White's politics...

I've got friends who think sports are stupid. And while I follow basketball pretty closely, most of the time I agree with these friends. Grown men & women who have devoted their lives to the pointless pursuit of "points".

A lot of the time sports men & women are a block of muscly, good-looking chocolates whose advertising is 110% filled with bad cliches about taking things game by game.

But here's the thing: sometimes, every now & then, a sports person comes along who has the capacity & clarity to challenge society in ways politicians & artists cannot.

Sports speaks an almost universal language & it's stars are respected like no other groups of people. They are revered by all classes of society, from higher to lower socio-economic classes (maybe especially lower).

There have been many sports stars who have pushed society to address social issues - from Jesse Owens, to Billie Jean King, to Muhummud Ali, to Cathy Freeman.

Sports men & women have pushed many societal issues forward in amazing ways.

And here's where I'll introduce you to Royce White - perhaps the most important athlete in decades.

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Royce White was recently one of the top players drafted into the NBA. Standing 6"8 with a strong, quick and agile body, he led his college in all major statistical categories (the only player in the country to do so).

And despite all this, halfway through his first NBA season, he has not played a single minute of basketball.

Because White struggles with an anxiety disorder that severely restricts the activities he is able to participate in.

This was not a surprise for his team, which were fully aware of his issues before drafting him, but considered him an acceptable risk, given his talent.

While enduring much criticism (including death threats), White has made it clear that he values his mental health far more than his NBA career, along with the money & status that go along with it.

But here's where it gets really interesting: White thinks his situation is a small part of a much bigger issue, one that questions the very nature of our cultural & economic system.

White's thesis is that our capitalist system views everything by it's economic value first & foremost. This, White believes, has created a mental illness epidemic, where the vast majority of us are living with some form of mental illness.

This is confronting!

It's confronting mostly because when we hear 'mental illness' we still think of multiple personalities, or people hearing voices in their head. We think of 'crazy' people.

But this is the equivalent of saying you only have a physical illness if you've had your head decapitated or an arm severed.

We understand that we can have physical illness' that aren't life threatening, but are still serious & require medical assistance.

And if we look at the levels of addiction in our society (alcohol, marijuana, Facebook/social networking, gambling, mobile phones) and our obsession with escapism (TV, overseas holidays, consumerism, video games), White's claims look less and less radical.

I know I have some weird bits to my personality, and the more I work in schools, listening to the stories of young people, the more I am convinced most of us do.

So maybe, just maybe, Royce White is on to something & there is something fundamentally & dangerously wrong with our society that focus' on economic value over everything else. And maybe, just maybe, this society is creating real mental scars for a lot of us.

How do we fix it?

What is 'it'?

That's for us to work out.


P.S. - here's a recent interview of White from Grantland.com:

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 26 percent of Americans over the age of 18 suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year. I ask White if he thinks that stat carries over into the NBA. This was the subsequent interaction:

Do you believe 26 percent of the league is dealing with a mental illness, or does mental illness prompt those dealing with it to self-select themselves out of the pool? Are you the rare exception who got drafted?

The amount of NBA players with mental health disorders is way over 26 percent. My suggestion would be to ask David Stern how many players in the league he thinks have a marijuana problem. Whatever number he gives you, that's the number with mental illness. A chemical imbalance is a mental illness.

So, wait … if somebody has a drinking problem, is that —

That's a mental illness. A gambling addiction is a mental illness. Addiction is a mental illness.

Well, then what's the lowest level of mental illness? What is the least problematic behavior that still suggests a mental illness?

The reality is that you can't black-and-white it, no matter how much you want to. You have to be OK with it being gray. There is no end or beginning. It's more individualistic. If someone tears a ligament, there is a grade for its severity. But there's no grade with mental illness. It all has to do with the person and their environment and how they are affected by that environment.

OK, I get that. But you classify a gambling addiction as a mental illness. Gambling is incredibly common among hypercompetitive people. The NBA is filled with hypercompetitive people. So wouldn't this mean that —

Here's an even tougher thing that we're just starting to uncover: How many people don't have a mental illness? But that's what we don't want to talk about.

Why wouldn't we want to talk about that?

Because that would mean the majority is mentally ill, and that we should base all our policies around the idea of supporting the mentally ill. Because they're the majority of people. But if we keep thinking of them as a minority, we can say, "You stay over there and deal with your problems over there."

OK, just so I get this right: You're arguing that most Americans have a mental illness.

Exactly. That's definitely correct.

But — if that's true — wouldn't that mean "mental illness" is just a normative condition? That it's just how people are?

That doesn't make it normal. This is based on science. If there was a flu epidemic, and 60 percent of the country had the flu, it wouldn't make it normal … the problem is growing, and it's growing because there's a subtle war — in America, and in the world — between business and health. It's no secret that 2 percent of the human population controls all the wealth and the resources, and the other 98 percent struggle their whole life to try and attain it. Right? And what ends up happening is that the 2 percent leave the 98 percent to struggle and struggle and struggle, and they eventually build up these stresses and conditions.