Anxiety - Short Bites. Episode #4: Introduction of the group.

So before we begin this discussion, let's start as we always do with a, what I call, a tour de table, which is each of you will tell us your name, what you do, and why you're interested in that topic. Please try to be brief and keep it to about a minute. So why don't we begin with Yannick?

Of course, bien sûr, thank you very much. My name is Yannick, I have a French name, I'm not French, I'm German, so philosophically very much related to many of the existentialists. I'm an existential coach, I'm a positive psychologist, I used to run the MSc Coaching Psychology here at the University of East London, and I do a bunch of other things, I'm a bit of a multipotentialite with a portfolio career, but I won't mention it all. Existentialism gave me personally a foundation in which I can ground my work with people. What I liked about it is that coming from a positive psychology background where a lot of people were a little bit too positive for my sense, they appreciated and acknowledged all of the difficult and challenging stuff that life throws at you. So it is very relatable to people. Navigating life. So in that sense, it gave me a foundation to base all of my coaching work in and relate to other people and also relate to my own life more. And I think in the interest of time, I'll just leave it as that.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Yannick. Gordon, why don't you continue?

Yeah, hi, I'm Gordon Marino, and I'm a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library. And I'm also a boxing trainer, professional and amateur. I came to this subject because I struggle with a lot of the inner demons. My belief is that in order for us to be loving, good human beings, we have to be able to deal with those. The existentialists, especially Kierkegaard, were helpful in that regard.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Gordon. Erik.

Yeah, my name is Eric Zimmer. I'm the host of the One You Feed podcast and a behavior coach. And I'm interested in these topics mainly because they've applied to my own life. You know, I'm a recovering heroin addict. I've dealt with depression. The show talks about a lot of these things. So they're just topics that are kind of close to my heart in my own life and in the lives of lots of people I care about.

Wonderful. Thank you. Scott.

Hi, I'm Scott Stossel. I'm the national editor of The Atlantic magazine, and I'm the author of this book about anxiety, which I wrote— that emanated out of my own lifelong struggle with anxiety personally and my intellectual interest in exploring what the psychological and biological and spiritual and philosophical roots of anxiety are. And in the book, I try to look at anxiety across all those dimensions. But the areas where I'm most familiar with are the medical and the psychological. I'm very interested in the philosophical, but I'm very interested to learn more from you guys who all know more about it than I do.

Wonderful. Thank you. I was reading this morning that in 2018, so less than 2 years ago, more than 300 million individuals of all ages were suffering from depression, and the global anxiety disorder and depression treatment market is forecast to reach $18 billion by 2026. So I'm glad that we're tackling this problem and this topic. Not sure where this discussion is going to go, but why don't we begin to discuss philosophy and depression. So Melissa, after you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do, why don't you also start start the conversation by setting up the context and answering this question: how did the existentialists such as Kierkegaard or Jean-Paul Sartre create philosophies around anxiety, freedom, authenticity, depression, and meaning?

Well, that's a lot. I'm Melissa Viviana, and I actually write philosophy of the mind, so I don't work with pragmatic psychology. I work with abstract psychology, which is my favorite. But like the one you feed, I apply it to myself, and I believe that subjectively we can test out our theories, which is very unlike academia, who says it has to be objective. You have to take yourself out of the picture and have no bias. I put all the bias back in because our minds are completely metaphysical, and the only way to access them is by experiencing ourselves. So I start with— I start all my theories with myself. So existentialism for me is a little bit different than both psychology and philosophy, which is good. It's— I probably could have had a really long career in either philosophy or psychology. I did not know of existentialism when I was in college, so I decided to change my career and be a roadie rogue writer, which I call a beat philosopher. I basically go off script and discuss ideas that people who are academically conformed to rules and regulations that they have to, for example, take bias out of the picture. I don't have to take bias out of the picture. So I'm a rogue philosopher, and that was before I found existentialism. Once I found existentialism, I realized there were many other people in history who had done the same, who had tried to explore introspectively and also, how do you say, objectively subjectively. So in other words, that you would, metacognition, that you would observe yourself, that you would observe your psychology introspectively. So it's kind of existentialism is in between. It's, you know, you are a philosopher, you are taking due diligence to really abstractly understand and break down concepts, but it's so personal, and especially the first existentialists, Kierkegaard and even Dostoevsky, who, for them, it was the fact that we live in a disaster of humanity and can we use this intellectual brain that we have to turn it on itself, to turn on the disaster and try to get some clarity? I was always a little upset with people who had never suffered, people who had never had any disorders, people who had never had any chaos, who would very calmly and stoically talk about chaos and talk about the explanations for chaos.