It is a common struggle nowadays: You sit down in the library to tackle your mountain of reading, when you are inexplicably sucked into the siren song of your choice of short-form video platform. Ten rounds of five-more-minutes later, the sun is beginning to set. You have not eaten, you have not talked to anyone and you definitely have not done that reading. How many days do you think you have lost to scrolling like this? How many weeks? Months? Of course, you already know firsthand that our generation is fighting an uphill battle against the algorithms that define our time. I do not feel the need to convince you that we have a problem—rather, I offer that our generation-wide addiction cannot be understood as a failure of willpower and therefore will not be solved by self-based growth. The mental health crisis of our time is a systematic issue and must be addressed in community with others.
The ’70s ushered in an era of popular psychology. The previous decade’s idea of self-actualization spread across the general public as they increasingly entered psychiatrists’ offices, watching shows and reading books on the self. Today, the mental health industry has become deeply ingrained in our culture. A record number of adults are going to therapy, while self-improvement podcasts and videos fill For You pages. This blossoming of remedies begs the question: Why are rates of mental illness still climbing? Surely, among the sea of cash-grabbers and millionaire gurus who bloviate on about willpower, there are genuinely dedicated psychologists with the best of intentions for their audiences. You may have even picked up some useful habits from your favorite self-help book, podcast or YouTube channel. Be that as it may, the existence of the self-help genre and its attempts to cure screen addiction imply that the issue lies with the individual. Even the most informative self-help book is a mere Band-Aid on much deeper social and political wounds.
In their 1993 book, “Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and Psychology,” authors Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins criticise the field of psychology for this exact reason. They argue, “Psychological approaches teach us to privatize, individualize, and pathologize our problems…rather than to understand these difficulties as shared consequences of oppression. Whatever it pretends, psychology…serves to obscure larger social and political issues (sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism), converting them into individual pathologies by an insistent focus on the personal.” Though their words are over 30 years old by now, I pose that the authors’ assessment rings more true than ever today. As patients increasingly bring their addiction-induced mental health challenges into the privacy of a therapist’s office, this culture-wide phenomenon is silently and falsely made into an issue of the individual, an issue of willpower.
Though social media addiction may be a 21st century phenomenon, we have understood for decades that addiction in general may be less about the drug of choice itself and more about the user’s environment. In the ’70s, Dr. Bruce Alexander carried out a series of experiments that is now referred to as “Rat Park.” In previous experiments, researchers put rats in individual cages with two water bottles: one with water inside, and one laced with heroin or cocaine. In isolation, the rats would consistently prefer the drugged bottle to the point of overdose.
Then, Alexander’s team set up a Rat Park: a large enclosure complete with toys, puzzles and plenty of rats living together in rat community. When the subjected rats were presented with the same choice between normal water and drugged water, overdose rates fell. Residents of Rat Park would occasionally “indulge” in the drugged water, but never to the point of dysfunction and death. The results of the study are clear: One’s environment can easily make or unmake an addiction. In this way, we can come to understand addiction as a symptom of deeper mental and environmental issues, rather than an issue in itself.
In a society marked by the privatization of mental health issues, it is easy to feel like a rat in a cage. For the generation raised with phone in hand, our drug of choice is apparent, and it is paralyzing. If you struggle alone, I urge you to consider the fallacy of willpower and the proven impacts of community on mental health. It is time that we bring our struggles into the light and endeavor not to change ourselves, but rather to change the systems that exist to isolate and pacify us.