Grappling With Demoralization

An increasing number of doctors in America are suffering from something they are diagnosing in an increasing number of their patients – “demoralization syndrome.” As a prominent physician recently wrote, “Our demoralization is not a reaction to a medical condition, but rather to the diseased systems for which we work.”

“The United States is the only large high-income nation that doesn’t provide universal health care to its citizens. Instead, it maintains a lucrative system of for-profit medicine. For decades, at least tens of thousands of preventable deaths have occurred each year because health care here is so expensive.”

Demoralization syndrome has previously been found mostly in terminally ill people, such as patients in the last stages of cancer. But doctors are experiencing it because of an existential conflict between the reason they went into medicine (to care for the sick), and the pitiless reality of the American health care system (which profiteers from illness, disease and even hospice care).

Of course the powerful and comfortably self-centered don’t grapple with demoralization, anymore than Joe Biden does in his delusion, “I’ve never been more optimistic about our future.”

The shudderingly hideous Marjorie Taylor Greene screamed “Liar!” again and again at President Biden during his State of the Union Address this week. He wasn’t lying about what she and the Republicans stand for, but he was lying when he said, “The state of the union is strong…the soul of this nation is strong.”

The worst conduits of collective darkness are intransigent optimists. Biden’s aggressively nationalistic optimism was not as grating as Greene’s hateful nihilism, but it is demoralizing. It’s no coincidence that his supporters called his speech 'MAGA with more substance and less vitriol.'

Even so-called philosophers, cosseted in academia, have found self-satisfied niches in pretences of philosophy (or for that matter teaching). I recently spoke with the director of a Center for Bioethics and Social Justice at a major American university, requesting inquiry at his center into some of the pressing questions of the day on a planned visit to the state. He emailed: “I/we aren’t in the market for what you describe. Each of our faculty members uses their own approach to inspiring ethical deliberation. It works for us.”

So much for philosophers thinking together. In that terse reply he combined the ‘it’s all marketing’ mentality of America with the culture’s rampaging individualism. 
 

Thus demoralization isn’t limited to terminal patients, and doctors broken by a ruthlessly monetizing system of health care. Artists, writers, activists and true philosophers are feeling it too.

Demoralization syndrome is diagnosed “when a poor sense of coping is associated with low morale, reduced hope, and a sense of feeling stuck, with related symptoms of feeling helpless, pointless or purposeless.”

Given that definition, and the state of the world and direction of the global culture, I wonder, how many people don’t feel this way?

Needless to say perhaps, demoralization syndrome is difficult to distinguish from widespread despair and the pandemic of depression. But having basically lost my 20’s to acute depression, and grappling with demoralization recently, I can attest that they aren’t the same thing.

(My cyclic sucks into black holes only ended at 30 when I stopped fighting them and saw that acute depression is a runaway biochemical reaction in the brain. That enabled me to non-judgmentally assume complete responsibility for dealing with the violence and neglect of my childhood. I also started taking daily methodless meditations in nature. Depression is not personal, but is fed by seeing things in terms of the personal. I never think I can’t fall into the bottomless pit again, and immediately listen to anxiety, the canary in the coalmine. I’ve never been on anti-depressants, and am not against their temporary use in intractable cases [which a psychiatrist blithely said mine was over the phone], but they are way overprescribed.)

Demoralization began to set in recently when I started feeling that the prospect for a human future of harmony with the earth and economic justice had become nearly nonexistent in my lifetime. However the real and present danger of my demoralization triggering an acute depression after 40 years makes adequately meeting it urgently necessary.

I realized that I'd begun to fall into the habit of taking non-personal things personally. Things like the fact that carbon emissions are still increasing even as the climate becomes disastrously unstable, while BP and other oil producers unashamedly announcing obscene profits. Also, almost unnoticed, an accelerating extinction of animals with which we share the Earth, which is occurring in real time.

Then there’s the war in Ukraine, an escalating World War I proxy war between Russia and America/NATO that could explode into World War III at any time. Even as the mainstream American media feeds the rotten roots of war by hyperventilating over 19th century balloons violating our sacred sovereignty, thereby inducing 18th century hysteria in a 21st century global society.

Stuck in their trenches, exchanging thousands of artillery rounds per day, Ukrainian soldiers are rightly applauded for keeping up their morale. But human resiliency is finite, and we’re stretching it to its limit. The evil that flows through Putin knows this if Western politicians and generals don’t. Congruently, how many Americans fall into demoralization syndrome after another mass slaughter in this country?

What is the prescription for demoralization? Certainly not prescribing antidepressants as if they were ibuprofen. Nor does the anodyne treatment of “cognitively informed and existentially oriented therapies to restore morale and sustain engagement with the living” provide much help.

Young people see what is happening. Greta Thunberg, the most passionate and famous activist of the latest generation, says, “The world is getting more and more grim every day.”

“For me,” she adds, “living in my bubble of activists, it may seem like people know where we’re heading, people know what’s happening, that people care. But when I move outside that bubble into the real world, then it strikes me every time that people are really living in denial. There’s still no sense of urgency whatsoever, anywhere.”

This is true, although I don’t think it’s possible to refer to “people” without separating oneself from people. Such thinking and language confirms that a contemplative life without engaging in activism is essential to transforming the world, and does no harm. Whereas activism without an inner life inevitably contributes to man’s fragmentation of the Earth and humanity.

Seeing little prospect for the one thing that can change the disastrous course of man -- a global psychological revolution -- I don’t have a remedy for demoralization. However there’s no choice except to keep learning through unlearning, and thereby keep one’s caring alive and heart growing.

It boils down to the age-old maxim, “Love and do what you will.”

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin77 at gmail

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