Boiling Frogs in an Ice-Cold Climate and Elsewhere

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

You may recall the legendary frog fable experiment. Throw a frog into a vat of boiling water and it will jump right out. But if you throw it into gradually warming water until it boils, the frog will stay put, first luxuriating in the warmth, then slowly but surely start drifting off, unable to jump out even if it finally recognizes the insidious danger, boiling to death. What seems missing in this fable is whether whoever put the frog into the slowly heating water intervenes to save the frog, or whether anybody does.

Perhaps we are experiencing this process in our country and world. Take climate change. I have written and spoken about its dangers for 18 years, comparing it with the frog experiment. Our planet warms gradually until it becomes worrisomely destructive and deadly, as it has. That we are going through an unusual freezing spell in much of the United States right now does not belie the trend, just provides an unwanted respite, but also the instability from the overall warming that should be part of our expectations.

Water itself can gradually become in short supply from overuse. Now, scientists of the United Nations university proclaim the beginning of water bankruptcy. That water crisis can also threaten the frogs that live in the life-giving water, let alone people’s water bill.

Or take immigration. It was stop and start at our Southern border until President Trump seemingly cut it off completely. Next came ICE and its increasingly aggressive round-up of designated immigrants and more. I suppose that process was even extended to international aggression with minimal internal effective opposition. You can find more examples from the first year of our new federal administration.

It can—and does—happen with undue mental distress too. Minor trauma at medical workplaces can accumulate until the threshold for an epidemic of physician burnout is reached. The same process holds true for our rising moral injuries. Full-blown psychiatric disorders can also develop slowly and increasingly, almost unrecognizable as it heats up.

As mental health is part of overall health, major changes in health resources will likely be harmful to mental health. That is likely to be the case to some extent after the United States just pulled out of the World Health Organization.

Whether out of fear, complacency, or societal normalization, this sort of gradually increasing detrimental processes is relatively easy to ignore, unlike the exponential development of artificial intelligence or acute psychosis.

What to do to stop such processes? Catch them early. Prevent them in the first place. Don’t just give up because it seems too late. Effective pushback without humiliating the opponent sometimes works.

Primary care physicians and loved ones can do much to monitor and advise intervention. Most all mental disorders and societal psychopathologies are easier treated sooner rather than later. One example of effective advocacy was the recent rapid reversal of the federal cuts to mental health and addiction grants after strong backlash from both political parties and public advocacy groups.

Collective upstander responses can work to reverse new politics and procedures, just like early psychiatric intervention can present more ongoing and entrenched mental deterioration.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.