One of my life’s goals is to find a way to solve a problem that is widely regarded as impossible by healthcare practitioners. Recently I made a key breakthrough on this in the form of a realization.
Background: I want to learn how to help people who are “unhappily unhappy”, people who’s level of suffering is sufficient that they are willing to give up their current ways of being in pursuit of greater happiness. Helping people who want to be helped is of course an achievable endeavor. Beyond that, I want to discover how to help people who are “happily unhappy”, people who are consistently unhappy but are far more content with their suffering than they are willing to risk any part of their existing lifestyle for the opportunity to be happy, even if that outcome could be guaranteed. Helping people who don’t want to be helped is considered a lost cause by most scholars and clinicians, but I refuse to believe that without trying to find a way.
My breakthrough observation which took 6 years to make is this:
Imagine that one’s mental health struggles is like boxing in a ring. Facing up to yourself and your issues is like entering the ring and voluntarily starting the boxing match. Your therapist, family/friends, and your support network cannot fight the match for you, but they can encourage you to show up in the first place, bring you and equip you with the best gear that you own, and prep you to be in the best state of mind that you can be in given your current condition.
I believe this analogy accurately captures three truths about mental health:
- No one can confront someone else’s deepest fears and challenges on their behalf.
- Yet, it is possible for a support network to make a difference in whether an important battle was fought at all, as well as whether there was an advantage on one side. This is true at least in some scenarios and some lives, and the difference that can be made can be considered decisive, at least from a retrospective consequentialist point of view.
- The gap between the “happily unhappy” and “unhappily unhappy” is a gap in want for help, and the theoretical problem of trying to induce a conversion between these states in someone else is akin to the art of doing whatever would work to have someone enter the boxing match (and hopefully come out with a positive outcome).
I’m not so sure what that last point means (and it may take several years to understand it), but it offers at last two immediate insights:
- The analogy highlights what is “at least” possible to achieve as part of the support crew. So what are the limits of decisive effectiveness a support crew can bring, and is there any category of influence that is more powerful or fundamentally different to what the support crew can achieve?
- How to be a highly effective and convincing support crew is in the creative realm, as is helping people who don’t want to be happy. Different things will work better for different people.
An interesting thing I like about this analogy is that it allows me to transform a problem that primarily lies in the emotional domain into a problem that’s within both the physical/practical and emotional domain, allowing me to examine the problem and possible solutions from more angles.
INTP things 