Has Mindfulness Gone Too Far?
Google ‘mindfulness’ and here’s what you will find:
That is 221 million hits. We live in the mindfulness age: mindful eating, mindful work, mindful… Here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say about mindfulness. We’ve highlighted in yellow the current and most common usage: paying attention to one thing at a time.
Google Ngram tracks frequency of term in use, 1800-2000.
Mindfulness, as you can see in the film below (done by mindfulness researchers at Harvard using brain imaging) can be used to understand and treat everything: depression, anxiety, drug addiction. Recent book titles include: Mindful Work,” “The Mindful Way Through Depression,” “Mindful Birthing,” “Mindful Movements,” “The Mindful Child,” “The Mindful Teen,” two books called “Mindful Eating,” and “The Mindful Way Through Stress.” Here’s one question we have about the turn to mindfulness. Is there a philosophy of science sufficiently developed to understand the complex dynamics, upward and downward causation, among and between body, brain, mind, self, and identity? As you listen to the film below, you’ll learn that the explanatory dynamic is between the body and the brain. And if this is the organizing and causal dynamic, perhaps this should be called brainfulness. It is not clear how or if the researchers see or have conceptualized the relationship between the brain and mind. And for many there is no important distinction to be made between brain and mind; and philosophy has long contended with this difficult issue. We believe that it would be necessary to have a sufficiently nuanced philosophy of science to see these relationships. There can be no doubt that the brain is rooted in the body. But even then the brain is an emergent property of the body and that emergence is entirely dependent on the nature and quality of the social surround (e.g., attachment, social relationships, poverty). We know that we develop brains (e.g., our capacity for language and speech) in relationships. And these are all contingent relationships. And our brains all emerge from our bodies in unique ways in those contingent relationships.
It must also be true that our minds emerge from our brains (i.e., our minds are emergent properties of our brains and bodies) and that our minds have a downward influence on our brains just as our brains have an upward influence on our minds. Just as our brains are rooted in our bodies our minds are rooted in our brains. However, while they are both rooted in body and brain, they are not reducible to them; otherwise, we’re left with tired, old neuro-reductionism (see our guest contributor blog post by Joseph Davis, author of Chemically Imbalanced). They each have their own unique powers and liabilities to produce effects. And we would say the same for self and identity (and this gets much more complicated when we talk about the self or identity).
What, then, is mindfulness? Is it the capacity of the mind to downwardly influence or cause our brains to act in certain ways? And if so, what ways? Or is it living in a particular moment in history, with particular, troubling and unstable selves or identities, that cause use to lose the capacity for the singular attention to a moment, for being fully present (see Purser’s book, McMindfulness, and the podcast interview with him below). Purser and Milillo (2015: 3-24) argue that “a denatured mindfulness divorced from its soteriological context reduces it to a self-help technique that is easily misappropriated for reproducing corporate and institutional power, employee pacification, and maintenance of toxic organizational cultures” and narrowly on attention enhancement, present-moment awareness, and stress reduction. They argue that “…current operational definitions of mindfulness… differ considerably from those derived from classic Buddhist canonical sources.” They explore the meaning, function, and purpose of Buddhist mindfulness with what they’re calling a triadic model of “right mindfulness.” For Purser and Milillo a “Buddhist-based conceptualization of right mindfulness provides both a theoretical and ethical corrective to the decontextualized individual-level construct of mindfulness that has informed the organizational theory and practitioner literature.”
Listen to interview with Ronald Purser
At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland (January 2015) Kabat-Zinn led executives and 1 percenters in a mindfulness meditation. This gathering of the world’s super rich needed someone to calm their nerves between conference sessions on Bitcoin and cybersecurity and how to maintain and reproduce their wealth. How could they continue without calming their polyvagal system and the shamelessness that comes when their sympathetic nervous system fails to take hold. After hearing from the guru of mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn (whose mindfulness industry has earned him a handsome 45m), they dismissed to attend a packed session with the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. His session was called The Human Brain: Deconstructing Mindfulness.
