack of hierarchy, the egalitarianism. I think this, secretly, is why some academics look down their nose at self-help: because it challenges their intellectual authority, their expertise, their Mandarin status.
But I'm aware that one can take this sort of self-reliant philosophy too far. It can be too individualistic. It can put too much emphasis on the superhuman individual conquering all circumstances. I think this critique can be directed at both Pierre Hadot and Foucault - they concentrated too much on individual spiritual exercises in Greek philosophy, and missed the communal aspect. As I put it in my book, "the Greeks knew that the best way to change yourself is together with other people".
That's why I'm increasingly interested in self-help communities, in mutual improvement. I've moved, personally, from quite a Stoic-libertarian philosophy to a more communal philosophy - I suppose it's more Christian, in the sense that it's grounded in a recognition that life is difficult for everybody and we all need to help each other (not that I'm a Christian).
I'm interested in experiments in communal self-help like the School of Life, which the intellectual Left loves to sneer at. But what outreach has the London Review of Books done recently, or the New Left Review, or Verso Books? When did the Left stop caring about adult education? (One possible answer: when Perry Anderson took over editing the New Left Review from EP Thompson in 1962, and the intellectual Left became totally entranced by continental philosophy and contemptuous of the British mutual improvement clubs that Thompson so admired).
Yes, the mutual improvement ethos can also be taken too far. It can be used as an excuse by libertarians for cutting public services, for closing libraries and hospitals, for dismantling comprehensive schools, for rolling back all the gains that the labour movement achieved since it first came to power in the UK in 1924.
But self-help groups aren't inherently libertarian, or laissez-faire capitalist. Support groups can really help people to get better. Self-help books can really help people (the best ones can, anyway). They can empower the vulnerable and relieve human suffering. And they can also work very well in partnership with public services, rather than as a rival.
So the next time someone disses a book as "just self-help", say to them, "what do you mean...just?"]]>Building Bridges Between Athens and Jerusalemtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16987862012-07-24T12:41:12-04:002012-09-23T05:12:09-04:00Jules Evanshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-evans/discussion in the Huff Post on the deficiencies of Stoicism as a philosophy for life.
Nevertheless, I feel that the Chief Rabbi mischaracterises Stoicism and Hellenistic philosophy, and seeing as my book is designed to attract people to Hellenistic philosophy, rather than put them off it, permit me to say a few words in its defence.
Firstly, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks conflates all the philosophies of the Socratic Tradition into one philosophy, and then sets it in opposition to the benevolent theism of Judeo-Christianity. He draws a sharp dividing line between Athens and Jerusalem, which is a surprising move from the author of How to avoid the clash of civilisation.
The Chief Rabbi suggests that all the philosophies of the Socratic Tradition (as I call it in my book) agree that there "is no transcendent purpose to human existence". In fact, they don't agree.
Certainly, Epicureanism believes "there is no transcendent purpose to existence" and that the universe is "fundamentally indifferent" to us. But that's not true at all of Stoicism, Platonism or Aristotelianism - all of which are theistic and have a teleological view of the universe.
The Stoics, for example, believe we are connected to the Logos, the divine intelligence pervading the cosmos, which orders the universe according to its benevolent plan. Stoics believe we are on Earth to develop our consciousness and reason and bring them into harmony with the Logos. As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it, "God has introduced man to be a spectator of his works, and not just a spectator, but an interpreter."
Aristotle, likewise, thought the transcendent purpose of human existence was to develop our consciousness in order to know both the cosmos and God. And Plato had his own cosmic teleology of love. The father of all these movements, Socrates, also appeared to believe in God, and to think it his own personal mission from God to teach us to "take care of our souls".
Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks then makes an old criticism of Stoicism (it's also made by Sir Isaiah Berlin and Bertrand Russell), that it's too pessimistic and introverted, the product of a particularly chaotic historical period, ie the 3rd century BC, when Athens was conquered by various marauding empires. He says "contemporary writers fail to remind us" of this fact, which is not true - I do discuss the original historical context for Stoicism in chapter two of my book.
