Tag: stress

Why are there greater mental health stresses on autistic people from gender-minority groups? To quote from the research paper,

“The increased rates of mental health problems in these minority populations are often a consequence of the stigma and marginalisation attached to living outside mainstream sociocultural norms (Meyer 2003). This stigma can lead to what Meyer (2003) refers to as ‘minority stress’. This stress could come from external adverse events, which among other forms of victimization could include verbal abuse, acts of violence, sexual assault by a known or unknown person, reduced opportunities for employment and medical care, and harassment from persons in positions of authority (Sandfort et al. 2007).”

Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Autism, Transgender and Avoiding Tragedy

I updated “I’m Autistic. Here’s what I’d like you to know.” with a selection from “Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services – Mad In America” to expand the bullet point on stress and stress cases and bring in a critical psychiatry voice. A longer quote from this piece is included in “Design is Tested at the Edges: Intersectionality, The Social Model of Disability, and Design for Real Life”.

People who enter services are frequently society’s most vulnerable–people who have experienced extensive trauma, adversity, abuse, and oppression throughout their lives. At the same time, I struggle with the word “trauma” because it signifies some huge, overt event that needs to pass some arbitrary line of “bad enough” to count. I prefer the terms “stress” and “adversity.” … Our brains and bodies don’t know the difference between “trauma” and “adversity”–a stressed fight/flight state is the same regardless of what words you use to describe the external environment. I’m tired of people saying “nothing bad ever happened to me” because they did not experience “trauma.” People suffer, and when they do, it’s for a reason.

Source: Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services – Mad In America

This doesn’t fit the flow of the bullet point as well as I’d like. Connective editing TBD.

I might work this quote/theme into Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing.

Mindfulness in Education

‘The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health’

Source: ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education

Mindfulness can be helpful, but once ed-tech gets ahold of something out of a psych department, it is productized and exploited. Ed-tech mindfulness is mindset marketing that “fixes” downward. Ed-tech mindfulness, like everything else ed-tech, boils down to behaviorism and classroom management, which makes this autistic cringe.

My piece on “Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology” provides some background on my behaviorism and mindset marketing skepticism. Follow that with this selection of skeptical takes on ed-tech mindfulness. As with the corporate flavor, ed-tech mindfulness disguises the ways they kill us.

Investment in universal mindfulness training in the schools is unlikely to yield measurable, socially significant results, but will serve to divert resources from schoolchildren more urgently in need of effective intervention and support.

Mindfulness Nation is another example of delivery of low intensity services to mostly low risk persons to the detriment of those in greatest and most urgent need.

Those many fewer students in need more timely, intensive, and tailored services are left underserved. Their presence is ignored or, worse, invoked to justify the delivery of services to the larger group, with the needy students not benefiting.

Source: Unintended effects of mindfulness for children | Mind the Brain

ClassDojo has also hit on the contemporary perception of child fragility and vulnerability among educational practitioners and policymakers as a market opportunity, one its investors have generously funded with millions of dollars in the hope of profitable future returns. It is designed to activate, reward and condition particular preferred emotions that have been defined by the experts of mindfulness, character and growth mindset, and that are increasingly coming to define educational policy discourse. The psycho-policy ideas ClassDojo has embedded in teachers’ pockets and habits across public education, through Silicon Valley venture capital support, are already prefiguring the imperatives of policymakers who are anxious about resolving the toxic effect of children’s negative emotions on school performance.

ClassDojo is simultaneously intoxicating teachers worldwide while seeking to detoxify the worst effects of education policy on children. In the process it-and the accelerated Silicon Valley mindset it represents-may be redefining what counts as a valuable measure of a good student or teacher in a ‘happier classroom community,’ and building a business plan to profit from their feelings.

Psycho-policy, then, is the use of psychology to impose well-being and activate positive feeling in individuals, and thereby to enrich social well-being at large. In this context, as the sociologist William Davies has argued, the use of mobile ‘real-time mood-monitoring’apps is increasingly of interest to companies and governments as technologies for measuring human emotions, and then of intervening to make ‘that emotion preferable in some way.’ As a pocket policy diffuser of such positive psychological concepts as mindfulness and growth mindset into schools, the ClassDojo app and platform can therefore be seen as part of a loosely-coordinated, multi-sector psycho-policy network that is driven by aspirations to modify children’s emotions to become more preferable through imposing positive feelings in the classroom.

Viewing ClassDojo as a pocket precursor of potential educational psycho-policies and practices of social-emotional learning in schools raises some significant issues. Mindfulness itself, the subject of ClassDojo’s latest campaign, certainly has growing popular support in education. Its emphasis on focusing meditatively on the immediate present rather than the powerful emotional ‘Beast’ of ‘anger, fear and anxiety,’ however, does need to be approached with critical social scientific caution.

‘Much of the interest in “character,” “resilience” and mindfulness at school stems from the troubling evidence that depression and anxiety have risen rapidly amongst young people over the past decade,’ William Davies argues. ‘It seems obvious that teachers and health policy-makers would look around for therapies and training that might offset some of this damage,’ he continues. ‘In the age of social media, ubiquitous advertising and a turbulent global economy, children cannot be protected from the sources of depression and anxiety. The only solution is to help them build more durable psychological defences.’