William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry: How the Government & Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing (Verso, 2015) questions why there is so much distress. He writes “… two things are worth focusing on. Firstly, there is the meritocratic ethos of contemporary capitalism, which states that social class is no longer relevant, and therefore everybody ends up with the socio-economic position they deserve. This produces a chronic sense of self-blame, unease, anxiety and self-recrimination, with individuals having nobody to blame but themselves for not being famous, very rich or more attractive. Combine with digital tools that allow all time and space to be used productively, and you have a society without any sanctuaries from economic competition. This, incidentally, is partly why the phenomenon of ‘safe spaces’ is necessary, providing the possibility of being somewhere where vulnerability is accepted, and also why such a phenomenon attracts so much rage from those of an older generation not privy to them. Secondly, we live in a time of psycho-somatic confusion, no longer knowing what to attribute to the ‘mind’ and what to the ‘body’, with the ‘brain’ serving as a medium between the two. A great deal of mental illness, as discussed and encountered today, hovers in a psycho-somatic space which is existential but also medical at the same time. The medical dimension stems partly from the fact that psychiatry has become increasingly medicalised since the 1970s, and more dependent on pharmaceuticals, but also from the fact that the medical doctor is one of the last experts that we truly trust, and – in Britain – the NHS is one of the last public institutions of all-round care and sympathy. So we turn in these directions in search of those things, as much as because of physical ailments.” https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/mental-health-and-neoliberalism-an-interview-with-william-davies/
Below you’ll find a podcast (The Radical Therapist Podcast) interview with William Davies about his book, The Happiness Industry
The Belgian psychoanalyst, Paul Verhaeghe, has written a very interesting book on what he sees as a major historical and recent shift in clinical praxis: from the classic neuroses to increasing depression and anxiety problems. Verhaeghe understands this as a shift from psychoneuroses to actual neuroses. He also argues that this recent shift included the rise of personality disorders (for him these are disorders of identity). He then speculates on the reasons for this shift in nosology (see Alan Horwitz’s work on this shift, Anxiety to Depression). Verhaeghe concludes that with a change in society came a change in identity and along with it different disorders.
For each of the authors discussed in this blog, Purser (see McMindfulness), Davies (The Happiness Industry) and Verhaeghe, the increasing dominance of neoliberalism has produced psychological outcomes. Verhaeghe argues that many health indicators correlate with neoliberalism (e.g., teen pregnancy, domestic violence, anxiety and depression, drug abuse, school dropout). He cites work by Wilkinson and Pickett who show that the rise in income inequality in a country, a region, or even a city, strongly correlate with most psychosocial health indicators.
For Verhaeghe neoliberalism, on a psychological level, produces competitive individualism. And this combined with economic meritocracy creates a system dominated by winners and losers (this includes the perverse meritocracy at universities) Living in this binary system, winners and losers, is the underlying cause of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. And because we are social by nature living in this binary system has psychological outcomes. The result: neoliberalism sets us apart and compels us to become competitive individuals and only competitive individuals.
How do we emerge from the neoliberal nightmare that has produced rapid global warming, extreme economic inequality, and virulent forms of racism? It will only be by refusing to accept that neoliberalism and free markets are the only way. And this must include a challenge to any practice that causes us to erase or misrecognize our role in the production of human suffering.
Neoliberalism has brought us to the brink. And this also means that social work researchers and scholars must get off the neoliberal bandwagon (Gray & Webb, 2013; Ferguson, 2009) and stop talking about distributive justice. Check out our guest blog post from Paul Gomberg on contributive justice.
We believe that we’re at a moment in history when this kind of competitive individualism is being tested: by the novel coronavirus and BLM. Let’s imagine that we can now begin to see that there is an alternative to competitive individualism and market-based capitalism. And there are no doubt many and complicated sides to mindfulness and like everything in the history of capitalism it is easy to commodify even our most fundamental ways of relating and mindfulness may be janus faced: it is both a reflection of and indulgence in competitive individualism and an attempt escape from it.
References
Davies, W. (2015). The happiness industry: How the government and big business sold us well-being. Verso Books.
Davies, W. (2017) Mental Health and Neoliberalism, Interview with W. Davies, by Jon Bales. In Counterpunch https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/mental-health-and-neoliberalism-an-interview-with-william-davies/
Ferguson, I. (2009). Another social work is possible! Reclaiming the radical tradition. Theories and methods of social work: Exploring different perspectives, 81-98.
Gray, M., & Webb, S. A. (2013). The new politics of social work. Macmillan International Higher Education.
Gray, M., & Webb, S. A. (2009). The return of the political in social work. International Journal of Social Welfare, 18(1), 111-115.
Purser, R. (2019). McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. London: Repeater Books.
Purser, R. E., Forbes, D., & Burke, A. (2016). Handbook of mindfulness. Springer International Publishing Switzerland.
Purser, R. E., & Milillo, J. (2015). Mindfulness revisited: A Buddhist-based conceptualization. Journal of Management Inquiry, 24(1), 3-24.