I agree with the Chief Rabbi that Stoicism may perhaps be too politically pessimistic and individualistic, which is why I only spent the first quarter of my book on the Stoics, before moving to other philosophies like Aristotelianism, which is more politically optimistic. Nonetheless, I think it's unfair to call Stoicism introverted, withdrawn, "risk-averse", or the product of cultural decline. It flourished in Rome in the first century BC and the first century AD, hardly periods of cultural decline. And it included among its ranks some of the most active and engaged politicians of the era - Cato the Younger, Cicero, Seneca - all of whom gave their lives for their country. Risk averse? Hardly.
Yes, Stoicism is an excellent philosophy for coping with crisis and chaos, which is why it is so popular with active soldiers today (including Israeli soldiers). It may not be the perfect philosophy for stabler and more comfortable periods of our life. Stoicism helped me a great deal in a very difficult period of my life, but I subsequently felt more drawn to other philosophies of the Socratic Tradition. But I can still recognise the great therapeutic value of the Socratic Tradition in general, and Stoicism in particular. So, I might add, can many Jewish scholars, from Philo of Alexandria all the way to Martha Nussbaum and Ronald Pies today.
The great value of the Socratic tradition, it seems to me, is that it rescued humanity from the tyranny of priests and taught us how to take care of ourselves. Before Socrates, if people were unhappy, they felt it necessary to bend their knee both to the gods and to their representatives on earth, the priests, to beg for forgiveness and mercy (usually through some sort of expensive material sacrifice, perhaps even the sacrifice of a member of your family). This tradition continues today, via psychoanalysis.
After Socrates and the Athenian Enlightenment of the 5th century BC, humanity learnt, in the words of Montaigne, 'how much it can do of itself'. In psychotherapeutic terms, we learnt that our emotional problems are often self-caused, that they arise from our beliefs and attitudes, which we have the power to change. We can learn to "take care of our souls" as Socrates put it (from whom the word 'psychotherapy' originates) and be "doctors to ourselves" (in Cicero's phrase). This is the Do-It-Yourself essence of both Socratic and Stoic therapy. We don't need to kneel to the priests and beg for their benediction. Based on the priests I have met in my life, this strikes me as excellent news (although I have yet to meet Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks).
The Stoic / Socratic insight that we can to some extent heal ourselves of emotional suffering has since been tested out by modern empirical science, and has become the cornerstone of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which has helped thousands, if not millions, of people to overcome emotional disorders. (I should add that CBT was pioneered by two psychotherapists of Jewish descent - Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck - so the cross-fertilisation between Athens and Jerusalem is still yielding fruit). CBT has saved thousands of people from deep emotional suffering, including atheists, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. I personally think that Socrates and the Stoics deserve some credit for that, even if we don't accept the Stoic goal of complete detachment from externals.
As for the advantages and disadvantages of believing in a "God with a human face", well, the Chief Rabbi takes the discussion to theological levels well beyond my pay grade. I personally believe in God, and in a transcendent purpose to human existence, although I don't believe in a personal afterlife or a personal God. The cosmos, alas, seems to me rather indifferent to the suffering of individual lives, although I cling to the hope that there is a benevolent general thrust to evolution.
What I like about the Socratic Tradition is it offers wisdom for both theists and atheists. It is a meeting place both for believers and unbelievers. In that sense, it seems to me a uniquely useful resource for those who want to avoid clashes of civilisation.]]>Want to Start a Philosophy Group? Here's Howtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16643392012-07-13T19:00:00-04:002012-09-12T05:12:11-04:00Jules Evanshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-evans/London Philosophy Club. We're one of hundreds of self-organised ideas and discussion groups that have mushroomed all over the world in the last 10 years. Today, you can find (deep breath) Socrates Cafes, Cafe Philosophiques, Literary-Philosophical Societies, book salons, atheist and humanist clubs, Sci-Bars, Skeptics in the Pub, Philosophy In the Pub, Psychology In the Pub, Art History In the Pub, even 'death cafes' for people who, well, want to talk about death.
There are also commercial organisers of ideas events, like the School of Life, the Idler Academy, 5X5, Life Clubs and Intelligence Squared. Then there are all those book festivals - over 300 of them in the UK now, including ones dedicated to philosophy, like How The Light Gets In. Even music festivals like Latitude have several ideas tents now (I'll be speaking at Latitude on Friday, in the 'faraway forest', which I think is basically the car park).
