Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Anthropocene

A Posthuman Inquiry

Jamie Mcphie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789811333262
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book makes the unorthodox claim that there is no such thing as mental health. It also deglamourises nature-based psychotherapies, deconstructs therapeutic landscapes and redefines mental health and wellbeing as an ecological process distributed in the environment – rather than a psychological manifestation trapped within the mind of a human subject. Traditional and contemporary philosophies are merged with new science of the mind as each chapter progressively examples a posthuman account of mental health as physically dispersed amongst things – emoji, photos, tattoos, graffiti, cities, mountains – in this precarious time labelled the Anthropocene. Utilising experimental walks, play scripts and creative research techniques, this book disrupts traditional notions of the subjective self, resulting in an Extended Body Hypothesis – a pathway for alternative narratives of human-environment relations to flourish more ethically. This transdisciplinary inquiry will appeal to anyone interested in non-classificatory accounts of mental health, particularly concerning areas of social and environmental equity – post-nature.

© The Author(s) 2019

Jamie McphieMental Health and Wellbeing in the Anthropocenehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3326-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jamie Mcphie¹

(1)

Science, Natural Resources and Outdoor Studies, University of Cumbria, Ambleside, Cumbria, UK

Jamie Mcphie

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

What if we were to extend the territory of madness beyond the human skin? ‘[I]f Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience’ (Bateson, 2000, p. 492). The world is being driven insane. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007, 2013) affirms ‘with very high confidence’ and ‘virtual certainty’ that humans have altered the climate to an alarming degree. The ability for the Earth to self-regulate in a way that supports an abundance of biological species is now under threat (again). Population sizes of vertebrate species have dropped by half since 1970 (WWF, 2014, 2015), in the time that I have been alive. Although this book is not about climate change and mass extinction specifically, these potentially catastrophic concepts are implicated in the nature of this book due to the novel approach I take by suggesting that mental health is distributed in the environment. We are implicated and imbricated in a process of ecocide.¹ The idea that climate change, as a thing happening ‘out there’, may be affecting our psyche, as a thing happening ‘in here’ (our heads), seems rather unidirectional, deterministic, transcendent and dualistic in its approach. Rather than focusing on climate change per se as some separate phenomena that may negatively affect a human psyche bound within a skull, maybe a redefinition of mental health and wellbeing is needed, one that merges conceptual boundaries and regards ‘the climate’ as of a wider mental assemblage so that mental health and wellbeing becomes an ecological or even geological discipline. It seems that our perceptions, conceptions and affections may well be worth unpacking if we are to attempt to map the spread mind in ‘environ(mental) health’.² The planet’s health is ultimately our health and as such we may need to displace our current understanding of human-environment relations. This introduction opens up these issues before revealing the rest of the journey from there, a journey that takes gradual steps to an ecology of mental health as you step through each chapter. This process highlights how mental health is spread from small objects all the way up to cities, forests, the world and beyond (ecologically, conceptually, topologically³).

Landscapes Are Transformed

‘We need 1.5 Earths to regenerate the natural resources we currently use; we cut trees faster than they mature, harvest more fish than oceans replenish, and emit more carbon into the atmosphere than forests and oceans can absorb’ (WWF, 2014, para. 3). This has led many academics to adopt a change of name for the current geological period in Earth’s history:

We no longer live in the Holocene […] but in the Anthropocene. Chemical, physical and biological changes are dramatic and sometimes frankly alarming: atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are now at levels last seen more than two million years ago and rising fast; invasive species have been introduced to every continent and a sixth great mass extinction event may be with us in mere centuries; landscapes are transformed. (Zalasiewicz, 2013, p. 9)

At the same time, conceptions of mental landscapes have been transforming. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that anxiety, stress and mental ill-health are becoming more prevalent in modern Western societies. Capitalism has been named as one of the guilty culprits for this mental malaise as well as influencing environmental degradation, hence the term ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore, 2014). Some academics relate these various issues to a ‘crisis of perception’ (Capra, 1996) and/or a general nature-culture perceptual misalignment—something Alfred North Whitehead called ‘The Bifurcation of Nature’.⁴ This particular view frames the problems mentioned at the ontological level—the nature of reality/the study of existence—and the epistemological level—the nature of knowledge (how do we think we know what we know?). It also leads to questions about ethics and/or morality—what ‘should’ we do or what ‘can’ we do? In agreement with quantum physicist/social scientist Karen Barad, I don’t think these concepts can be categorically separated, hence her term, ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ (Barad, 2007, p. 381) in order to denote the intertwining of ethics, knowing and being. But before we get into that philosophical composition—and as this story needs to start somewhere a little more accessible—what better place to begin, regarding a mental account of the earth, than ‘the Anthropocene’.

