Questions about emotional health

ChatGPT asks, I answer!

Every academic I know is trying to figure out how we can use new AI chat tools in ethical ways for our research. I’ve found Mushtaq Bilal’s work incredibly helpful on the topic. You can follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his newsletter, Keep Writing.

He said in a recent article, “Asking for answers is the wrong approach – you need to ask it to give you questions, so you can create your own answers.”

So I asked ChatGPT to create a list of questions people commonly ask about emotional health. We went back and forth, and I drilled down until they got more specific. I’ve chosen a few of the AI-generated questions about emotional health that I will answer here today.

Let me know if you think the machine got it right. Are these question you have wondered about yourself or have heard others ask about emotional health?

Question 1: What are some signs or symptoms of poor emotional health?

• Lacking emotional granularity: Do you have an extensive vocabulary of emotions, and can you say with specificity what you are feeling in a given moment? Or do you feel frustrated or limited when trying to express your emotions? If you fall back often on “mad,” “sad,” or “I don’t know how I feel, I just don’t feel good,” you might be struggling with poor emotional health. Being able to clearly express your emotions and having the words to do so is one sign of good emotional health.

• Avoiding emotions: Do you pull away from feeling and talking about your emotions? Discomfort with emotions can be a sign of poor emotional health. This can also be a sign that you received bad teaching on emotions when you were growing up. If you were shamed for expressing emotions or told not to trust your emotions, you might avoid them now because of those unhealed wounds or incorrect thoughts.

• Struggling to control emotions: Do your emotions feel wild, unpredictable, and beyond your ability to manage? Do you erupt in anger and immediately act in lashing out at people around you? Do you feel overwhelmed by your emotions, like they are taking over your body? Do you feel like you are drowning in low moods for days at a time? These are probably symptoms of poor emotional health and a lack of emotional regulation skills. They can also be signs of trauma.

Here is an important caveat: if you are relating to these points, it’s possible that you have alexithymia. People with alexithymia have trouble interpreting their interoception - the sense of what is going on inside the body - and making emotional meaning out of those bodily sensations. It seems kind of like color blindness, but for emotions. There is some overlap between alexithymia and neurodivergence, but not all people with ADHD or autism have alexithymia, and in fact, the (wrong) idea that autistic people lack empathy might come from misdiagnosed alexithymia: “emotion-related difficulties are intrinsic to alexithymia, not to autism.” See this article for more on alexithymia.

• image by Joice Kelly on Unsplash

Question 2: How can I determine if my emotional reactions to situations are within the normal range or if they are disproportionate and potentially indicative of a mental health issue?

This is a good follow up to the previous question, because an additional sign of poor emotional health is disproportionate emotional reactions to a situation.

What is actually proportionate for you, and what the people around you think is proportionate, may be two different things. I see this a lot in institutional abuse situations. Someone is being abuse by a church leader, for example, and they are rightly furious about the ongoing mistreatment. Others in the community might tell them their anger is inappropriate or out of line or they are clearly bitter and unforgiving. That assessment from people who benefit from the status quo is not an accurate analysis of the appropriateness of the victim’s anger. Ask yourself who stands to benefit from policing and downplaying your emotions.

This also happens in situations of intimate partner violence. An abuser will push and push and push a victim until they explode, then tell the victim they are overly emotional. Ask yourself if the other person is able to stay unnaturally calm while you blow up — this can be a set-up to make you think *you* are the destructive or unstable one. They can remain calm because they are in control of the whole situation. Other times, they may give a big, angry emotional expression themselves and blame you for it — “Look how angry you made me!” Ask yourself if they are allowed to have big emotions but you are not.

Fear can sometimes be a result of hypervigilance stemming from trauma. Ask yourself if you reaction in the moment is actually based what is happening right now or if it might be coming from a past event your body is remembering. Are you accurately perceiving the current situation? Do you have all the correct information you need about what is going on right now? Has something similar happened in the past about which you might still be carrying fear?

If you are always or almost always sad, and you have low energy, and have lost interest in things you used to enjoy, you might be depressed.

If you are constantly on guard and lack a sense of being settled or calm in your body, you might have an anxiety disorder.

When trying to figure out if your reactions are disproportionate, evaluate your situation, the people around you, your past experiences, and possible mental illness or trauma disorder diagnoses that could match your symptoms. It’s possible that you are right and appropriate in your emotions because you are reacting to a harmful situation. Or you might be having disproportionate reactions to current events or reacting to things in the past that are leaking into your present.

• image by tabitha turner on Unsplash

Question 3: When should I seek professional help for my emotional health?

An excellent follow up on the previous two questions. Once you have identified that you might be struggling with your emotional health, what do you do next? When should you seek professional mental health care?

My most basic answer is: any time you want to.

I think therapy from a licensed counselor is a great idea any time you want it, for any reason.

So there isn’t a point at which I think you need to be struggling enough to seek help. Preventive care is important too.

With that said, if you want to know the point at which you really need a professional mental health care provider, a good indicator is when you are nearing the point that you can no longer cope on your own. You’ve exhausted your own resources and support network. If you feel overwhelmed and unsure what to do to help yourself feel better, seek help from someone who can support you with professional skills and knowledge.

If you are looking for a diagnosis or medication management, you might be able to start with your general practitioner/family doctor/primary care physician. You might also be able to see a nurse practitioner.

I know that therapists have long waiting lists (often 6-8 weeks or more), therapy is expensive and not often covered well by insurance, and some areas of the country are underserved by licensed counselors. If you do want to try to find a therapist, you can start with your insurer to find covered practitioners, or you can start with directories of practitioners. I find Internal Family Systems to be a helpful methodology for dealing with emotional reactivity. You can search for an IFS-trained counselor in the IFS Institute Directory. It can be a hard search to find the right counselor, but it can make a world of difference—the work is worth it. If you feel too overwhelmed to start or manage the search on your own, ask a friend if they will help you or even sit with you while you make phone calls, send emails, do web searches, or fill out intake forms.

• image by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

Next week I will answer more AI-generated questions.

What other questions would you like me to answer about emotional health? Leave a comment!

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