16 Aug 2023.

Over the last five years I’ve been reading about the trends in mental health on American college campuses. There are sky rocketing rates of anxiety and depression. Campuses are awash with demands for “safety,” by which many students mean that they should not encounter ideas they disagree with because it makes them feel “unsafe”. 

Everybody wants “trigger warnings” on things, to the point that Stanford University IT department asked staff not to use the phrase “trigger warning” because trigger warnings now trigger people. Students now regard their feelings as the ultimate guide to reality, leading staff to cull readings from the syllabus which might offend anyone. (Try doing courses in politics, criminology or bio-ethics without coming across some idea you don’t like.) Students at Harvard University and other law schools have asked professors not to teach the law on sexual assaults because it triggers people. But imagine, after all the efforts of feminists over the last 30 years to get reforms to court procedures to get fairer treatment of victims, (on which society still a long way to go) that law schools produce potential prosecutors and defense lawyers who have never studied a major part of the criminal law.

Watch here as a group of students storm out of a panel discussion, damaging sound equipment, shouting about fascism and Nazis because an evolutionary biology professor says that men and women have physical differences, such as average height, muscle mass and where body fat is deposited. “We should not listen to fascism. It should not be tolerated in civil society,” declares one student. “The women in there are brainwashed” shouts another. These students seem unhinged from reality.

Having returned to study in retirement, I have commented that I’m glad that we are not seeing this kind of dysfunction on Australian campuses. In a bio-ethics class, a couple of students suggested that the way to avoid some medical data contributing to negative stereotypes of women in certain situations was not to publish medical data broken down by sex. A lecturer pointed out that men and women have slightly different symptoms at the start of a heart attack, so failing to know this would actually disadvantage women. (Traditional descriptions of heart attack symptoms have been based on men because they have more sudden heart attacks than women, and their first symptom is often chest pains radiating into the left arm – an easy one to spot. Women somewhat more than men may present with back pains going into the neck and jaw, or pains that resemble gastric reflux and hence get misinterpreted see here.) Nobody stormed out of the room shouting about Nazis.

Saying that heavyweight boxers should not compete against bantam weight boxers is not ‘denying the humanity’ of heavy-weight boxers. Saying that a twice-convicted rapist like Isla Bryson should not be in a women’s prison (as occurred in Scotland earlier this year) is not denying anyone’s humanity. It’s not ‘TERF-ism’. It’s pointing out that Bryson is a violent, repeat sex offender who posed a risk to women prisoners, many of whom have already been victims of domestic violence or sexual offences. Vic Valentine, manager of Scottish Trans, didn’t want a blanket rule on where trans prisoners are located, but agreed that prisoners with sexual assault convictions who therefore posed a risk to women should not be placed in women’s prisons (see here.) Is it likely that the trans-male national spokesperson for a trans lobby group is himself a transphobic bigot? No.

 American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) in his book “The Coddling of the American Mind.” describes three types of thinking that are driving up rates of anxiety and depression among students: the belief that viewpoints you don’t like make you “unsafe” (and you therefore need to be protected from them), the idea that your emotions are a good guide to reality (rather than evidence or reasoning), and the belief that the world is a battle ground between good and bad people (and “your side” has a monopoly on virtue). See also this video which includes data on anxiety depression, and self-harm, among teenagers. This has all exploded since we have the first generation of teenagers who’ve never known a world without social media.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, one of psychology’s greatest success stories, teaches people to reduce anxiety and depression by replacing dysfunctional thoughts with more realistic thoughts. It says that our self-talk, the stories we tell ourselves inside our heads, determines our emotional reactions to things. Much of this dysfunctional self-talk is a series of cognitive distortions, some of which are listed here and here. CBT says we change our emotional states by changing our self-talk.

An example is this, taken from the way I’ve seen uni students react to getting a bad mark in an essay. 

Event	Catastrophising thought	More realistic thought
New uni student fails an essay	This is terrible. I’ll probably fail the subject. I’m probably not suited to studying at uni. It’s all hopeless. I’ll probably fail the degree. I might as well drop out of uni.	I got 12/30 for this essay. There’s still 70 percent of the assessment to go. I’m only 3 marks below a pass. I can easily make that up. I get help from an advisor about how to write better essays.

 An example more relevant to the American students above.

Event	Black and white thinking	More realistic thought.
Somebody holds an opinion I don’t like, on an issue that personally affects me in a serious way.	This person is a hateful bigot. Probably a Nazi. They want to erase my existence and deny that I’m human. They need to be crushed and destroyed. I should denounce them on social media. They are not fit to hold any position and I should demand they resign from their job.	People don’t normally think the way I do, so it’s not surprising when they don’t. A spectrum of opinions exists on most issues. There are real bigots in the world, but this person may not be one of them. I could try explaining why the issue causes me a problem. They may still not agree with me on some things, but most social change is incremental and I can make an incremental gain here.

There are articles on CBT here , here, and here.

Some of the standard distortions discussed in CBT are:

Catastrophising: (if someone disagrees with me on something, they are denying my humanity, they are a threat to my existence. If something goes wrong it’s a disaster. Everything will be awful forever.);

Mind reading: thinking we know what other people think when we have no evidence: (if they disagree with me, they must hate me.);

Black and white thinking: there are two types of people, good people who think like me and bad people who need to be denounced and opposed, and there’s nothing in between;

Thinking that your emotions are a good guide to reality: if I feel something, my feelings make it true. That’s all the evidence I need. I should always trust my feelings (when in reality your feelings are about the worst guide to reality you could find.)

The world consists of two types of people; good people who think like me, and evil bigots. If I feel unsafe, I must actually be unsafe. Disagreement means people are trying to treat minorities as non-human or “debate their right to exist”. There are actual Nazis in the lecture theatre.

How has such thinking, so detached from reality, occurred? Unfortunately looking at some current political debates through the lens of CBT shows us what is going wrong. Social media repeatedly exposes us to websites and threads that tell us what we already think, and promotes extremist tweets and posts that generate controversy. We have people constantly repeating to each other some of the distorted thinking that CBT exists to counter. Some people seem to be teaching themselves Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in reverse. This is entirely counter productive in political campaigns.

The ‘yes’ campaign didn’t win the same-sex marriage vote in 2017in Australia by accusing everyone else of being Nazis, or homophobic bigots. “You’re an arsehole. Now vote the way I want,” isn’t a good way to approach other people. Some of that happened. But the average voter was won over more by appeals to equal treatment, and by patiently explaining to some how gay people could be disadvantaged in a hospital settings or in a disputed will without legal recognition of the relationship, when the other person’s family disputed the relationship.

How then do normal people respond to rhetoric that seems to be completely detached from reality? It will be necessary to explain, over and over, that a variety of opinions is absolutely normal in any society. Nobody is trying to “erase your identity”. Someone who holds a differing opinion to you on Isla Bryson is not trying to destroy you. Men and women do have physical differences. Saying that men are on average taller than women, or knowing that men and women experience heart attack symptoms differently doesn’t make anyone a Nazi. No one is shoveling sexual or racial minorities into gas ovens. Repeating this numerous times may no doubt become tiring. But it has to be done. I don’t see another option. Political conversations need to be grounded in reality.