The Languishing Series: an Introduction
A stagnating clinician’s brain
A couple of days ago I stumbled upon that New York Times article by Adam Grant about languishing, that you might have already read. And man, didn’t we all find ourselves in that description? Let’s find out more about it.
Being a psychologist on my way to becoming a licensed psychotherapist, I wondered why the concept of languishing itself didn’t really ring a bell. It’s a term for the opposite of mental well-being, a stagnating unmotivated state of aimlessly living day by day and kind of getting by but not being particularly joyful about it.
On a personal level, languishing describes exactly what I, along with others around me, have been feeling while the pandemic drudges on and on.
The initial motivation of getting through it as a society while making the best of things at home might have been present in the beginning (Remember #flattenthecurve and all those banana bread recipes?) but died down quickly. By 2021, the blah (as Adam Grant so vividly described it) had firmly settled in.
On a professional level, colleagues and statistics alike told me that mental health was deteriorating quickly for many of us. People are suffering from isolation, anxiety, and depression, domestic violence is on the rise.
My patients, paradoxically, seemed mostly okay-ish with the situation. They were almost happy to not have to deal with the cruel world around them and face the people that they were anxious to be judged and belittled by. One of my patients even said that they felt relief and a sense of belonging because everyone was doing the same as them, staying at home.
But of course, this is not something that we are looking for in the long run. According to German psychotherapy researcher Klaus Grawe, two of the important active factors of any kind of psychotherapy are problem actualization and problem-solving. So if my patients were currently involuntarily avoiding their problems, there was nothing to solve, really. Even treatments were languishing.
The WHO’s definition of mental health is not just the mere absence of mental disorders. As we learn in clinical psychology 101, every mental disorder comes to be in a complex network of biological, psychological, and social factors intertwining in a way that we call multifactorial genesis. The same is true for mental health.
So why is it that am I able to list a bunch of risk factors for every mental disorder in the book straight away while the emotionally so familiar concept of languishing, or its desirable positive counterpart, flourishing, only feebly resonates in my clinician’s brain?
I am not completely sure about the answer to this question but I just might have an idea. Dear reader, this is a late welcome to my first article on Medium and, as I just now am realizing myself, the start of series that I hope you will get to enjoy soon.
I will be creating an overview on positive mental health, textbook clinical psychology’s stepmotherly consideration of it (and why that’s a problem even in our self-optimizing society) as well as try and suggest solutions for languishing-related problems that you might be having. Thanks for being here, strap in for the ride!
Next up: What am I even talking about, what exactly is languishing?
