 |
| Tom Sawyer applying some management skills to the whitewashing of Aunt Polly's fence. Not finding credit. |
David Brooks got his readers to help out with a column on mental health in the year of plague ("The Pandemic of Fear and Agony"), sending out an appeal last week
to tell me about your mental health — how you are faring in this hard time. I don’t know what I expected; maybe some jaunty stories about families pulling together in a crisis. What you sent gutted me. There have been over 5,000 replies so far, and while many people are hanging in there, there is also a river of woe running through the world — a significant portion of our friends and neighbors are in agony.The column he gets out of it, and a supplementary selection ("'I Feel Like I'm Finally Cracking and I Don't Even Know Why'"), is all agony, and I'm of two minds about it: on the one hand, better to devote space to real human voices than to another David Brooks column, and these barely edited fragments of sorrow and anxiety are pretty real, but they're jumbled together in an awfully uncurated way, as if to emphasize the lack of a pattern in who's suffering: old people in isolation, old people saddled with family responsibilities, people with a history of anxiety and depression disorders, people who have always thought they were completely healthy, people who think they're doing something about it (some reading Victor Frankl on Brooks's recommendation) and and people who don't know what they're going to do.
