[A]n inhuman social organization attributes the responsibility for its cruelties to its victims themselves
=> — Raoul Vaneigem, “Revolution of Everyday Life”
Resilience: The characteristic individuals are expected to develop by multiple systems of oppression in order to deal with the consequences of that oppression, for which those systems abdicate responsibility by declaring “that's just life”.
There's a lot of talk nowadays about people needing to have, or build, ‘resilience’.
i agree that, in general, ‘resilience’ is indeed a good thing to have and to build. But it feels to me that the increasing emphasis on ‘resilience’ is often being used to divert responsibility away from significant structural/systemic issues to individuals - to make individual struggles a case of “just not having the right mindset”, as though one's capacity to be resilient is unconnected to one's economic / social / cultural capital[a]. This, in turn, has made me angry enough, in an ongoing way, that i've felt compelled to write a few poems on the issue[b].
Stating or implying that a person ‘lacks resilience’ or ‘needs to be more stoic’ without consideration of their life circumstances is often, at the least, problematic - and in a number of cases, it might actually be offensive. In Australia, a disabled Indigenous woman who's the daughter of someone from the Stolen Generations[c] will have had to develop a substantial amount of resilience as part of reaching adulthood, particularly compared to a non-disabled Anglo man whose parents were middle-class professionals. If the Indigenous woman constantly experiences harrassment and discrimination due to being Indigenous - which she's had to deal with all her life - how appropriate is it to focus on her ‘lack of resilience’ or ‘need to be more stoic’[d]? And further: how appropriate is it to do so whilst underfunding and defunding services and subsidies that might give her the ability to improve her physical and mental health[e]?
There's also the issue that:
often ‘resilience’ seems to be measured by whether one is meeting the timetables of society and various individuals, rather than by whether one's own physical and psychological needs are getting met.
How appropriate is it to suggest that someone ‘lacks resilience’ if, for example, they take ‘too long’ to process the death of a loved one? It's problematic to turn descriptive data about healing and recovery processes (e.g. “It usually takes about six weeks for this type of broken bone to heal”) into prescriptive analyses (“It takes six weeks for this type of broken bone to heal, so if that doesn't happen, your behaviours must to be blame”) which assume that everyone's physiological (including neurological) and psychological capacities are practically the same.
The weaponisation of ‘resilience’ follows the weaponisation of ‘mindfulness’:
In a lively and razor-sharp critique of mindfulness as it has been enthusiastically co-opted by corporations, public schools and the U.S. military, Purser explains why such programs inevitably fall short of their revolutionary potential. Simply paying attention to the present moment while resting snugly in our private bubbles is no mindfulness revolution. Mindfulness has become the new capitalist spirituality, a disciplined myopia, that mindlessly ignores the need for social and political change.
=> — Goodreads: ‘McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality’
Some notable examples of the results of this co-option include:
=> Image: Mindfulness in the Guantánamo Bay gift shop
=> Image: Affirmations at Amazon
There's a more general issue here: of capitalism and/or the state weaponising psychology:
Do spiritual ideas that get absorbed into mainstream clinical practices still retain their potency? Or do they become declawed in the process? The reuptake of Buddhist ideas into clinical spaces is not always clean. As with Judaism and psychoanalysis, [Dialectical Behaviour Therapy] translated the spiritual authority of Zen monks into the secular authority of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and mental health counselors. Working in a psychiatric inpatient hospital last year, I was supposed to lead a group on an idea from Linehan’s DBT called “emotional regulation” for incarcerated and heavily medicated inpatients with varying levels of psychosis. My task—teaching groups of patients alternatives to becoming upset while stuck in a punitive setting—left me feeling like an unmistakable agent of state repression. Some portion of my peers at my graduate school of Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren who don’t talk about the Holocaust will take on such positions more permanently, becoming psychologists in prisons, forensic psychiatric hospitals, and other kinds of psych wards where people are kept against their will, sedated, restrained, isolated, silenced.
