Is It Really Okay to Not Be Okay?

Enough already with the self-improvement advice about how to find happiness, valid as some of it may be. How about considering the popular Netflix drama series from South Korea, titled It’s Okay to Not Be Okay. The website IMDb describes it this way (spoiler alert, and some scenes can be disturbing):

A story about a man employed in a psychiatric ward and a woman who is a popular writer of children's books. The drama tells the story of Moon Gang Tae, a community health worker at a psychiatric ward…and Ko Moon Young, a successful children’s book author with antisocial behavior...After meeting one another, the two slowly begin to heal each other’s emotional wounds.

Well, they do find healing, according to reviewers, but in the process, we meet people surviving a turbulent childhood, autism spectrum disorder, traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, alcoholism, and dementia. But we already know many examples from real life of people who have struggled with mental health. Consider well-known people such as:

• Winston Churchill, who suffered periods of what he called “the black dog” of depression, alternating with times of high energy and confidence, and who rose to be England's prime minister, leading the fight to save the civilized world.
• Abraham Lincoln, whose presidency preserved the United States in spite of neglect in childhood, a somber temperament, and likely depressive symptoms.
• John F. Kennedy, surreptitiously receiving daily doses of steroids and stimulants to counteract an otherwise debilitating case of autoimmune disease, Addison’s disease, and back pain.
• Prince Harry, now talking about his mental health issues after the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and his marriage to Meghan Markle.
• Several icons of technology have the social awkwardness often associated with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder, previously known as Asperger’s — Elon Musk, for example, has stated that he does. Simon Baron-Cohen of Oxford University finds a high concentration of this problem in the denizens of Silicon Valley and the MIT tech corridor.

The list could go on. Of course, these examples include those born into privileged positions, which limits their relevance to most people. And harming others or committing evil actions are not okay.

Authentic responses to challenging situations

Such examples, however, illustrate the limits of elevating happiness to an impossible ideal. They also might remind us of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, as described by Stephen Hayes, in which an early step is to accept things one cannot control and then commit oneself to working to further one’s values.

“It really is OKAY to not be okay,” wrote Vasundhara Sawhney in the Harvard Business Review (2020), recalling his already stressful time during the pandemic when he learned that both his parents had COVID-19. He found it helped when he found not only the drama series discussed above, but also when he found Jaime Zuckerman, a licensed clinical psychologist and cognitive behavior therapist, who criticized false—or what she calls toxic—positivity. "We cannot simply pick the emotions we want to have. It just does not work that way," she told the Harvard Business Review. Sawhney continued:

So feeling sad and scared about my parents after they contracted Covid was normal. [...] When we think we might lose something we care about, that’s sad. When we don’t know what to expect next, that’s scary. We should let ourselves, and other people in our lives, feel these things as they come up — which may be more than usual right now.

Is there a take-home message? Positive and encouraging words are fine, but there is a place and time for accepting imperfect situations and feelings, improving them when possible, but in the meantime not having unrealistic expectations for everyone to be perfectly okay.

Copyright (2021) by Robert A. Lavine