Everything about the country we lived in in the last quarter century was actually a very convenient ground for us to "go crazy". We have been exposed to countless social ruptures, traumatic social events and dozens of situations that directly affect our daily lives.
Our sense of security has decreased, our basic beliefs about life, people and society have collapsed, and we have been left alone with life events that are difficult to cope with over and over again. Among these events, there are explosions that turn into massacres, stories of harassment, rape and murder, marginalizations that turn into psychological violence, "coups" and massacres of justice. While all this was happening, one of the most common beliefs was that we were "going crazy" as a society. Because we were being carried to hospitals and medical centers in droves and receiving boxes of antidepressants. Individual insanities, suicides and even chilling deformations such as the "Palu Family" were revealed one by one. There is some truth to the belief that we are indeed going crazy. If we had long-term follow-up studies investigating mental health problems at the societal level for the last decades (and they are being conducted), we could discuss objective evidence of the deterioration in our mental health. However, in this article, I will try to explain not how we went crazy, but how we did not go crazy despite all these social events. If anyone asks how I came to the conclusion that we are not going crazy, my reference is the healthy reflexes that society can already provide at the level of individuals or groups. The emergence of a Gezi Resistance in a completely sick society, a social response to the injustice in the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Presidential elections that will make a difference of hundreds of thousands of people, determined and supportive processes of relatively small but effective groups such as non-governmental organizations, such as the case regarding the Academics for Peace, etc. Even though all of the examples I have given are on different planes, they all express "aliveness" in common. Unfortunately, this spiritual/social vitality does not reflect the general society. In most cases, there is a mood of despair, abandonment, and a feeling of being sprinkled with dead soil. But at this point, I want to focus on the parts of us that survive, remain alive and vibrant, show stability, persevere and resist. How did we not go crazy?
There is a healthy need for human beings to maintain their existence and unity at the individual level. It needs selfhood. Traumatic experiences, negative life events, and stresses can traumatize us and even lead to fractures at a certain point. However, although not from birth, human beings gain equipment to cope with the conditions they experience during their development. Our reactions to the events we experience are largely shaped by the mother/caregiver. Essentially, not all of our coping mechanisms are effective mechanisms that develop consciously and progressively. Our defense mechanisms, which we use in the Freudian sense, are often far from the conscious level, involuntary and aimed entirely at preserving the state of balance the individual is in. The defense mechanisms proposed by Sigmund Freud and later tried to be classified by his daughter Anna Freud have been valid for a century. However, the international psychology community is just beginning to include defense mechanisms in fields such as personality psychology and social psychology. In summary, these studies say that we are not just creatures that cope with life in a conscious and controlled way. Denial, repression, reflection, counter-reaction, sublimation, regression, rationalization, displacement, etc. put forward by Freud. It's not just the mechanisms we use to deal with problems at the individual level. When an ego-threatening event occurs in a social sense, defense mechanisms come into play. For example, this week, during the commemoration of the July 2 Sivas Massacre, our quarter-century-old wound bled again. It is said that our hearts would dry up if we forget, but this incident was never forgotten by many people in the country and it always fed the rebellion from within. So, it is not possible to say that it is "repressed", at least for one group. "Denial" came into play for those who sided with those who created the massacre and did not provide justice for this massacre. In fact, the biggest building block of this country's bloody history is the "denial" mechanism. Sometimes we naively ask how these people can lay their heads on the bed and sleep. Although on a very different level, there was denial by the "powers that be" in the reactions of the families of the victims of the Çorlu Train Accident, whose case was heard this week. Maybe we can say that we suffer so much because we cannot deny it. But we know that the denial mechanism is combined with repression. These are the most primitive mechanisms in the hierarchical sense. You hide, suppress, divide and multiply what you think you cannot handle. What takes a higher level of ego strength is to identify it, accept it, and see what you can do with that pain. In fact, parallel to the Gezi Resistance and technological developments, as social media became more involved in our lives, "sublimation", which we can say is the least burdensome of the defense mechanisms we mentioned, came into play. We tried to overcome the social pain that we could not understand with humor and art. Even though I think that this use of humor can sometimes become vulgar and turn into a kind of "regression" mechanism, when I look at it in general, I see that it works. Another person may say whether there is humor or art left in the country, we are surrounded on all fronts. It is impossible for me to disagree with this. But the important point is this; The oppression, injustice, plunder and cruelty we live in necessitates a transformation. We must be able to move from what we are to a different emotional state than what we perceive. Humor and art provide this for now. We can hold on to these until we develop more conscious, more controlled, more free will coping methods - which I think there is still time for this.
I have been watching dear Zeynep Altıok and Eren Aysan for years. I constantly try to empathize and understand their feelings, just like I do to all the victims in society, their relatives and Oğuz Arda Sel's mother. When you empathize with such a person, it is very easy to not be able to bear the inner pain you experience and to activate the suppression or denial mechanism. I often hear people say, "I can't look at it, I just turn it off and run away." Be sure that this defense mechanism does not free you from mental distress. All the traumas we experience as a society are recorded in social memory, even if unintentionally. It appears somewhere in our lives as an anxiety of unknown origin. We need to confront, we need to understand, we need to stand up and produce. We were able to stay without going crazy to the extent that we could do these.
Years ago, I listened to someone talk about "post-traumatic growth" at a psychology congress and I was very surprised. Over the past 20 years, I have witnessed countless examples of this both socially and clinically. As the cliché goes, what doesn't kill us can make us stronger. It works. You may ask, do you see the last castle in the middle of a wreck (do you see the survivors among all those who went crazy), yes, I think it is like that. Because every struggle towards goodness, justice, peace, vitality and health starts from a single strong castle.
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