Divinest Sense

I’m not phoning it in, I swear. I just like to talk about things I’ve read in the paper. Today our topic is “positive psychology”, or “good medicine can’t cure bad art”.

This NYT feature on the emerging discipline of Positive Psychology is pretty interesting. The idea is that lots more study needs to be done on how positive thinking affects physical health as well as mental health. After thinking about this for a while, I don’t believe this should be its own intellectual discipline, but it sure wouldn’t hurt to teach such things in med school. If you’ve ever had surgery or some other serious medical concern (or know someone who has), you know very well the effect that a doctor’s attitude can have on your own attitude, and therefore your stress level, and therefore your general well-being. Injecting a little positive thinking into medical procedures couldn’t hurt.

This topic caught my eye because of my recent prolonged exposure to some very negative-thinking friends of mine. If anyone needs a positive-thinking intervention, it’s these folks. After only 16 waking hours of listening to this couple’s bemoaning and criticism of friends, relatives, neighbors, complete strangers, shopkeepers, various objectionable ethnic groups, the town, the state, the country, the world… I wanted to kill myself. My mood was in the toilet. I was seriously starting to believe that life was just not worth living, and that there was nothing out there to stem the tide of ill will raging unchecked through our universe. After a quick trip to a coffee shop and some venting, I was able to stop the dark whooshing noises in my head.

But the experience got me thinking. Mr. and Mrs. Complainalot have nice lives, live in a cute town, have a nice house, a decent income, family members close by, friends, hobbies, and various things that make life engaging and interesting. They keep busy but not too busy. To the outside observer, life’s not exactly perfect, but it’s pretty good. But they have health problems, and seem older and more tired than other people in their same demographic. It’s hard to believe that their attitude toward life has nothing to do with this. After all, why try to stay healthy and active when everything’s all just going to hell, nobody cares about you, and you’re just going to die eventually anyway?

In a situation like this, positive psychology could potentially save lives. I like the idea of an intervention. It would be really refreshing to shake my finger at these folks and yell YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BED UNTIL YOU TELL ME ONE NICE THING THAT HAPPENED TODAY! NOW SPILL IT!

Another interesting aspect of positive psychology is that instead of being essentially narcissistic, like all those positive-thinking self-help books out there, there is evidence that you can attain more personal contentment by doing something nice for someone else than you can by doing something nice for yourself. I can buy this. In fact, I think the thing that’s lacking in the Complainalots’ worldview is the frequent exercise of altruism, whether in thought or in action. Taken to extremes, the lack of altruism is a personality disorder. But I suspect that in today’s American culture, altruism simply is not valued as a laudable trait, and a lot of us fall into a pattern of thinking that pits us against the horde of miscreants who are constantly trying to take our stuff or elbow ahead of us in the cosmic line.

So, the study of positive psychology has some potential application in medicine and social policy, and let’s not forget religion. As a matter of fact, as the Times article points out, the proposed area of study has some uncomfortable religious trappings. Spread goodwill in the world? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Be kind to people whether you think they deserve your kindness or not? Sounds a bit like Christianity to me. Admittedly, these are the good parts of Christianity, so hey, let’s not strike it down as unworthy of our philosophical consideration.

However, like any religion, positive psychology’s relative benefit is in its practical application. My support of the idea comes to a screeching halt when the article starts to talk about schools incorporating positive psychology’s lessons into literature classes. To wit:

This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?”

Now, this is taking things too far. It is not OK to fuck with literature by infusing it with contemporary psychology. What are the things that Odysseus could have improved on? Gimme a break. This is basically saying to your teenage students: “Dear students, you have been placed in the special ed class because of your violent tendencies and your inability to understand the complexities of classical thought. Your dignity will be returned to you at the close of school hours.” The very idea of putting Odysseus on the guidance counselor’s couch is just… unfathomable. For those of you who were educated in a dignity-free school system, let’s sum up: Characters in ancient Greek literature were considered to be playthings of capricious gods, and their fates were determined by outside forces, such as whom their grandaddy ate for dinner. Odysseus was never, ahem, in any position to make healthy life decisions.

And, as I can tell you from my experiences in art school, healthy life decisions and positive thinking have no place in art. Rather than attempting to teach teenagers to drop the sulkiness and act more helpful and chipper, we should be teaching them to understand literature and art on a deep level, so that their minds can stay active and engaged. Studying art and literature requires the development of a healthy understanding that sometimes life just has no meaning, and horrible things happen - but that even in tragedy and meaninglessness, there can be beauty. Now there is a positive thought.

I hope BriVT is right about this - that this new Medicare debacle will affect so many millions of ordinary Americans that it will be impossible to ignore. This is truly a far-reaching crisis with staggering implications for our healthcare “system”. From a column in Newsday:

But Gottlich doubts this Congress or President George W. Bush will deal with the fundamental reason for these problems. As correspondent Margaret Warner said recently on PBS’ “NewsHour,” “There’s no standard government-designed plan” administered by Medicare. “Instead, enrollees have to choose from dozens of plans offered by private insurance, with different deductibles, co-pays and lists of authorized drugs.”
Some Democrats want to modify the privatization aspects of the law by having at least one standard plan run by Medicare. But that would mean competition for private companies from the more efficient Medicare system, which could use its purchasing power to drive prices down. The Republicans and the drug companies who bought them won’t hear of it.

Did anyone *really* think that Part D was going to improve anything? The congresscritters who voted for this piece of garbage must have just closed their eyes, gritted their teeth, put cotton in their ears, and mumbled to themselves, “well, it’s all for the sake of privatization and competition, which are theoretically good things…”

Despite whatever “big picture” rationale they made up to make themselves feel better, our legislators knew in their hearts that they were screwing the real, live, human individuals who depend on the government to get the medication they need. And they will hear about it. They won’t listen to young and healthy me, but they will be forced to listen to the millions of grandmas and grandpas whose lives are now in jeopardy, and the angry state officials who are emptying their coffers in order to keep the government’s pledge to the elderly poor.

California and New York have already had to pony up emergency state funds so that the elderly and poor can get the medications they need. Gee, we never saw THAT coming.

The problems appear to stem from the fact that 6 million elderly, low-income and disabled people – including 1 million Californians – were automatically switched into the new drug program Jan. 1. These people previously had been covered by the Medicaid state-federal health care program for the poor, called Medi-Cal in California.
The system was apparently not equipped to handle the influx.
“The result is a major health emergency in California, particularly for people with chronic and debilitating diseases who rely on multiple medications daily to keep them alive,” [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein wrote. (Feinstein voted FOR the medicare bill - ed.)
“In my view, the state of California is absorbing a federal cost caused by incompetence,” she wrote.