Panel: Three Loyola professors on the intersection of capitalism, mental health

At first, it might not seem like professors Jenna Drenten, Jonathan Singer, and Devon Price have much in common.

Take their diverse research interests at their respective schools as an example: Drenten focuses on digital consumer culture at the Quinlan School of Business, Singer looks at school-based responses to youth suicide at the School of Social Work, and Price teaches psychology and statistics at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

But Loyola magazine brought them together with the hope that they might discover parallels in the way their work deals with mental health. During the hour-long discussion, surprising connections were drawn—over the struggle for psychological well-being under capitalism, the idea of “warning signs” in the mind, the body and the marketplace, and others.

This conversation, which has been edited for length, began with a question about how each of the professors first became interested in their field.

Jenna Drenten: For me, I would say that we’re all born as consumers. People have thought about what we’re going to buy and what we should be sold before we even come into this world breathing. I always tell my students that we all have experience being consumers and being embedded in consumer culture. So I don’t know that it was really a choice to be a marketing professor so much as I was born into this culture, where marketing is all around me.

Jonathan Singer: When I was in high school I was in the play Ordinary People. It was about a suicide attempt, family loss, and schools, and it was the first time that I had an intense exposure to this idea of suicide.

Back in the eighties, it was not something anybody ever talked about, and so fast forward about a decade. I finished my MSW [Master’s of Social Work], and I was looking for a job and the only job I could find was on the mobile crisis unit working with suicidal, homicidal, and actively psychotic kids. So that’s what I started doing. And from there my career just continued.

Devon Price: I wouldn’t have answered this question this way at the time but, looking back, I became interested in social psychology as a teenager because I was autistic and didn’t know it yet. I did not understand human behavior at all. I didn’t understand why people followed these silly social rules that were often very arbitrary.

Studying social psychology—and especially a lot of early social psychological experiments that show how people’s behavior is subject to social pressure and culture and social norms—really helped me feel like I could understand people as they were, in a way that just did not come intuitively for me.

Devon, in your interview with Life Kit on NPR about your book Laziness Does Not Exist, something that struck me was your discussion about warning signs and how they can be a message from your body, your mind, that you need a break.

Price: I think it all comes down to capitalism. The way society runs right now, it expects all bodies to work in the same way, and any deviation from being able to stay at your post and do your school work or your job for eight hours per day is seen as some kind of deficiency on your part.

When really, as I go into in that book, the data is pretty consistent across a variety of different sectors. Nobody’s actually built to be an automaton like that. We all need social breaks. We all need different forms of stimulation and switches and tasks to keep our minds active. We all need to eat. We all need to take walks. We all need to cuddle with our dogs on the couch. And because we’re working longer and longer hours, more and more detached from other people, we are completely detached from those bodily signals.

Drenten: Ditto. I agree with everything you said, particularly your comments, Devon, around capitalism. Speaking from a marketing and consumer culture perspective, I think what our culture has done is take those warning signs and, instead of approaching them with care-based interventions, we approach them with market-based interventions.

What that means is, if you want to stay up longer, you can drink caffeine. You don’t need to sleep if you are forgetting to eat. Actually, that’s a good thing, because maybe now you’ll lose weight. Actually, just go on Ozempic. And so we are living in a culture in which warning signs are opportunities in the market.

From a marketing perspective, the concept of warning signs is great, and I’m going to use that terminology now.

Have any of you experienced something in your career that feels indicative of the initial interest that brought you to your field? Maybe a moment that felt like confirmation of ‘Yes, this is why I wanted to do this thing.’

Drenten: In academia, we talk a lot about impact and impact is often measured as what your Google citations are or what conferences you’re being invited to present at. Very often what goes under the radar is how we are actually making an impact on the people’s lives who are reading beyond academic journals.

For me, a recent “aha” moment was when I collaborated on an article on gun influencers and was then able to connect with someone on the media advisory board for Sandy Hook Promise. I talked to their leadership about the research that we had done and how they might be able to use that in their lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. That was a big full-circle moment.

Singer: Jenna, I love this story about Sandy Hook Promise. I’ve worked with those folks, and they do really good stuff.

For me, I got to talk with the folks from Netflix when I was president of the American Association of Suicidology, because 13 Reasons Why created controversy. Their question was ‘We’re about to come out with season two, and we’ve heard a lot of criticism about the final episode where the main character kills herself in a bathtub. Do you think we should remove that scene?’

I was able to talk about the research and what it means when kids are given visuals. I was like, ‘Yes, there is no need for that scene.’ And so, under cover of night, they completely removed it from the series. For me, that was one of those moments where my decade of practice experience before getting a PhD, my policy experience, my experience running an organization, it all came together for this big impact.

Price: So, I teach in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies and our students are typically non-traditional-aged, older students. They’re often people who have had a really hard time in school in the past and didn’t complete school on the conventional timeline. It’s been really rewarding to discover that a lot of these students are on a journey similar to that of myself and others in the world, discovering their own neurodiversity in one way or another, later in life.

It’s really been a blessing to be a part of an academic unit here that offers a ton of flexibility for those kinds of learners, and has that awareness of accommodating disability, meaning that you have to make some pretty dramatic changes to how you think about academic rigor. Sometimes it’s not as simple as just extra test time. Sometimes it’s really questioning, ‘Do we need to have closed-note tests at all? What does that actually do?’

Being part of this growing movement of saying, ‘We actually do see that, from a systemic perspective, these injustices play out. What can I do as an educator to flip the power dynamic and change how school operates?’

Frankly, these are things that I would have benefited from at that point in time in my life as well.

You all do meaningful work outside of the classroom as well, but what do you think you can do as a professor that you can’t do anywhere else?

Price: I don’t think there is really any other work that I could be doing while also running this parallel life of writing and scholarship. So many of the students that I serve struggle with the things that I’m writing about in books like Laziness Does Not Exist. Many of these students, because they couldn’t get through school on the conventional timeline, thought it was some lack of effort on their part rather than ‘Oh, my gosh! You’re working a full-time job, you have elder care responsibilities, you have kids, you have a chronic illness. Of course you couldn’t finish undergrad. Are you kidding? This isn’t your fault.’

So, none of this would have happened if not for both the student populations that inspire it and the working environment that makes it possible to actually do this kind of work.

Singer: I train social workers, and I love helping them hold onto the thing that inspired them to get into the profession in the first place, while at the same time socializing them into what it means to be a social worker.

There’s a certain way that social workers look at things. There’s a certain understanding of systems, of structural change, of power and oppression, of all these sorts of things.

To see a student who comes in saying, ‘I don’t know why people just don’t seem to care about abused kids.’ And then they realize that literally millions of people for decades have been working tirelessly on behalf of abused kids.

And then having them be like, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do with that. This is what I disagree with. This is the new way of thinking.’

That, to me, is fantastic. I love that about Loyola students. They have this curiosity, this passion, this excitement, and that’s invigorating every day.

Drenten: My favorite is when students at the end of the semester say, ‘I can’t go through my day without thinking about this class,’ because that’s my goal.

There’s the opportunity to instill curiosity and to build a classroom culture of connection and belonging, and to give students a space to think. There are so few opportunities to think in everyday life.

Being an educator is an extreme privilege. I think educators changed the trajectory of my own life, and if I could possibly be that person for anyone, I think that is an honor that I would not take lightly.

Read more stories from Quinlan School of Business, the School of Social Work, and the School of Continuing and Professional Studies.