Searching for Extreme Weather and the Ambiguities of Diagnosis (article)

Any time a natural disaster is approaching or extreme weather is looming, the media likes to find and film individuals who are out surfing amidst the high waves, riding their bikes below falling trees, or just generally flaunting all of the safety warnings made by public officials to evacuate the area or seek shelter. Individuals actively seeking to participate in extreme weather conditions are labeled as irresponsible, which they certainly are, because emergency personnel will quite likely be forced to risk their lives in heroic rescue efforts. Given the risky behavior of adventure seekers, one might argue that these individuals have very limited ability to govern their own impulses and are, thus, mentally ill.

Media commentators do make this argument on a regular basis, even if they are meteorologists or anchorpersons who have no psychological training. The commentators never, to my knowledge, seek to obtain or are able to obtain interviews with the individuals who are out braving Mother Nature. Nevertheless, this does not stop the commentators from offering their own armchair diagnosis. During Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, and several other major natural disasters, I watched meteorologists and anchorpersons show film of individuals flaunting Mother Nature and the first thing these media professionals said was: “This person is clearly mentally ill and also has no respect for government warnings.” On other occasions, the meteorologist or anchorperson used the example of the storm chaser as a kind of joke to kick off the broadcast,

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first by showing a clip and then saying: “Well folks, I know most of you sane individuals have already left this area, but look at this deranged individual flaunting government warnings and hang gliding into the hurricane!”

In this essay, I do not argue with the position that in certain cases these individuals might be suffering from mental illness. However, while those actively searching for perilous, life-threatening, extreme weather conditions may be diagnosable, I propose that these individuals are actively investing themselves in what they perceive to be a real, non-cyber experience that is difficult to find in our contemporary society. Their active craving to participate in a natural disaster plausibly expresses a desire to be a part of reality, which is also one of the goals of psychotherapy. This article calls into question the vague diagnostic comments made by media commentators on MSNBC and The Weather Channel during Hurricane Sandy that such risk seekers are all, unquestionably, mentally ill. During these live broadcasts, viewers were subject to the government’s warnings to seek shelter and then were shown footage of individuals riding jet skis through the waves as an example of what not to do, and commentators took this opportunity to engage in making armchair diagnoses by attributing this behavior to mental illness. I argue that while these individuals are absolutely making socially irresponsible choices that may be indicative of a mental illness, the choice may also fulfill their desire to participate in a major reality.

Such risk-seeking behavior has undoubtedly existed in the past, but its popularity today is noteworthy for the fact that we can predict future weather patterns with near precision. This makes the risk-seeking behavior appear as a suicide mission, but my essay will show that there may be a great deal more at work in this behavior—namely, that these risk seekers may be engaged in a dramatic attempt to feel more alive. In order to marshal this argument, I will use the psychoanalytic concept of resistance as well as describe this behavior as a form of social protest.

Resistance

With respect to most important matters in human life, there is a tension involved between competing personal motives. This is noteworthy because when and where we see one strong tendency

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(such as a seemingly suicidal tendency), we may suppose a competing tendency (such as an attempt to restore one’s life or to change society’s perception) to be present as well, though perhaps not immediately apparent. Resistance to society’s norms of mental health, as portrayed by the media, may in fact signal resources within the resister that are strongly allied with the purposes of improved mental health. This is an argument made by many scholars regarding famous rebels such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others advocating non-violent resistance or civil disobedience. In the setting of psychotherapy, resistance is similarly viewed as a moment of important arousal and encounter. The resistance in psychotherapy must make some skillful use of some fragment of reality.

Risk seekers hunting down tornadoes and other storms may be engaged in an act of such resistance and ambivalence. Even as they are risking their lives, they are engaged in resisting the tendency of our modern societies to create artificial environments. We seek these disembodying experiences, such as surfing the Internet and perusing at a shopping mall, as part of an elaborate attempt to deny our physical location and our embodied experience.

Extreme weather is especially seductive for individuals who recognize this on some conscious or unconscious level. A storm provides a sense of reality, location, and a sense of the limitations of human will and human power. In this experience of direct and extreme weather, the individual can find a sense of finitude and selfhood. While this is often socially costly for rescuers and taxpayers, it is judged to be worth the risks by individuals seeking an intense experience of self-affirmation.

Social Protest

Since these individuals are engaged in protesting society’s inability to provide them with enough experience of selfhood, and because this risky behavior is so costly, I view this behavior as a kind of social protest. Also, because the poor are already provided with ample opportunities for the experience of reality, economically comfortable, even wealthy individuals may take part in much of this risk seeking behavior. These are individuals with a lot of spare time, or perhaps they work at a computer all day. They seek a thrilling experience and are also largely unaware of the social costs, so they are in all likelihood lonely and isolated individuals with suf-

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ficient, possibly exceptional, financial wealth. This is also consistent with the images we see in the media of individuals riding motorboats into Hurricane Sandy or hang gliding into a tornado—it takes a lot of money to defy the force of Mother Nature in such a dramatic fashion. As mentioned previously, on the broadcasts of Hurricane Sandy on major networks such as MSNBC and The Weather Channel, viewers were shown such images of lavish boats, yachts, and jet skis being used off the coast of New Jersey in order to ride into the heart of the storm. While there were certainly poorer individuals who also disobeyed the government’s warnings and never evacuated, the news networks were fascinated by the way some wealthier individuals were flaunting their disobedience.

Conclusion

I do not argue with media spokespersons or other experts who label these risk seekers as potentially mentally ill; however, such a diagnosis should be contrasted with the most basic insights of the psychotherapeutic process that indicate these individuals may be acting out a life-affirming impulse in the face of feeling deadened in our modern society. Their behavior is socially irresponsible, even as it may also be a dramatic attempt to recover a sense of selfhood. For these reasons and those mentioned above, I have labeled the behavior of these risk seekers as a form of resistance and social protest against disembodying experiences.

The fascination or ambivalence the media commentators have for these storm chasers functions to confirm my argument. By using footage of the storm chaser as an anecdote, punch line or joke to open up their broadcast time and time again, these commentators reveal some degree of envy or jealousy for the storm chaser’s ability to experience Mother Nature in such a firsthand way, though also to show their disdain for such socially irresponsible behavior. Like the storm chaser, the media commentator may long for the embodied experience that is so hard to find in contemporary life, yet at the same time revels in the casual armchair diagnosis they are allowed to make because it kicks off their broadcast by contrasting the supposedly insane (the storm chaser) with the sane (the media commentator issuing the warnings, weather predictions, societal consequences, etc). In fact, scholars of psychology and culture ought to question such comments not only because they come from

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an unqualified source but also because such language can reveal the way power is constructed in our society.

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