There’s a well kept secret in the psychology profession about depression. In many orthodox perceptions of depression, the remedy is considered to be to train the sufferer to “think positive”. This approach is called “cognitive behavioral therapy” or CBT. And it works to a degree, helping break the cycle between difficult emotions and negative thoughts. This is the approach taken by many “official” efforts to combat depression.
But the secret is this: in many cases CBT is only treating the symptoms of depression. It can work for those who may be down owing to some external pressure that will pass. But for the fundamentally depressed it can actually make things worse. How so?
In many cases, depression is not the result of negative thinking. It is a manifestation of unexpressed emotion, usually anger, arising from past trauma. And being told over and again by a therapist, by a support network, by yourself, only buries that unexpressed emotion further, making it grow.
Right now, that is where we are economically. Australians know that they’ve been through an economic trauma. The GFC wiped out enormous wealth in this country. The years since have been unkind as well, with little or no progress in traditionally safe assets and a mining boom that did nothing much for the vast majority of people beyond the prevention of making things worse. Moreover, folks know in their bones that there is no going back to the boom years when money flowed from every local house and superannuation account on a conveyer belt.
This is an enormous unexpressed trauma. It is also perhaps the single largest reason behind the rise in popularity of a pretty awful Opposition. Deep down, we can at least identify with its negativity.
Yet despite this deep knowledge, which craves acknowledgment, and is the ashes of the Phoenix from which a rebirth of national energy could spring, the pop-psychologists of our national elite spend all day, every day, doing their utmost to bury it. Generally under the banner of a kind of thin Keynesian notion of keeping up “animal spirits”, the government, the RBA, our most respected media commentators, in unison give us a chorus of “buck-up”.
No reference is ever made to the fact that the old order of economic wealth creation has passed, nor that our economic performance per head is the worst it’s been for decades. Instead, we’re subjected to a ceaseless chorus of “it’s all good” (surely the most depressing phrase in the national lexicon), that China will save us, and that we’re better off than the Joneses.
The last two days have seen an extraordinary assault by this alumni of the economic school of Anthony Robbins. Yesterday Ross Gittins parroted the government’s absurd line that our China boom will last forever. Unsatisfied that one dose of abusive optimism was enough, Michael Pascoe simply parroted Ross Gittins in the afternoon. This morning, Stephen Koukoulas uses a mallet to belt prozac pills into our mouths describing the economy and its doyens as both “perfect”.
This is not working. It is only making us more depressed. Not only do we have to face the realty that our economic circumstances are not what they were and that our hopes for the future are less rosy, we have to do it alone. Our economic parents have no idea what is really going on and nothing can be fixed. With those we turn to for support, understanding and a sense of control engaged in a game of let’s pretend, is it any wonder that we are depressed!
What Australians needs is a rebirth. We are desperate for it. A dose of shock therapy that embraces our pain for a lost vision, liberates it, and it gives it purpose in a new entrepreneurial fervour that exports its success to the world. A rerun of the eighties policy catharsis that crushed the false platitudes of positive thinking in a wave of bowel-shaking grief.
Until we get that, the old order will not only whither, it will suck the life from the new.
