Mental Health Isn't Rocket Science

Mental health isn’t rocket science.

However, a bit of rocket science can go a long way.

The more time I spend in the world of clinical psychology, the more apparent it becomes that many people — including professionals in the field — are painfully confused as to the development of psychological wellbeing.

That’s where the rocket science comes in.

When I say “rocket science,” I’m referring to the field of cybernetics.

Originally developed around the middle of the twentieth century, cybernetics is the study of goal-directed, self-regulating systems. These systems organize their own behavior through feedback in relation to their environment.

Although it may sound robotic, cybernetics includes both mechanical systems such as rockets navigating toward their targets and animate systems like you, and I, and every other animal out there getting along with our lives.

A cybernetic system has three elements:

1. A goal (or goals),

2. A representation of the world in relation to those goals, and

3. A set of actions that can close the gap.

When things are working smoothly, the system will take action based on what it perceives, and it will use feedback from that action to determine whether or not it’s on the right track.

DeYoung & Krueger (2018) suggest that a cybernetic model provides a valuable way to interpret psychopathology, defining it as “persistent failure to move toward one’s goals, due to failure to generate effective new goals, interpretations, or strategies when existing ones prove unsuccessful.”

This means that mental health isn’t simply about what’s going on in your head.

DeYoung (2014) writes elsewhere that “Our brains interpret the world primarily as a forum for action.” Mental health is therefore a matter of how you relate to the world around you - the goals you set for yourself, how you perceive yourself and the world, and the actions that you take as you move toward what matters most to you.

For example, depression is often related to a collapsing of goals. When we’re in a depression, the world around us loses its luster, and nothing seems worthwhile. Action becomes meaningless as our emotional system flattens. Or consider anxiety: when we’re anxious, our representation of our abilities is greatly reduced, making it difficult to act effectively in relation to the world around us.

People, we must have an active psychology, one that develops our embodied capacities for action. For too long the field has turned us inward and backward, but we’d do well to redirect ourselves outward and forward.

Given the cybernetic definition of psychopathology, a question remains: how does this system get stuck in the first place?

An early cybernetic theorist, Gregory Bateson (1967), wrote “For purposes of cybernetic explanation, when a machine is observed to be (improbably) moving at a constant rate, even under varying load, we shall look for restraints.”

In other words, if we see that somebody is acting the same way in different contexts despite plenty of evidence that what it’s doing isn’t working, we have to assume that there is a restraint on the system’s behavior and perception.

If you spend much time in a therapeutic setting, it becomes evident quite quickly that a primary restraint concerns the “affects.” Affect is the biological basis of emotion; it’s where the body meets the mind.

Affect tells us what matters, in what way, and to what degree.

When unable to regulate affect (aka “get our emotional act together”), we’re confused about our goals, unsure where we stand in relation to them, and unable to muster up our resources effectively in pursuit of them.

If it isn’t painfully obvious, people have a helluva time feeling the feels effectively, more often than not relying on repressive strategies to negate what they’re feeling. Long term, this is a disaster both psychologically and physiologically, resulting in an increase in psychological disorder and a heavy burden on the body’s biological resources.

The cybernetic system becomes disoriented and severely restricted in its capacity to act, and you know by now that that’s a major problem for mental health.

The clarification of goals, refinement of representations, and the development of more flexible action creates a context in which successful pursuit of goals is more likely, allowing for psychological wellbeing to improve of its own accord.

Again, mental health is not rocket science.

But a bit of rocket science helps.