Smaller but angrier

Sunday’s anticorruption rallies were smaller than the earlier ones, but I sensed they were angrier, especially among younger rallyists.

I worry, though, that the anger is attached to growing fatigue, perhaps even a sense of futility. And it’s not just a matter of old scripts or old stories.

I felt that, having to attend two academic gatherings at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. The first was a celebration of the psychology department’s milestones, including transformative developments, changes in theoretical perspectives (for example, the emergence of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, shifting from Western psychology to more Philippine-based perspectives), as well as responses to the urgent needs of the times, especially among young people. Yes, suicide came up repeatedly.

It was good seeing new, young faces, from different schools and not just UP.

We’ve also veered away from normative definitions of psychology, definitely away from “normal” and “abnormal” psychology. There’s more interest in looking at how psychology fits into people’s everyday lives and relationships.

I was encouraged by the growth of applied psychology, for example, in guidance counseling. There is also greater caution in creating pathological labels, which ends up stigmatizing people who pursue studies in psychology. How often have we heard people claiming that people who take psychology as a degree program are “abnormal,” while trying to understand their own condition!

At the back of my mind, I was thinking of another academic meeting I had scheduled today, and I found myself more grounded, more helpful.

Most concretely, I was feeling good about how UP Diliman has developed more concrete programs around clinical psychology. More and more faculty and administrators have been asking for additional psychological services for their schools, especially students, and there have been concrete results that are helpful for students, as well as for faculty and staff.

The progress here has been more dramatic in the last 15 years or so as schools finally noticed the rise in depression and anxiety rates, self-harm, and attempted suicides, as well as violence among students.

Developing appropriate programs has not been easy, mainly because administrators were not convinced that there was a growing problem. The most common response was that the youth today are “weak” students and need to “be strong.”

Other responses from health professionals were that the seriousness of mental health problems had been exaggerated, especially with the “advances” of medicine today, including new drugs. Yet, the so-called medical advances in psychiatry have been in the definitions of these problems and in the understanding of the dynamics of mental health. If anything, the advances were showing the complexities and how, in fact, medicines were making it more difficult to treat mental health problems on their own.

Yesterday, as I wrote this, I woke up trying to finish my drafts for my presentation and figured, in a strange way, that we were probably forgetting an example of the complexity of young people’s mental health.

I felt the growing rage of young people, especially when I thought of a young UP student, Carl Francis Arnaiz, a bright student who finished in schools, including Makati Science High School, and got into UP Diliman, majoring in interior design at the college of home economics. But he had to go on leave from UP because of depression issues.

His mother was working overseas and assured him he could take a leave and then return to his studies when he felt ready. He made it clear that he would return to college only if UP would take him again.

But he and a friend, Kian delos Santos, aged 17, disappeared one night in August 2017. Carl was killed shortly after, the police claiming Carl had tried to hold up a taxi driver. The driver later recanted. Kian’s corpse was found shortly after, in a river, with 25 stab wounds.

The public, including the Catholic religious community, protested the killings.

It took eight years before police investigations resulted in the arrest of policemen and their conviction for the deaths.

Carl’s case haunted me many times, mainly because he had dropped out of UP at a time when we were just starting a Psychserve program. Psych professor Dr. Violeta V. Bautista was steadfast in getting other psychologists in UP to get an office set up to handle psychological problems, which are now in place, but remain terribly understaffed. Yet, the cases of young students in 2017 show how a little more effort and more resources could have made a difference in the lives of Carl, Kian, and other young Filipino students.

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michael.tan@inquirer.net