You might say that cognitive-behavioral therapy aims at achieving self-control, while psychodynamic psychotherapy aims at achieving self-understanding. But what the ancients aimed for was self-mastery, something that encompassed both concepts and transcended them.
.. It will only ever be available to an elite – and that elite may be shrinking because of Baumol’s cost disease, which makes anything labor-intensive more expensive over time as automation makes capital-intensive activities cheaper. That’s one reason CBT is so popular – it’s also not really scalable, but it’s more scalable by far than the psychodynamic approach. It’s a form of therapy perfectly suited to a society that finds the inner life to be a bit of a nuisance, but demands every-increasing organizational competence of its monads.
It is depressing to think that there are good economic reasons why an affluent society can’t afford to incubate very many mastered selves, but I don’t think the ancients would be surprised at all.
Where Police Violence Encounters Mental Illness
According to data compiled by The Washington Post, of nearly 1,000 people shot and killed by police officers in the United States in 2015, 25 percent displayed signs of mental illness. And about 14 percent of individuals in American jails and prisons have a serious mental illness, which means that, for most officers, interacting with individuals with mental illness is an almost daily occurrence.
.. There are two simultaneous national crises — one of police violence and the other of inadequate mental health treatment — and we are making a mistake if we focus blame only on the police. They have become, by default, the way in which our society chooses to deal with people with mental illness in crisis, particularly in poor and minority communities. We need also to address the declining state of mental health services across the country.
Fighting China’s Stubborn Stigma Around Mental Health
Upon his diagnosis with bipolar disorder, Chen Wei, a successful businessman living in Shanghai, found himself disappointed with the services available. In 2003, he founded China’s first support group for people suffering from depression called Shanghai Tulip. In a country with widespread shame surrounding mental illness, it was a difficult move—but the needs are great, as an estimated 6 percent of China’s 1.2 billion people suffer from depression. “I think that maybe in 30 years, the public will be well educated about mental illness,” Wei says in this short film by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “They will know how to deal with it just like they do with a cold.”
Other People’s Yachts: Churchill and his Money, or Lack of It
Lough points out that Churchill’s switchback from the Tories, to the Liberals, and back to the Tories can be situated in terms of his personal finances. Having started out in the party of the landed interest, he switched to the party of the entrepreneur and the professional when he started to earn serious money with his writing. Having finally acquired land, he switched back to the Tories.
.. this was a guy who decided to drink champagne only five times a week in order to save money.
.. In fact, he tried all the ways rich men find to lose money, except yachting and mistresses.
.. Money also illuminates his inner life. The Black Dog struck in 1937-8, when he was savaged by margin calls in the hundreds of thousands of pounds on his appallingly ill-thought-out share portfolio, pursued by the Inland Revenue, enormously overdrawn at his bank, writing 2000 words a day or more for fear that his publisher would reclaim the long-spent advance on Marlborough: His Life and Times. Of course he was depressed.
.. In the end, one important lesson from this book is that perhaps standards of public integrity and financial probity have actually improved.
In 1923, Churchill accepted a £250,000 fee to lobby on behalf of Shell Oil. He used this money to underwrite part of a major bond issue by Daily Mail & General Trust, a newspaper that also published him and an obvious source of political influence, in exchange for a 2% commission. Vickers, Da Costa called in a favour with DM>’s merchant bank to hold a chunk of the business back for him, after Churchill had Shell send the cheque to his brother Jack’s home address for secrecy’s sake. Jack, of course, had just made partner at Vickers, Da Costa, no doubt in part because he brought Winston’s account with him from Grenfell’s and it wasn’t yet obvious what a mess he was going to be. Churchill collected on the transaction, went to stay with the Duke of Westminster in Mimizan, and proceeded to lose the lot at the casino in Biarritz.
I doubt you’d get away with that now.