=> — Hannah Baer, “Therapy was never secular”
Note that i referenced “the state” above, not just “capitalism”: history contains various examples of self-described ‘worker's’ / ‘socialist’ / ‘communist’ states using psychology/psychiatry as a method of social control. Take, for example, the use of the diagnosis of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ in the old Eastern Bloc:
It was developed in the 1960s by Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, and was used exclusively in the USSR and several Eastern Bloc countries, until the fall of Communism starting in 1989. The diagnosis has long been discredited because of its scientific inadequacy and its use as a means of confining dissenters.
=> — Wikipedia: ‘Sluggish schizophrenia’
This was an instance of a more general phenomenon:
=> Wikipedia: ‘Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union’
which i feel is a near-inevitable result of ‘false consciousness’ theory[f].
That said, the idea that psychology and psychiatry under capitalism are somehow ‘apolitical’, and never developed and/or used for political ends - either by capitalism in general or by a particular capitalist state - seems obviously untrue. If a person has to work two or three jobs and/or work (say) 60 hours a week to cover rent and basic living expenses for themselves and their family, and the law allows the landlord to raise the rent to a level the person can't afford and evicts them, resulting in that person attempting suicide - is the issue here really just that the person needs to be more resilient?
=> Image: Attempted suicide due to inability to afford rent
Of course, counsellors / therapists / psychologists / psychiatrists, as individuals, are often not necessarily in a position to directly change the systems that expect and force people to develop resilience in order to cope with how those systems negatively impact their physical and mental health. But that doesn't mean that those professionals - particularly those whose background doesn't involve being part of marginalised communities - can't be, well, mindful of that context. As i've noted previously:
When promoting ‘resilience’ and ‘mindfulness’, reflect on how you might be enabling ‘sustainable exploitation’ of less-privileged people for the benefit of the more-privileged, and failing to validate the former's experiences of systemic inequalities.
i find lack of validation in these sort of contexts problematic for (at least) two reasons:
More generally, i feel there's ample evidence of certain circumstances having significant negative impacts on people's mental and physical health:
=> Image: The health effects of being poor or a minority
In such a context, i regard it as professional, organisational and ethical failure if professional associations don't make strong representations to businesses and governments, on behalf of their members' clients.
The groups that most need assistance to improve their resilience are often the ones least able to deal with being treated as though systemic problems are actually simply a result of a deficient psychology or insufficient psychological skills. (Particularly those of us who spent many years dealing with the consequences of mistreatment and misdiagnoses at the hands of health professionals[g]). We should try to build people's resilience without doing so as a weapon against marginalised and exploited communities.
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=> Glossary | Gemlog Home
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[a] Pierre Bourdieu's conceptualised the existence of various types of ‘capital’:
=> Wikipedia: ‘Pierre Bourdieu’ / ‘Theory of capital and class distinction’
[b] In particular:
=> “The branch broke” | “‘This is just’” | “You must be more resilient”
[c] The Stolen Generations
were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.
=> — Wikipedia: ‘Stolen Generations’
Note that in South Australia currently,
Advocates in South Australia say the number of [Indigenous] children being removed today is fast approaching those historic levels.
The state's commissioner for Aboriginal children and young people, April Lawrie, has been calling for urgent action to address what she says are "unnecessary" removals, based on "institutionally racist" decision-making.
=> — “'I knew I had a fight on my hands': How one grandmother took on child services and won”
[d] Cf. my previous post:
=> “‘The standard you walk past is the standard you accept’”
[e] The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that, in the 2020-2022 reference period,
[t]he difference between the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous life expectancy was:
• 8.9 years for males in the most disadvantaged areas, compared with 7.4 years in the least disadvantaged areas
• 8.3 years for females in the most disadvantaged areas, compared with 7.6 years in the least disadvantaged areas.
=> — “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life expectancy”
[f] Which i discuss in this post of mine from 2023:
=> “The steep slippery slope of ‘internalised X’”
[g] For example, failure to diagnose autism:
=> “Autism, the mental health professions, gaslighting, and trauma”
Related poem:
=> “You didn't try to know” This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini;lang=en_AU
