The Cultural Psychiatrist, Vol 2
Welcome to Vol 2 of The Cultural Psychiatrist - an (approximately) monthly newsletter of content related to culture & mental health.
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Writing
Is Technology Really Ruining Teens’ Lives? (New Yorker)
Like Twenge and Haidt before him, Richtel proposes a name for today’s teens: “Generation Rumination.” But he situates their turmoil in a consideration of adolescence as a cultural, sociological, and psychological stage that has emerged in recent centuries. The distress teens feel is, he believes, a reasonable response to a world whose challenges are increasingly abstract and intellectual rather than physical. “Generation Rumination is growing up in the realm of the mind and psyche,” he writes. “Asking why some are struggling is like asking why some adolescents of yesteryear skinned their knees and broke their bones while trekking over a mountain to explore new terrain.”
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A nuanced review of the relationship between social media and teens’ mental health. Molly Fischer reviews Matt Richtel’s new book – How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence. Meanwhile, in the UK, Conservative MP Neil O’Brien has started a campaign to ban smartphones from schools. Watch the launch video (featuring a surprise cameo from Peep Show’s Big Suze) here.
A survey by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, established with Home Office funding in 2022, found over a third of 16 to 34-year-olds had experienced [strangulation], compared with 3% of those 55 and above. “Larger academic studies of college students in the US and Australia put it at much higher,” says Meyrick. US research found that 64% of female college students had been choked during sex.
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A troubling article on the rise of choking during sex. Increasingly, evidence suggests that people’s sexual behaviours are significantly sculpted by the wider culture (particularly violent online pornography). I wonder if one of the reasons this hasn’t gained more public attention is that it challenges our core assumptions and attitudes about sex. While our cultural discourse assumes that sexual preferences are fixed and innate (and should be ‘freed’ from repression), anecdotal reports from porn users and social data suggest that sexual desires are in fact heavily culturally patterned. In other words, our social attitudes are stuck in a Freudian model of the mind (in which a repressive cultural super-ego suppresses the innate drives of our inner id). But what this neglects is an obvious social reality - that our desires, appetites and instincts are themselves shaped by the wider culture. Ignoring this, as the article describes, benefits no-one.
Putting ChatGPT on the Couch (Substack)
A Freudian slip, we all know, is when what seems to be a little mistake reveals a deeper unconscious motivation. Such slips are to be interpreted as symptoms of those underlying motivations. It so happens that AI’s slips (we call them ‘hallucinations’) are equally amenable to interpretation - and what ChatGPT told me from the couch should worry us all.
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Psychotherapist Aaron Balick describes a conversation in which he attempts to psychoanalyse ChatGPT. A fun article, with an interesting conclusion.
Research
Researchers ask over 5,900 people from 12 countries what personality traits they associate with being ‘cool’ compared to being ‘good’. Interestingly, findings were similar across different cultural settings, including both ‘Western’ and non-Western contexts, and were unrelated to a country’s level of economic development. Extroversion, hedonism, power, adventurousness & openness were more strongly associated with being “cool”, whereas warmth, agreeableness and conscientiousness were associated with being “good”.
(Countries included: Australia, Chile, China (Mainland and Hong Kong), Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States).
How everyday AI might be fuelling psychosis
In the last newsletter, I recommended a blog post in which René Walter asked whether AI might have the potential to induce delusional thinking. If you enjoyed the topic, a group of former colleagues at King’s College London have just released a preprint paper on the topic.
And something else…
“The urge they felt in those moments was very strong, blinding – whether it was desire or more a desire to desire – but every time, without fail, something stopped them.”
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I really enjoyed Perfection by Italian author Vincenzo Latronico, shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize.
The plot follows the life of a digital nomad couple living in Berlin. Described as “a sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence,” it is “scathing and affecting in equal measure”.
There is very little character development - but what could feel like a stale ethnography or sociological analysis instead resonates to the core. Through Latronico’s portrayal of modern aesthetics, rentism and lives lived online, the novel seems to capture so much of the sensibility of contemporary millennial life, and its psyche. The characters’ relative anonymity seems only to emphasise the presentist, rootless and liquid existence they inhabit.
Read an extract on Granta here, or a nice review by Michael Patrick Brady here.
Images by Marco Verch, CC BY 2.0