Panic and Its Impact on Mental Health

May I suggest that suicide is a reaction to panic? When students are paralyzed by contradiction, the resulting panic is quite literally diabolical, and not everyone knows how to resolve contradiction without leaving the situation entirely by drugs or suicide.

Families and other institutions can be self-contradictory as well as contradicting each other, but what is far worse is that surrendering the power of agency to some external institution deprives the individual of every power except the power to quit. A healthier course is to build a strong, alert self that can resolve its contradictions.

The history of philosophy since Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato, all the way up to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, has been a quest to relate the routine level of thinking that does our work quickly, and the reflective level of thinking that decides what work we will do, and in what order, resolves contradictions, and creates new routines as necessary.

I speak from personal experience. Once, a Princeton dean invited me into his office without an appointment but blamed me for not having made an appointment. I panicked, and the only choice I could think of was to leave so I quit Princeton. His response was to assure me he’d take care of the paperwork.