Your Positivity Is Killing People; Raise Mental Health Awareness in Frum(Religious Orthodox) Circles

As a frum Jew, everything has to be positive and meaningful. Your washing dishes is making worlds of deep meaning, so is your washing laundry, your 9 to 5 job, your driving down the freeway, and your suffering. If you're not feeling positive in every moment, you are told that you lack emunah(faith that God controls everything and that all your actions matter) and your hashgafa(viewpoint of the world) is influenced by goyish(non-Jewish) bad outside influences.

The answer to someone with mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and just about any mental health issue for men in the Yeshivish community is "Learn More Torah". Torah is told to be the answer to just about everything. I recall a story of a friend who told me he was laying in bed sick and people who are not his roommates came into his room and tried to pull him out of bed and told him he was being lazy and not learning Torah. Those people are living in a zealous fake reality and are doing harm by making someone feel bad for something they can not control and denying their pain. Another friend told me that he told his Rabbi that he is depressed and in therapy. His Rabbi told him that he should feel good from all the Torah he is learning and how there is no reason to be depressed in his current state being in Yeshiva. The thing is, it was his childhood that had him depressed for years and nothing to do with Torah. Sometimes you need to go to your dorm and cry, and that is ok.

There is this unspoken inherent belief in Frum communities that if you just focus more and more on the positive, the negative will disappear. This lacks a basic understanding of human psychology and is very harmful. Focusing more on positive happy things is better than focusing on negatives or just being indifferent to life as a general attitude. The problem is that negative experiences shape us much more as people than the positive experiences. Positivity does not overshadow the negativity when negativity is all-pervading. If people could automatically control their fight or flight response they wouldn't be anxious or depressed. People need to work through their problems, feel pain, feel grief, and sadness. The way we look at our suffering is deeply important because everyone suffers. You can either become nihilistic, angry, and depressed about our suffering or choose to see that the only way is forward. It is ok to not feel happy and to feel a certain way and that the future holds more in store than what appears to be unbearable suffering now.

"Gam Zu La Tov"(the mentality that this too is for the good) should not be seen as an all encompassing principle that means "Be happy, stop feeling bad". It should mean "Try to be positive in your life perspective because it will help you live your life and perceive things as less painful". The latter just leads to a repression of negative emotions that build up like junk in a drawer that will one day overflow. Torah is not always the answer, just like Torah is not the answer to food, exercising, and sleep.

If there is any "Goyish" influence of the time from secular society, it would be exactly how "try to remain positive and happy" is interpreted. The better off materially and mentally people are with regards to how they feel about their physical condition, the more entitled people are to feel good all the time. If you want food, you can order it Kosher to your house in 10 minutes from the comfort of your bed, if you feel sad you can go to a simcha(celebration) and eat and dance your heart away, if you feel angry you can take something to lower your blood pressure. Feeling happy all the time at the fact of what God has given you is a very high level of belief that most people are not on. Most people have some unresolved issues and everyone has difficulties in life that are painful and a struggle to deal with which inevitably cause one to feel things other than happy and positive. The thing that is most important is how you view those non-positive emotions and how it fits in with how you see the world. No one should be guilted for feeling bad or told that they are not having enough emunah(faith). Understand that people are human and by telling them that they are not on the highest level and they just need to try harder, you are undermining their pain and their experience. As I interpret Mark Manson, you are unfairly subscribing someone to the cycle of hell that is negativity. You will make people feel bad about not being the best and make them less likely to achieve the goal.