According to this analysis, school-based mindfulness initiatives are based on the assumption that young people are stressed, fragile and vulnerable, and can benefit from meditative practices that focus their energies on present tasks rather than longer-term anxieties caused by uncontrollable external social processes. James Reveley has further argued that school-based mindfulness represents a ‘human enhancement strategy’ to insulate children from pathologies that stem from ‘digital capitalism.’ Mindfulness in schools, he adds, is ‘an exercise in pathology-proofing them in their capacity as the next generation of unpaid digital labourers.’ It trains young people to become responsible for augmenting their own emotional wellbeing and in doing so to secure the well-being of digital capitalism itself.

According to Davies, however, much of the stress experienced by children is actually caused more mundanely by the kinds of testing and performance measurement pressures forced on schools by current policy priorities. ‘The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health,’ he argues.

It is probably a step too far to suggest that ClassDojo may be the ideal educational technology for digital capitalism. However, it is clear that ClassDojo is acting as a psycho-policy platform and a channel for mindfulness and growth mindsets practices that is aimed at pathology-proofing children against anxious times through the imposition of positive feelings in the classroom. While taming ‘the Beast’ of his uncontrollable emotions of ‘anger, fear and anxiety’ through mindfulness meditation, ClassDojo’s Mojo mascot is both learning the lessons of positive psychology and acting as a relay of those lessons into the lives of millions of schoolchildren. Its model of pocket-based psycho-policy bypasses the kind of slow-paced bureaucracy so loathed in the fast-paced accelerationist culture of Silicon Valley, and imposes its preferred psychological techniques directly on the classroom at global scale.

Source: ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education

But on the face of it, mindfulness might seem counterproductive in a workplace setting. A central technique of mindfulness meditation, after all, is to accept things as they are. Yet companies want their employees to be motivated. And the very notion of motivation – striving to obtain a more desirable future – implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.

To test this hunch, we recently conducted five studies, involving hundreds of people, to see whether there was a tension between mindfulness and motivation. As we report in a forthcoming article in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, we found strong evidence that meditation is demotivating.

Among those who had meditated, motivation levels were lower on average. Those people didn’t feel as much like working on the assignments, nor did they want to spend as much time or effort to complete them. Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity – states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project.

Then we tracked everyone’s actual performance on the tasks. Here we found that on average, having meditated neither benefited nor detracted from a participant’s quality of work. This was bad news for proponents of meditation in the workplace: After all, previous studies have found that meditation increases mental focus, suggesting that those in our studies who performed the mindfulness exercise should have performed better on the tasks. Their lower levels of motivation, however, seemed to cancel out that benefit.

Source: Opinion | Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate – The New York Times

James Reveley has further argued that school-based mindfulness represents a ‘human enhancement strategy’ to insulate children from pathologies that stem from ‘digital capitalism.’ Mindfulness in schools, he adds, is ‘an exercise in pathology-proofing them in their capacity as the next generation of unpaid digital labourers.’ It trains young people to become responsible for augmenting their own emotional wellbeing and in doing so to secure the well-being of digital capitalism itself. 

According to Davies, however, much of the stress experienced by children is actually caused more mundanely by the kinds of testing and performance measurement pressures forced on schools by current policy priorities. ‘The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health,’ he argues.

Source: ClassDojo App Takes Mindfulness To Scale in Public Education (Ben Williamson) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Mindfulness training, this article argues, is a biopolitical human enhancement strategy. Its goal is to insulate youth from pathologies that stem from digital capitalism’s economisation of attention. I use Bernard Stiegler’s Platonic depiction of the ambiguousness of all attention channelling mechanisms as pharmaka-containing both poison and cure-to suggest that this training is a double-edged sword. Does the inculcation of mindfulness in schoolchildren empower them; or is it merely an exercise in pathology-proofing them in their capacity as the next generation of unpaid digital labourers? The answer, I maintain, depends on whether young people can use the Internet’s political potentialities to mitigate the exploitation of their unpaid online labour time.

Source: School-Based Mindfulness Training and the Economisation of Attention: A Stieglerian View: Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol 47, No 8

Newly published research finds mindfulness meditation makes us more likely to “recall” something that never actually happened.

“By embracing judgment-free awareness and acceptance, meditators can have greater difficulty differentiating internal and external sources of information,” writes a research team led by University of California-San Diego psychologist Brent Wilson. “Their reality-monitoring accuracy may be impaired, increasing their susceptibility to false memories.”

But observing thoughts “without judgment or reaction” apparently eliminates these valuable cues, making it harder to later discriminate between things we encountered and things we merely imagined. In this way, they conclude, “mindfulness meditation appears to reduce reality-monitoring accuracy.”

Source: The Downside of Mindfulness – Pacific Standard

See also,

I updated “Design is Tested at the Edges: Intersectionality, The Social Model of Disability, and Design for Real Life” and “Compassion is not coddling. Design for real life.” with a selection on stress and trauma from “Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services – Mad In America”.

