All Crisis, All the Time

Americans are overreacting to events: to the "Great Depression" of 2009, to the increasing numbers of young people with Attention Deficit Disorder, to the histrionic fantasy that climate change will become global boiling. None of these issues is without substance, and none of them should be ignored; but in one way or another, we are overreacting by turning each of them into a crisis.

We seem to have fallen in love with crises, and the more crises we find the more animated we seem to be. We are immersed in a Crisis of Crises, replete with illogic, a surfeit of emotion, and strings of events vying for crisis status.

"Crisis," literally, means separation, and involves a break with the past by supplanting the existing order with a new one. Tectonic departures from precedent such as the transition from B.C. to A.D., from the ancien régime to the French Republic, from the Romanovs to the Bolsheviks, were set off by crises. Both the Russian and French revolutions included a change in their calendars. Illegal immigration, farm "crises," daily energy "crises," credit card "crises," E. coli contamination "crises," and education "crises" express substantive concerns, but they are not and never were crises in the strict sense of the term.

So what is overreaction? Simply put, overreaction is characterized by its reliance on emotion, its episodic time frame and, ultimately, its retreat from reality. Take the worldwide swine flu pandemic. No doubt, researchers have locked onto a serious health threat that will require a forceful response-immunization, rapid diagnosis, public health precautions, and ongoing research. An important moderating factor is the high probability that anyone who was infected with the virus between 1946 and 1953 is likely to be immune to the disease.

But the public has responded with less moderate emotions, donning surgical masks, avoiding crowds, and gulping down "immune-boosting" pills. No doubt, swine flu infection is a real phenomenon, and a scary one which, by dint of a single mutation, could cast a giant shadow across the American continent. But when we look at the facts we find both our feet on the ground. H1N1, as infectious disease specialists call it, is closely related to influenza virus A, which brings the flu each winter. The most recent attack, one that was carefully studied, took place in Mexico in late April, and the death rate was calculated at 0.6 percent.

Admittedly, H1N1 has hogged the airways because it is the same virus that caused the Spanish Influenza of 1918 and killed 50-100 million people worldwide. But the reaction to the news about H1N1 has been nearly hysterical, not by researchers who calmly poke their noses into high-risk settings but by ordinary people who imagine large-scale scenarios of death and dying. Given the changes in our ability to launch an antiviral "war" we should regard this disease as a serious problem-and one for which we have a coordinated repertoire of responses. A serious problem, Yes; a crisis, No.

A captivating example of overreaction involves the volatile responses to a 1998 article in Lancet, which described an alleged new disorder called autistic enterocolitis. The authors stated unequivocally that they had not established a connection between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and this new condition. But at a post-publication press conference, one of the authors surprised his coauthors and recommended that children should have the opportunity to receive the vaccines separately, with a year between doses. Though the article itself had not made a splash, this single remark ignited a furious reaction that caught the imagination of the media. The result was a decrease in the number of children whose parents approved of the vaccine, a decrease that produced a real threat of an outbreak of measles-and all because of the overreaction of the press and public to one stray remark from one coauthor that was disavowed by his colleagues.

In the firefight that followed that single comment, the debate on the subject turned into a "crisis," and collective emotions crowded out potential candidates for the cause of autism. Researchers seek to provide premises that are true, and the combination of logic and fact is at the heart of science. Denying the value of either is what overreaction is about. But by avoiding reality, some parents ignored the ordinary standards of evidence, and crazy ideas flourished.

Overreaction points to mythical thinking, a way of embodying our emotions and impulses in tales of our fears, vulnerabilities, and guilt in strange, often colorful, stories. We dread our powerlessness and concoct magical cures for our weakness. Such thinking is regressive. That myths are the outcome of the flight from reality, that we hop from one myth to the other and supplant reason with emotion, tells us that we have regressed. We've chosen ways of thinking found in children, tribal cultures, and dreams.

There is a moral dimension to all this. We are not children anymore. We are not mere mythmakers. We know fairy tales don't solve the problems that plague us. We have a choice between thinking in Dr. Seuss terms, and in reflective adult ways. When we don't acknowledge this internal dichotomy, we are acting in bad faith.

A troubling side to this collective self-deception-the detachment of people from themselves-is what we call alienation. In order to construct myths that replace reality, we deny not merely the world beyond ourselves, but the world within. To varying extents, we have to distance ourselves from our own identity, from the knowledge of who we are, what we want, and how we want to live. That many Americans have fled from themselves seems self-evident, given their total immersion in diversionary activities, in multiple iterations of ESPN or the Internet, in their surrender to the panoply of forces that have usurped their privacy and in their vague displeasure that things are not going their way.

What is the difference between reaction and overreaction? At the simplest level, a reaction to a real event means responding in a realistic way-taking facts into account, avoiding fairy tales, and being logical. People who act in their own best interest assess things realistically. They don't use mythical ideas; they don't reason with their emotions; they don't hop from one crisis to another.

In the case of overreaction, just the opposite applies. The hyperemotionality attached to the mythical imagination eclipses logical reflection, while the serial, episodic nature of excess emotion moves on to new pastures with strange regularity. Overreaction, by definition, ignores reality-even though reality is the provenance of the challenging event. Instead of realism, it withdraws into a private, subjective realm of dreamy thought, lacking logical structure and ignoring the facts of the case.

In increasing numbers, we are choosing our own interiors over the real world in which we live.

Irwin Savodnik is a psychiatrist at UCLA.