Why this sudden profusion of ideas clubs? I interviewed Melvyn Bragg, the cultural commentator, for a Financial Times piece on philosophy clubs last month, and he suggested the main driver was the huge expansion of higher education since the 1960s. Back then, only 5% of the population went to university. Now it's over 40%. That's created a large number of people with minds trained to tackle big ideas, who are hungry for mental stimulation.
In particular, the retired have led the way in using their leisure to stimulate their minds. It was they who drove the huge expansion of book festivals over the last decade, and other generations have followed their lead. They also helped expand the trend for self-run informal learning organisations like the University of the Third Age.
Another huge boost for the growth of such clubs is the internet, and the easy access to social network sites like meetup.com, Facebook and eventbrite, which let groups organise meetings and attract new members for a low cost. More philosophically, the think-tank ResPublica recently argued that people are attracted to clubs because of the decline of traditional forms of community like churches and working men's clubs. People want to belong, to foster community, and to learn. The Office of National Statistics recently found that people involved in adult learning are more satisfied with their lives than people who are not.
Since my FT article came out, I've received emails from people all over the world asking for advice on setting up clubs. There's still a lot of room for new clubs: according to meetup.com, there are 338 people in Edinburgh interested in joining a philosophy club, all waiting for someone to set one up. So how do you set up a philosophy club? Here's how:
1) Find a venue
Many pubs will let you use an upstairs or downstairs events room for free, as long as people buy drinks and don't plot the imminent violent destruction of the state (even then there are certain venues who will happily accommodate you). The capacity of such rooms is typically around 50, so for more than that, you will need to rent a room and charge your members. Careful though: you may find not everyone turns up and you are left footing the bill. You can also meet in restaurants, bars, parks, libraries, galleries, museums, even street corners (although you may be moved on by the police). If you're a small group of friends, you can take turns hosting the club at your homes, perhaps preparing an appropriately themed dinner (Tolstoy and borscht, Hegel and bagels etc ).
2) Find members
A club can start with just two people. One of the largest philosophy groups in London, Big Ideas, was started by two friends, Nathan and Rich, who met up in the pub to talk about ideas. They decided they wanted to bring in experts to teach them stuff, and they might as well invite other people too. They found an obliging pub, and grew over the last seven years until they now have over 200 members and have hosted some excellent speakers. Small can be beautiful: Philosophy In Pubs in Merseyside has 15 groups all over the area, typically attracting 5 to 10 people for an event. That enables everyone to get involved in the discussion, and to get to know their local neighbours. Big can also be beautiful: the London Philosophy Club has almost 2,000 members, which helps us attract world class speakers.
3) Pick a topic
There are, to my mind, three main ways to run a philosophy club, and you can do all three if you want. The first is for the group to pick a topic (it could be a question, a philosopher, a book), perhaps do some preparatory reading (perhaps not) and then use it as the 'stimulus' for a Socratic group inquiry. The advantage of this format is that it's very participatory. The disadvantage is people aren't necessarily learning anything. It can help if there is a moderator to steer the conversation, make sure it doesn't just go round in circles, and stop the extroverts from dominating. One group in London uses whiteboards to try and track the conversation and help it forward.
Secondly, one of your members can prepare a short talk on a topic, and then the group uses that as a springboard for collective inquiry. The advantage of that is that member will hopefully share the fruit of their research, and it's also a confidence-booster to have the experience of public speaking.
Finally, you can invite an academic, author, or some-such 'expert' to give a talk. That's what we often do at the London Philosophy Club, and we've had some really great speakers, like Roman Krznaric and Lord Maurice Glasman. It's also what Occupy London did - their Tent City University hosted such philosophical luminaries as Ted Honderich and Lord Robert Skidelsky. You'd be surprised how willing authors and academics are to give up an evening for free, particularly if they have a book out. It's best, though, to give them some sense of the size and expertise of the audience. Your local university philosophy department might also help - Sheffield's philosophy deparment, for example, encourages its undergraduates to run a 'philosophy in the city' project, and I'm hoping to start up something similar at Queen Mary, University of London, next term.
