The dark side of a left-brained culture?
It’s been quite the week of gossip and spectacle for us living here in San Francisco. There’s been Gavin Newsom, Queen Mary 2, and Gavin Newsom again. Not much more to say about these than what’s already been said (my reactions were, “What the hell was he thinking?”, “Whoa, that’s a really HUGE ship!”, and “Ah, so that sort of explains why he wasn’t thinking. I hope he gets the help he needs.”
But astronaut Lisa Nowak just did Gavin Newsom a big favor by doing something even more bizarre and of even greater national—nay, international—newsworthiness. After all, Newsom may be the mayor of a major American city*, but being an American astronaut carries global cultural cachet. Astronauts are international cultural icons. We all read or saw The Right Stuff. American astronauts were first to land on the moon. Astronauts Sally Ride and Judith Resnik inspired me during my formative geek years as the first and second American women to go into space.
And just as the space program captured the imaginations of people of my generation when we were younger, back when landing on the moon wasn’t a memory enshrouded in the mists of time and before space shuttles blew up, astronauts still have this lingering mystique. That mission to Mars that Bush announced three years ago may or may not ever happen—we’ve got some problems to sort out in Iraq first—but astronauts still represent something cool and futuristic.
And the popular image is of astronauts as being these people who are completely in control, because they need to be prepared for every contingency. If something goes wrong in flight, they should be able to respond to it effectively and without panic. Which is what makes Lisa Nowak’s passion-driven actions all the more perplexing—and fascinating.
I mean, here is a highly accomplished woman who’s got a career to be proud of—admitted to the United States Naval Academy, advanced degrees in engineering, astronaut who completed a space shuttle mission—and she snapped. This article indicates that all may not have been well with her marriage, which could have been part of why her feelings for the pilot she trained with had grown so strong.
I’m wondering whether she had access to talk with a therapist about these things, or whether that’s just not something that people in the NASA culture do, or after years of being in that culture it wouldn’t have occurred to her to even try to process these feelings and channel them in a more productive way before it got to this point. I mean, in the aftermath of both of the space shuttle accidents it became clear that there is a groupthink dynamic there that can lead to overlooking problems until things literally explode. (And this doesn’t just happen at NASA, of course—it also can happen in the White House or Enron or many other institutions.) I wonder if the very left-brained, analytical, rational sort of work done at NASA begets an institutional culture in which introspection is given a lesser value.
Lisa Nowak is no Andrea Yates, but Yates was certainly a victim of the lack of empathy of her then-husband—a NASA employee—for her depression. And at a place where the success or failure of a mission hinges upon cold calculations, I would think that the tendency would be to value the hard rational skills over the softer, human-centered skills. And in many places, admitting to needing some psychological help can threaten your career. But we really need to keep on destigmatizing this: you don’t have to be mentally ill to get therapy; therapy helped me get through graduate school.
I don’t know if not getting the therapy she needed was Lisa Nowak’s problem. I can definitely sympathize with feeling emotional in a culture that minimizes it, though. I hope she gets the help she needs. And maybe Gavin Newsom’s openness about confronting his personal problems might encourage others to seek out help rather than letting their emotional problems fester until they explode.
*Hey, SF is the fourth largest city in California, after all! That counts for something, doesn’t it?
February 6th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Well, I know in the military technical area there’s a push from above to get people who need help to actually SEEK it (to the point of renaming Mental Health to Life Skills so there was less of a stigma), but the problem isn’t a matter of “I don’t need help” so much as “If I see a psychologist, it’ll hurt my career.” People thought they would lose their security clearances. (its unfounded, but it used to happen and people do not like to jeopardize their jobs).
Since this lady wanted to go back to space, maybe she feared seeing a therapist because any mental health problems could prevent a second trip. Not because of a cultural pressure, so much as a legitimate concern as astronauts have to be cleared with psychological tests.