Saturday, September 20, 2008

We Can All Fly if We Believe

I just finished re-watching "Michael Clayton." One of the main characters of the movie is bipolar, wigs out in the middle of a deposition, continues to act nuts till his death. But of course, in the midst of his madness, there is truth to which the rest of the characters in the movie are deliberately blind. It's a pretty cool movie, and one of the things that makes it cool is this way that they've incorporated a central philosophical notion: that reality is not objective, that the observer is everything when it comes to understanding the truth. That mental health is perhaps not all it's cracked up to be.

Years ago, I read about an experiment that had been performed on two groups of volunteers, one clinically depressed, one non-depressed. They played games of chance, and after the games were over, they were asked to evaluate what their chances of winning had been during the games. The interesting result was that the depressed people rated their chances of winning much more accurately than the non-depressed people. It's depressed people who have the proper grip on objective reality, the study suggests. Not "normal" people.

How could that be? To me, it goes to the nature of "reality". If reality is an objective truth, then observing it accurately should be the optimal strategy. But science has taught us that species that flourish do so because they have adaptations that give them a competitive advantage. Our "normal" tendency to overestimate our chances of success must somehow enhance our chance of survival.

And this makes sense, if you think about it. Say you're in a bind, and things really look terribly hopeless. If you assess that accurately, you're likely to just sit down and accept your fate. If you assess that inaccurately, you might think your harebrained scheme stands some chance of success and you might try it. Most of the time, you'll be wrong, sure. Squashed like bug. But every so often, you'll beat the odds for having tried. You'll win where the dude with the good grasp of reality will lose. Where all else fails, delusion is king.

This is what "mental health" really means. It means the ability to participate sustainably in the group hallucination that best meshes with the world we've built. What wrong with mental ill-health is not that it's necessarily inaccurate, it's that it's maladaptive. Reality isn't a stationary target; it's a story we're creating as we go along; it has a Heisenberg quality that exceeds its central truth. Life isn't a game of chance with fixed odds. Believing unreasonably in your chance of success helps foster your chance of success.

But it's easy to slip from that notion to the fallacy that mental ill-health is some form of inspired wisdom. Mental ill-health comes in all forms. Maybe depressed people can rate games of chance accurately. Maybe manic people can tap into arteries of courage and hope and energy the rest of us couldn't hope for. Maybe schizophrenics can see patterns in the world around them that are subtle and sublime. Where any of these perceptions stand in relation to some mythical (in my opinion) objective reality is immaterial. The center of the mental bell-curve is where it is because it is the human race's hard-won best survival strategy. It is as built in to our biology as are our fingers and toes.

However, that, also, is no static truth. Today's mental health is today's survival skill. In times of upheaval, of great global shifts, when the center's strategy suddenly starts to fail, it'll be the outliers who will flourish. Who knows, some millenia from now, if we survive that long, "mental health" might be defined completely differently than it is now.