That's really all you need to start a philosophy group: a venue, some members, and a topic or speaker. After that, it's all about building community and strengthening your members' commitment and feeling of belonging. There are many simple ways to do that, from remembering people's names, to sharing organisational responsibilities, to sharing photos of past events, to organising field trips or volunteer work. Philosophy groups can learn a lot from churches in this respect - and can also link up with local churches to use their venues and community links.
It can be tiring, it can take a bit of time and money, but it's also hugely rewarding. I do it for selfish reasons, because I make a living from philosophy and because I like hearing great minds thinking out loud. But all of our members get a real kick, I think, from co-creating a worthwhile community.
I'm also researching such communities for an academic research project at Queen Mary, University of London. So if you run a philosophy group, anywhere in the world, do please get in touch via my website, www.philosophyforlife.org, and tell me about your group. You can also find out more about philosophical communities around the world in my book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations. And please share your own ideas and experience in the comments.]]>Coping With the Mental Health Crisis on Our Campusestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14517092012-04-26T19:00:00-04:002012-06-26T05:12:01-04:00Jules Evanshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-evans/
I also remember how unhappy I was at that period of my life. I started to get depression and social anxiety in my first year at university, it got steadily worse throughout the three years there, until finally I had a breakdown after finals. I left university with a first class degree, but no clue of how to control my emotions, and little idea of how to find a fulfilling job, or a fulfilling life.
That was partly my fault for not knowing how to take care of myself. But it was also the fault of my university that I had such a bad experience of higher education. The mental health support for students was inadequate, back in 2000. Even today, after a decade when universities have supposedly made big strides in student support, only 54% of higher education institutions say they have any mental health policy. That's a shameful statistic.
Student demand for such services is soaring. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the number of students requesting mental health support has risen 450% over the last decade (though that's partly because of rising student numbers and improved diversity). According to new figures from Northern Ireland, one in four students suffer from a mental illness at some point during their time at university, which is in line with the national prevalence of mental illness.
Yet, according to another survey, just 4% of students will go to see university counselors. Meanwhile, the national drop-out rate among students is 20%, and rising - again, this is unlikely to be entirely because of mental health problems, but experts suggest it is one factor.
The UK is not alone in facing a mental health problem among university students. In the US, college mental health services also say they are 'overwhelmed', with 90% of student support services reporting a rise in demand. This, of course, is not entirely a bad thing - it means American students feel increasingly comfortable asking for help at this tricky phase of their life.
University is stressful. For many young people, it's their first time away from home, they are suddenly among people of very different backgrounds and classes, they are in environments of binge-drinking and drug-taking, they may experience a lack of social support, they may have difficulty managing their finances (particularly now the cost of tuition has risen so much), they are often under heavy academic pressure. And they about to plunge into an economy where graduate pay is lower than a decade ago in real terms, property is often unaffordable, and 46 graduates are chasing every job vacancy. On top of that you have your elders constantly telling you these are the best days of your life. Welcome to adulthood.
So what can we do about this, as students, parents, universities, healthcare providers and citizens? For a start, we can insist that the provision of mental health services is a statutory requirement for universities. We can make sure every student is told often what support services are available, and encouraged to use them. We can make sure tutors are offered training in how to spot danger signs, how to deal with students who ask for help, and how to help students feel OK about seeking support.
We can ask students about their experiences at universities, and name and shame those universities lacking in basic care. Students are now paying more - they should demand a better service.
Universities, of course, are doing their best. They're overwhelmed by the demand for services from a more psychologically-literate student body, who now more aware of things like depression and anxiety, and thankfully more likely to ask for help. Universities themselves can get help in the provision of such services, by joining up better with local GPs and with voluntary mental health organisations. Students are also learning to self-organise and help themselves, through organisations like Mental Wealth in the UK, or STAMP in the US.
But, deeper than this, I suspect the 'crisis' in student mental health may be a crisis in meaning. It's a crisis about what it means to get a university education. Does a university have a duty of pastoral care to its students? Should it follow the liberal education mission of trying to raise free, autonomous, flourishing citizens, or simply prepare students for their finals?
I want to explore these questions on this blog over the next year, and I would like to hear from you, about your experiences of university, about the well-being services or lack of services you've encountered, and how you think the university experience can be improved. If you're preparing for finals - good luck! And don't worry: these probably aren't the best days of your life.]]>