Lamenting the losses in life

There are paths through the thicket of loss that mental illness causes. Rachael Newham explores lament.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

A Victorian fisherwoman sits on a beached boat, shoulder slumped.

But O For the Touch of a Vanished Hand, 1888, Walter Langley. The title is taken from the Tennyson poem 'Break Break Break'.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

I am lost. I feel utterly bewildered by my surroundings and my head is beginning to spin under the strip lighting. There are people all around me, but I can’t find my bearings. This place should be familiar, it’s somewhere I’ve been a hundred times before, but I feel the panic rise as I try to find my way.

Before I had known exactly where things were, how to navigate the aisles and reach the things I needed with ease, but in the months I’ve been away, things have changed and I cannot face the thought of finding my way around the new arrangement, so I turn on my heel and leave empty-handed.

I haven’t been away on holiday or gone on a work trip, I’ve been locked inside my own head doing battle with my own mind in the shadowlands of mental illness. Stable now, with the crisis averted, I am trying to rebuild and yet the Co-op rearranging my local store has served as a stark reminder that things have changed in me and around me.

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it.

This is the where the conversation about mental health awareness falls silent; the reality of the losses mental illness stacks up like Jenga blocks while you aren’t looking. Serious mental illness doesn’t just take your mind; it takes your ability to enjoy the people you love, the work you find fulfilling, the gloriously mundane school run and the life you once almost took for granted.

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it, no five-step process to ‘get over it’. There is simply the loss and the life you’re trying to rebuild.

This loss must be grieved. I would argue that all losses must be grieved if we are to learn to live with them. It is as Michael Rosen’s childhood classic “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” reminds us as the family go on their adventure and encounter the winds and sticky mud: “You can’t go under it, you can’t go over it, oh no! You’ve got to go through it”.

We simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate.

It’s perhaps something the ancient faiths and traditions understood better than we do where there are rituals for grief; whether it be Jewish communities sitting Shi’vah or the Irish keening their songs of mourning, they acknowledge the enormity of grief and the need for communities to come together to process it.

Where the loss is more personal, we can seem to lose access to the healing found in community traditions. When the loss is because of illnesses still so misunderstood and stigmatised, these processes and traditions can feel even further away, still.

And yet.

There are paths through the thicket of loss. William Worden, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association speaks of four tasks of mourning which include accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain of grief, adjusting to the world afresh and finally finding enduring connection. These tasks were designed with bereavement in mind, but they seem to me to speak to losses in the broadest sense and I have found them to be true in mental illness.

In the Bible we find this prophet Nehemiah, who is tasked with rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after the Israelites exile in Babylon. They’ve returned home, but home doesn’t look like they imagined to, the place they longed for no longer exists, and they have to accept before they can begin to grieve what has passed. Author Marya Hornbacher writes that

“managing mental illness is mostly about acceptance- of the things you can’t do, and the things you must”

and I see it every day - perhaps you do too - as I take the medication and get the sleep that’s required for some kind of equilibrium to be maintained

Nehemiah grieves and weeps over the city for an estimated four months; but there is no set timescale for such things, we simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate. In the Christian tradition this is called lament; it’s grief directed at God, bringing the pain before him in a way that acknowledges the twin realities of God’s goodness and our grief’s greatness. It is undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is the gift of honesty. We do not need to put on our Sunday best for God, but can come in our brokenness and mess knowing that we will not be abandoned to it.

And then we begin to adjust to the new normal we find ourselves in. We test the boundaries of what we can do as anyone in recovery does. There is a slow almost imperceptible move towards more of life; a trip to the local shop much like I did during that disorientating visit to the co-op, a visit from a friend or a phone call answered, long avoided. Nehemiah returns to his work for the King - but even then the King asks him why he’s looking so sad. We need not rush in with fake smiles before grief has finished with us, but be honest with those around us - and with God.

We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church.

The fourth task is that of finding connection. For some it will be found in their friendships, others in their faith communities or peer-led community groups. Whichever way it happens it’s how life grows again around and alongside the loss. Worden I think meant it as a way to continue the connection with a lost loved one, but in the story of Nehemiah we see it as the Israelites first come together to rebuild the wall and then to celebrate it. We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church, we have to find spaces where we can share ourselves, our stories and know we are not alone. It is perhaps one of our most fundamental needs - it is certainly been mine - to know that I am not alone in my loss and I’m not alone as I survey the wreckage and tentatively begin to rebuild.

Explainer

Belief

Creed

6 November 2024

5 min read

Whether it's AI or us, it's OK to be ignorant

Our search for answers begins by recognising that we don’t have them.

Simon Walters

Simon Walters is Curate at Holy Trinity Huddersfield.