The Anthropocene

I was at a conference where someone said something about the Holocene. I suddenly thought this was wrong. The world has changed too much. So I said: “No, we are in the Anthropocene.” I just made up the word on the spur of the moment. Everyone was shocked. But it seems to have stuck. (Crutzen, cited in Pearce, 2007, p. 44)

Popularised by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, the Anthropocene (unofficially) replaces the Holocene as the current geological period in Earth’s history due to human influence on the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere (if you want to label them this way). Its acceptance as an official term for the current geological epoch is still being debated but it is becoming used increasingly by various geological societies, climatologists and academics, for example. Such is the popularity of the term that it is now the title of a heavy metal album, The Anthropocene Extinction. There are also a few contenders, for a variety of reasons, that claim to be the starting point for the Anthropocene—the Pleistocene, the Holocene, the Agricultural Revolution, the 1500s, the Industrial Revolution, 1945, 1964—but as Timothy Morton asks, ‘[i]s it at all possible to say with a straight face that on a certain date at a certain time, a threshold will have been crossed that guarantees the arrival of apocalyptic catastrophe?’ (Morton, 2012, para. 7). I’m sure some people could and do.

The term Anthropocene is yet another example of the bifurcation of nature. When the concept is used, it is often juxtaposed with the supposedly more natural geological epochs:

The term Anthropocene […] suggests that the Earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state. (Steffen, Crutzen, & McNeill, 2007, p. 614)

So, human activities ‘rival’ nature/natural activities, as if we were not of the world. The other mass extinctions were supposedly brought about by volcanic action. If we understood the taxonomic family tree by what things ‘do’ rather than by genetic variation, I would say that human’s closest relative was not the chimpanzee but the volcano. We are a natural process too. That doesn’t mean we have to like it or sit back and take it, but it does have implications as to how much we are able to do about it, especially if we accept that agency is a distributed process and not a thing contained within the shell of a human.

Although I realise the obvious anthropocentric—as well as gendered and hegemonic—issue in the concept Anthropocene (see Haraway, 2015), I agree with Morton (2014) when he states, ‘Anthropocene ends the concept nature: a stable, nonhuman background to (human) history. Should this not be welcome for scholars rightly wary of setting artificial boundaries around history’s reach?’ (p. 1). However, I also disagree with Morton’s insistence that the sixth mass extinction event is ‘caused by humans—not jellyfish, not dolphins, not coral’ (2014, p. 2) in that humans are not a transcendent or biologically bounded entity (or ‘object’ as he might now put it) distinct from the intra-actions⁵ of other life processes. This would lead to a ‘fetishisation of difference that tends to erase other differences’ (Colebrook, 2014, seminar). In this sense, the term Anthropocene may herald problematic performative consequences. Alternatively, the Plastocene (Preston, 2017) seems apt for obvious reasons. There is even a rock called ‘plastiglomerate’, formed when plastic fuses with rock, sand, wood, coral and shells. Emerging 150 years ago, plastic is now in our geological record. We are living in a plastic age. It is also a brand of children’s putty as well as sounding very similar to another geological period, the Pleistocene.

It might be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Material (Re)Turn—to Mental Health
• 3. The Accidental Death of Mr. Happy and the Medical Gaze
• 4. The Birth of Mr. Messy: Post-Qualitative Inquiry, Rhizoanalysis and Psychogeography
• 5. The Healing Power of Nature(s)
• 6. Agential Dancing
• 7. Extended Body Hypothesis (EBH)
• 8. Interlude: Liverpool ONE—Liverpool Too: A Therapeutic Tale of Two Cities
• 9. The Aesthetics of a Teletubby Landscape: A Short History of a Romantic Gaze
• 10. The Depression of POPS
• 11. Posthuman Therapeutic Inquiry
• 12. Conclusion: There Is No Such Thing as Mental Health
• Back Matter