People who enter services are frequently society’s most vulnerable-people who have experienced extensive trauma, adversity, abuse, and oppression throughout their lives. At the same time, I struggle with the word “trauma” because it signifies some huge, overt event that needs to pass some arbitrary line of “bad enough” to count. I prefer the terms “stress” and “adversity.” In the book, I speak to the problem of language and how this insinuates differences that are not there, judgments, and assumptions that are untrue. Our brains and bodies don’t know the difference between “trauma” and “adversity”-a stressed fight/flight state is the same regardless of what words you use to describe the external environment. I’m tired of people saying “nothing bad ever happened to me” because they did not experience “trauma.” People suffer, and when they do, it’s for a reason.

Source: Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services – Mad In America

Rather, the entirety of the mental health field and the paradigm under which it operates is a modern-day religion rife with all the familiar problems and benefits that exist in any religion. Most importantly, however, there is hope if people are willing to move beyond what society tells us we “must” do. People have been healing from great pain for 200,000 years—the mental health professions have existed for less than 200. While there are some things we have learned, we need to stop trying to re-invent the wheel. People need love, support, community, to be heard, to be valued, to be validated, to have purpose, to have health and housing, to have nutrition both physically and emotionally—it is not rocket science and doesn’t become such just because we keep saying that it is.

People who enter services are frequently society’s most vulnerable-people who have experienced extensive trauma, adversity, abuse, and oppression throughout their lives. At the same time, I struggle with the word “trauma” because it signifies some huge, overt event that needs to pass some arbitrary line of “bad enough” to count. I prefer the terms “stress” and “adversity.” In the book, I speak to the problem of language and how this insinuates differences that are not there, judgments, and assumptions that are untrue. Our brains and bodies don’t know the difference between “trauma” and “adversity”-a stressed fight/flight state is the same regardless of what words you use to describe the external environment. I’m tired of people saying “nothing bad ever happened to me” because they did not experience “trauma.” People suffer, and when they do, it’s for a reason.

If patients willingly adopt the role of defectiveness, then how is the doctor doing anything harmful or wrong? People who grew up as the scapegoat, who believe they are dirty or defective or bad, who are ashamed of their existence or believe they should be someone they are not, who have led their entire lives being marginalized and discriminated against in society-these are the people who most frequently enter mental health services. They are also those most readily vulnerable to accepting these messages under the guise of treatment and care. It is not until people are willing to start to consider that, in fact, they are not defective in the least, rather, that they are just flawed and unique human beings adapting to incredible pain that they can start to actually believe in themselves enough to heal.

Of course, there is simply the existential issue of mental health professionals that may be unbearable for them to face: If I am not fixing a distinct and identifiable problem, what, then, is my purpose? If the real healing power I have is something that any human being could ostensibly provide, if willing, why did I spend all those years in school and possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars? If these are not specific diseases related to specific biochemical or genetic flaws, why have I specialized-and who doesn’t like feeling special? And, worse, if I am not addressing people with genetic illnesses and biochemical problems, what, really, am I doing when all I have to offer are drugs and technological interventions?

This problem is not unique to mental health professionals. Medical doctors are caught in a similar dilemma when it comes to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, chronic inflammation, and many autoimmune diseases, even cancer. What do these doctors do when they realize that these problems are almost entirely due to an industrialized diet largely based on corporate interests-the sugar industry, soy bean manufacturers, Monsanto-and that if people just ate the way humans are designed to eat, these problems mostly would not exist? And, of course, these issues are entirely intertwined with mental health problems! If these are not specific diseases related to specific biochemical or genetic flaws, why have I specialized? If these problems are not really genetic illnesses and biochemically-based problems, what, really, am I doing when all I have to offer are drugs and technological interventions?

A black man spends his life being marginalized and aggressed, dismissed because of his fear and pain-should he enter the system, he is no longer “less-than” because of his blackness, now he’s marginalized and dismissed as “schizophrenic.” A sexually-abused young woman who was told she “wanted it,” was blamed, and was never given the opportunity to be angry enters the system-she now is “borderline” and once again blamed for being too sexualized, for causing staff to behave in shameful ways, and condemned for her anger, even when it is taken out on herself.

Perhaps more than any other, the most common enactment is that associated with the individual who grew up with a narcissistic parent in constant need of adulation, intolerant of discomfort or self-reflection, and who was a master in the art of gaslighting.

We live in a society that values stoicism, complete control over one’s behaviors, lack of emotional expression, “politeness” at the expense of authenticity-I love New York!-and an eerie Stepford Wife-like ideal of conformity. Mental health professionals often are selected for their ability to represent these values. Those troublemakers who tell the truth, are spontaneous(otherwise called “impulsive”), who laugh or find humor in the darkness(or “inappropriate affect”), who refuse to conform(or my favorite, “oppositional”) are ostracized and pathologized for the threat they pose to propriety. They generally don’t make it through the training process. I know I almost didn’t. It is the Anglo-Saxon way. It also is what makes most of us completely miserable.

Source: Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services – Mad In America