[A failure mode of culturally high mental health awareness.]
In my experience, there is a high level of mental health awareness in the EA community. That is, people openly talk about mental health challenges such as depression, and many will know about how to help people facing such challenges (e.g. by helping them to get professional treatment). At least more so than in other communities I’ve known.
I think this is mostly great, and on net much preferable over low mental health awareness.
However, I recently realized one potential failure mode: There is a risk of falsely overestimating another individual’s mental health awareness. For example, suppose I talk to an EA who appears to struggle with depression; I might then think “surely they know that depression is treatable, and most likely they’re already doing CBT”, concluding there isn’t much I can do to help. I might even think “it would be silly for me to mention CBT because it’s common knowledge that depression can often be treated that way, and stating facts that are common knowledge is at best superfluous and at worst insulting (because I’d imply the other person might lack some kind of basic knowledge)”.
Crucially, this would be a mistake even if I was correct that the person I’m talking to was, by virtue of exposure to the EA community, more likely than usual to have heard of CBT. This is because of a large asymmetry in value: It can be extremely valuable for both one’s personal well-being and one’s expected impact on the world to e.g. start treatment for depression; the cost of saying something obvious or even slightly annoying pales by comparison.
This suggests a few lessons:
If you may be able to help someone cope with mental health challenges, don’t forfeit that opportunity just because you assume they’ve already got all the help they could. (Of course, there may be other valid reasons: e.g., it could be too costly, or inappropriate in a particular context.) Even if you’ve recently talked to many similar people of whom this was true.
If you’re still worried about stating the obvious, it may help to be explicit about why. E.g., “I know you may be aware of this, but I’d like to mention something because I think it could have outsized importance if not”.
[A failure mode of culturally high mental health awareness.]
In my experience, there is a high level of mental health awareness in the EA community. That is, people openly talk about mental health challenges such as depression, and many will know about how to help people facing such challenges (e.g. by helping them to get professional treatment). At least more so than in other communities I’ve known.
I think this is mostly great, and on net much preferable over low mental health awareness.
However, I recently realized one potential failure mode: There is a risk of falsely overestimating another individual’s mental health awareness. For example, suppose I talk to an EA who appears to struggle with depression; I might then think “surely they know that depression is treatable, and most likely they’re already doing CBT”, concluding there isn’t much I can do to help. I might even think “it would be silly for me to mention CBT because it’s common knowledge that depression can often be treated that way, and stating facts that are common knowledge is at best superfluous and at worst insulting (because I’d imply the other person might lack some kind of basic knowledge)”.
Crucially, this would be a mistake even if I was correct that the person I’m talking to was, by virtue of exposure to the EA community, more likely than usual to have heard of CBT. This is because of a large asymmetry in value: It can be extremely valuable for both one’s personal well-being and one’s expected impact on the world to e.g. start treatment for depression; the cost of saying something obvious or even slightly annoying pales by comparison.
This suggests a few lessons:
If you may be able to help someone cope with mental health challenges, don’t forfeit that opportunity just because you assume they’ve already got all the help they could. (Of course, there may be other valid reasons: e.g., it could be too costly, or inappropriate in a particular context.) Even if you’ve recently talked to many similar people of whom this was true.
If you’re still worried about stating the obvious, it may help to be explicit about why. E.g., “I know you may be aware of this, but I’d like to mention something because I think it could have outsized importance if not”.