The Lot[us] club official slogan explains their main goal is to “find people, find peace.” One way this club acts on this goal is through the Lot[us] room — a passion project for the club creators that aim to provide a safe space on campus and foster open community.
The room offers plenty of resources to help students find their peace. My contention is with one aspect of the room that I believe is problematic: the bookshelf.
As an avid reader of critical theory, specifically relating to psychology, medicine, and societal issues, I was interested to see what books the club members thought would best fit their mission.
I was caught off guard by the amount of pseudoscientific pop-psych they had on this shelf, that along with the seemingly out-of-place clinical manuals just didn’t sit right with me.
For the sake of the limited word count, this won’t be a review of all the books. Instead, I’ll focus on three main issues I see: the presence of clinical manuals, the copious amount of pseudoscience, and the problematic authors.
The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, or more commonly referred to as the DSM, provides shared language and diagnostic criteria for mental health professionals. While it’s useful for insurance companies and clinicians, it doesn’t tell undergrad students much about themselves or others.
My main concern is that without the necessary insight into common misunderstandings and logical fallacies that plague our understanding of “mental health,” one can easily fall into a state of hopelessness that comes from thinking one’s suffering is set in stone due to genetics or a chemical imbalance.
In reality, we have far more autonomy to improve our life than what we’ve been led to believe. Thus, I think the clinical manuals have no use, and may even harm students who are trying to understand their suffering, using a framework that they may not fully understand.
Self-help books like ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ and ‘Evolve your Brain: The Science of Changing your Mind’ offer us the enticing notion that our complex behavior and mental suffering can be explained by neuroscience alone. This, however, is far from the truth.
The reductive approach used in these books to understand mental health often over-exaggerates the utility of different neurological tests like the fMRI to decipher our emotions.
We long for a medical stamp of approval for our issues and the authors of these books know that. So huge scientific leaps are made to exploit us at times when we’re most vulnerable.
To most readers, these clear-cut explanations make sense, and the solutions given by these authors (life hacks, worksheets, fasting, life-coaches etc.) are presented as if they will ‘heal’ the suffering we experience due to trauma and hardship — but that’s far from the case.
As for the problematic authors, Jordan Peterson is one that stood out immediately as they had two of his books on the shelf.
Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor and prominent personality within male-focused communities online.
The loose clustering of social media accounts, chatrooms and forums that make up these communities are notorious for being openly misogynistic, racist and xenophobic.
Peterson made a name for himself as one of the main proponents of gender determinism, a theory that seeks to explain (or justify) differences in behavior and values between men and women. This is often used by these men to perpetuate sexist rhetoric and fuel violence against women.
So, in a room created to be a safe space, how did problematic books and authors make it onto the shelf?