A street sticker displays multiple lines reading 'and then?'

Stephen Harlan on Unsplash.

When was the last time you admitted you didn’t know something? I don’t say it as much as I ought to. I’ve certainly felt the consequences of admitting ignorance – of being ridiculed for being entirely unaware of a pop culture reference, of being found out that I wasn’t paying as close attention to what my partner was saying as she expected. In a hyper-connected age when the wealth of human knowledge is at our fingertips, ignorance can hardly be viewed as a virtue.

A recent study on the development of artificial intelligence holds out more hope for the value of admitting our ignorance than we might have previously imagined. Despite wide-spread hype and fearmongering about the perils of AI, our current models are in many ways developed in similar ways to how an animal is trained. An AI system such as ChatGPT might have access to unimaginable amounts of information, but it requires training by humans on what information is valuable or not, whether it has appropriately understood the request it has received, and whether its answer is correct. The idea is that human feedback helps the AI to hone its model through positive feedback for correct answers, and negative feedback for incorrect answers, so that it keeps whatever method led to positive feedback and changes whatever method led to negative feedback. It really isn’t that far away from how animals are trained.

However, a problem has emerged. AI systems have become adept at giving coherent and convincing sounding answers that are entirely incorrect. How has this happened?

This is a tool; it is good at some tasks, and less good at others. And, like all tools, it does not have an intrinsic morality.

In digging into the training method for AI, the researchers found that the humans training the AI flagged answers of “I don’t know” as unsatisfactory. On one level this makes sense. The whole purpose of these systems is to provide answers, after all. But rather than causing the AI to return and rethink its data, it instead developed increasingly convincing answers that were not true whatsoever, to the point where the human supervisors didn’t flag sufficiently convincing answers as wrong because they themselves didn’t realise that they were wrong. The result is that “the more difficult the question and the more advanced model you use, the more likely you are to get well-packaged, plausible nonsense as your answer.”

Uncovering some of what is going on in AI systems dispels both the fervent hype that artificial intelligence might be our saviour, and the deep fear that it might be our societal downfall. This is a tool; it is good at some tasks, and less good at others. And, like all tools, it does not have an intrinsic morality. Whether it is used for good or ill depends on the approach of the humans that use it.

But this study also uncovers our strained relationship with ignorance. Problems arise in the answers given by systems like ChatGPT because a convincing answer is valued more than admitting ignorance, even if the convincing answer is not at all correct. Because the AI has been trained to avoid admitting it doesn’t know something, all of its answers are less reliable, even the ones that are actually correct.

This is not a problem limited to artificial intelligence. I had a friend who seemed incapable of admitting that he didn’t know something, and whenever he was corrected by someone else, he would make it sound like his first answer was actually the correct one, rather than whatever he had said. I don’t know how aware he was that he did this, but the result was that I didn’t particularly trust whatever he said to be correct. Paradoxically, had he admitted his ignorance more readily, I would have believed him to be less ignorant.

It is strange that admitting ignorance is so avoided. After all, it is in many ways our default state. No one faults a baby or a child for not knowing things. If anything, we expect ignorance to be a fuel for curiosity. Our search for answers begins in the recognition that we don’t have them. And in an age where approximately 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, the sum of what we don’t know must by necessity be vastly greater than all that we do know. What any one of us can know is only a small fraction of all there is to know.

Crucially, admitting we do not know everything is not the same as saying that we do not know anything.

One of the gifts of Christian theology is an ability to recognize what it is that makes us human. One of these things is the fact that any created thing is, by definition, limited. God alone is the only one who can be described by the ‘omnis’. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. There is no limit to his power, and presence, and knowledge. The distinction between creator and creation means that created things have limits to their power, presence, and knowledge. We cannot do whatever we want. We cannot be everywhere at the same time. And we cannot know everything there is to be known.

Projecting infinite knowledge is essentially claiming to be God. Admitting our ignorance is therefore merely recognizing our nature as created beings, acknowledging to one another that we are not God and therefore cannot know everything. But, crucially, admitting we do not know everything is not the same as saying that we do not know anything. Our God-given nature is one of discovery and learning. I sometimes like to imagine God’s delight in our discovery of some previously unknown facet of his creation, as he gets to share with us in all that he has made. Perhaps what really matters is what we do with our ignorance. Will we simply remain satisfied not to know, or will it turn us outwards to delight in the new things that lie behind every corner?

For the developers of ChatGPT and the like, there is also a reminder here that we ought not to expect AI to take on the attributes of God. AI used well in the hands of humans may yet do extraordinary things for us, but it will not truly be able to do anything, be everywhere, or know everything. Perhaps if it was trained to say ‘I don’t know’ a little more, we might all learn a little more about the nature of the world God has made.