Category Mental health

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Is there a dark side to gratitude?

Feeling thankful is increasingly touted as a cure-all, but sometimes there are reasons not to be grateful

The word “gratitude” is everywhere these days. On mental health leaflets and in magazine columns, emblazoned on mugs and motivational posters. All this is the result of more than two decades’ research in positive psychology which has found that having a “gratitude practice” (usually jotting down three to five things you are thankful for most days) brings a host of psychological and physical benefits.

I don’t want to seem, well, ungrateful. I’m a sceptical historian, but even I was persuaded to take up the gratitude habit, and when I remember to do it, I feel better: more cheerful and connected, inclined to see the good already in my life. Counting your blessings, whether that’s noticing a beautiful sunset or remembering how your neighbour went out of their way to help you earlier, is free and attractively simple. But there’s the problem. In our eagerness to embrace gratitude as a cure-all, have we lost sight of its complexity and its edge?

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How modern life makes us sick – and what to do about it

From depression to obesity, the concept of ‘evolutionary mismatch’ can help foster self-compassion and point the way to a more rewarding existence

One of the fascinating things about working as a psychotherapist is the opportunity to observe how many of our problems involve us getting in the way of ourselves. The difficulties we encounter are frequently the result of self-sabotage, and managing them often requires wrestling with our own drives, doing our best not to give in to every impulse. This is easier said than done, of course. To lose weight and keep it off, to successfully climb out of debt, to find meaningful work, to maintain long-term, happy relationships: all demand postponing our immediate desires in the service of a longer-term goal.

Delaying gratification, as it’s called, has been a useful tactic for aeons. But at a certain point it becomes reasonable to ask: why does so much of modern life seem to involve swimming upstream? Why is it that following our instincts often seems to land us in so much trouble?

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‘How can I find meaning from the ruins of my life?’: the little magazine with a life-changing impact

After struggles with mental health and addiction, Max Wallis launched a poetry magazine – and it has transformed his life

One morning in February last year, I received an urgent call from the journalist Paul Burston, alerting me to alarming recent social media posts by a mutual friend, the poet and former model Max Wallis.

It seemed he had left his London flat in deep distress and was headed to a bridge. Our best guess was the Millennium footbridge by St Paul’s Cathedral. Then we heard that Max might have taken refuge inside the cathedral. While I scanned gaggles of tourists in the nave, he was intercepted and removed by ambulance. I was relieved to get a message later that evening that he was safe.

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Pan by Michael Clune review – a stunning debut of teen psychosis

This wild ride of a novel is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence

The narrator of American nonfiction author Michael Clune’s first novel is the 15-year-old Nicholas, who lives with his father in a housing development so cheap and deracinated it inspires existential terror. It’s a place exposed to “the raw death of the endless future, which at night in the midwest in winter is sometimes bare inches above the roofs”. Just as frightening is Nicholas’s sense that “anything can come in”. One day in January, what comes into Nicholas is the god Pan – a possessing, deranging, life-threatening spirit. Or that, anyhow, is how Nicholas comes to interpret his increasingly disabling anxiety.

Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I’ve read how these can be experienced as black magic – indeed, it allows that they might be black magic. Nicholas successfully prophesies trivial events (the wind rising, someone saying the word “diabetes”) and is haunted by a dead mouse’s squeak. Another boy finds a means of divination in a schlock fantasy novel. Even the pop anthem More Than a Feeling is a path to the uncanny; it’s a song with “a door in the middle of it … like the door on a UFO”. Nicholas becomes convinced that he is perpetually at risk of leaving his body – specifically, that his “looking/thinking could pour or leap out” of his head – and his friends, also being 15 years old, are ready to believe it, too. They are easy prey for Ian, a college-age man who sets himself up as a small-time cult leader among these high-school kids. Ian particularly targets Nicholas, telling him that only they are capable of real thoughts; the others in the group are “Hollows” who have “Solid Mind”, a deterministic mentality with no animating self. “The sound of words from a Hollow mouth,” says Ian, “contains an abyss.” Soon the group is staging rituals incorporating sex, drugs and animal sacrifice.

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