More on tough times

It is often said these days that we are going through the worst economic times in seventy years.  The world is suffering from the bursting of bubbles, greed, high stakes foolishness and the fall out from chasing false values.

Seventy years ago there was a brand new field of psychotherapy.  Freud was still leading the charge, very few people got to experience any kind of treatment besides being locked away in insane asylums, and the treatment anyone received was either totally ineffectual or harmful.

When I was training as a therapist I was made aware that the incidence of "mental illness" among those with less money and fewer resources was much greater than for those who were better off.  There was always a great discussion over which was cause and which was effect.  I still was trained, and for the most part was able to focus my practice, in dealing with problems that could primarily be described by a psychiatric diagnosis.  I have discussed in here how inaccurate and often misleading those diagnoses can be, but the point I want to make is that I felt that I was treating psychological and emotional problems.  Many of these problems, I always felt, were the result of conflicts in a person's close interpersonal relationships. Anger, loss, rejection, neglect, shame, scorn and loneliness were many of the themes that often came up in therapy.

I still deal with mostly with those same issues, along with addictions, chronic anxiety, hopeless and powerlessness, real and perceived.  But these days I feel that a lot of these feelings are secondary problems.  The underlying causes are economic. 

There were no private practices of psychotherapy in the 1930s.  Today I feel we have to differentiate between what is a normal reaction to not being able to find a job, or any reliable source of income, and dealing with all the consequences that brings.  Anger, helplessness, shame, stress, family strife, disappointment, embarrassment, feelings of self-depreciation are common, but they are not pathological.  We need to find ways to treat and change these feelings, but the best treatment would be a job.

My office is in an industrial city that is a bellweather for the economy.  In the 1990s there were business in this city that had to hire buses to bring workers in from a city twelve miles away.  Now those bus drivers are out of work along with a long line of others.

I will give more specific examples of what this does to people, the community and everyone's outlook on the world next time.