Mettle
In the film Network the character played by Ned Beatty, a truly terrifying capitalist superman called Arthur Jensen, delivers a monologue to a traumatised and possibly psychotic ex-TV-news anchorman, played by Peter Finch. The monologue concludes with a vision – utopian or dystopian depending on your political persuasion perhaps – of ‘One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.’
One part of this vision – of tranquilising anxieties – seems to be materialising in the form of a men’s wellness app (the prose style of contemporary culture is, perhaps, an indicative eyesore). ‘Mettle’ has been launched by Alex George – the UK’s Youth Mental Health Ambassador, who is a medical Doctor and a former contestant on Love Island – and the ‘adventurer’ Bear Grylls, though it appears to be the brainchild of one Neil Smith, a ‘creative’ whose most significant other invention was a reality TV show called Snowflake Mountain.
Mettle is a fascinating name for this product. The word is an Elizabethan variant spelling of metal. Both forms of the word were used interchangeably by Shakespeare in the literal sense and in the figurative one which meant something like ardent masculine temperament, spirit and courage, because of metal’s association with armour. The psychological resilience thus conjured is martial. It is difficult to imagine a less felicitous image of mental health. Men are being encouraged to prepare for battle, to encase themselves, to make themselves impregnable. The danger of male self-help culture is always how it can reinforce those curiously masculine psychological defences of individualism, autonomy, and self-reliance and make what men genuinely need – interpersonal connection, collaboration, and vulnerability – that much harder to achieve.
I quote now from a piece of journalism from the ‘Tech’ magazine T3 that more than usually seems merely to reproduce a press release:
The app is personalised for each user and includes gamification elements to encourage habitual use, improving the user’s mental fitness over time. Upon downloading the app, users take an initial assessment that determines their mental fitness score out of 100. This is calculated across five categories including ‘Rested’, ‘Calm’, ‘Thriving’, ‘Happy’, and ‘Strong’, with Mettle then tailoring a mental fitness plan designed to help users address any issues highlighted in the initial assessment. Alongside this, the ‘Mettle Bot’, an AI chatbot within the app, asks users how they feel each day and makes unique recommendations on what they could be doing to help with their mental fitness.
The analogy of mental health with ‘fitness’ misunderstands psychological pain, grasps it as the malfunctioning of a potentially well-functioning machine; our symptoms and struggles are meaningful, not the misfiring of an engine, or the result of some mental unfitness. The idea of ‘gamification’ is truly terrifying. Behavioural models of psychology have got out of hand here; trying to improve our mental fitness score absurdly quantifies what is a qualitative experience. The final dystopian note is the ‘Mettle bot’, algorithmically assessing our mental state and giving us machine-learnt answers for our existential problems.
This leads me to my final point. As Freud puts it, our depressive states are the experience of ‘the shadow of the object’ falling over us, intimidating and chilling us in equal measure. The antidote is real relating – what Winnicott called ‘The Use of an Object’. Such use includes the inevitable failures of relating we must encounter with other real people.
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