Kike Esnaola, psychologist: “We are losing sight of a huge number of elements in our health”

The psychologist Kike Esnaola offers in his book Habitando el malestar a direct critique of the way psychological distress has been understood, especially in recent decades. In his work, he insists that the dominant tendency has been to turn suffering into a strictly individual responsibility, as if everything depended on each person’s attitude or willpower. “We are losing sight of a huge number of elements in our health, such as economic circumstances, access to housing, traumatic situations, which often happen in human relationships with other people, and sometimes also because of natural disasters or wars,” he explains in an interview with AS. For Esnaola, this narrow view prevents us from understanding why distress becomes chronic and widespread.

The psychologist stresses that factors such as precariousness, social polarization and the fragmentation of community are not background noise, but central elements in people’s emotional experience. “We are missing the influence of the social polarization and fragmentation we are experiencing today, in losing a little of that more collective vision and the ability to support one another through community and union with others, and in having a society that is increasingly individualistic and more ideologically positioned,” he says. All of this, he notes, ends up having a direct impact on quality of life and, by extension, on mental health.

What he sees in therapy

This reading is clearly reflected in therapy, where Esnaola detects constant frustration among patients. “The experience patients have of distress is one of total individual responsibility, of willpower, of attitude,” he says. Many people feel that, despite doing their part and trying to change the way they think or relate to reality, the distress does not disappear but intensifies. “There is a huge amount of frustration placed on psychotherapy treatments because people feel that, despite their efforts, the distress is still there and is getting bigger and bigger,” he adds.

For Esnaola, this constant clash between individual effort and persistent distress is a sign that something is wrong with the approach. “Very often, an anxiety problem has more to do with an excessive working day, or with not having quality time with our peers, or with excessively stressful and demanding situations, rather than with a question of attitude or will,” he explains. In that sense, therapy becomes the place where problems with much broader, collective roots end up landing.

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