I’ve got a song stuck in my head. A piece of music actually. I don’t know its name, but it’s an ominous, minor-keyed, bass-heavy, slow-groove. Its is the call waiting music for my superfund. I’ve spent endless hours listening to this composition over the last month.
I had been calling my superfund for a simple problem to be rectified, which has now been solved. However, solving this issue involved over 15 phone calls and much of that time was spent on hold. When I wasn’t on hold, I found myself starting from scratch to explain the issues from the ground up to a superficially helpful operator, again and again.
I consider myself a fairly level-headed guy who feels comfortable navigating the modern world. But I was frustrated and angry. I even reached a point of despair several times, wanting to quit. It’s all to hard!
If I’m reaching a point where I falling into a state of helplessness and hopelessness, what chance do people with active mental health disorders have? What role does the impersonal service of governments and corporations play in engendering community-wide hopelessness and helplessness? In the wake of suicides attributed to the Australian government Robodebt scheme, is anyone investigating the mental health impact of impersonal service more generally?
Who is Franz Kafka?
When I talk about my experiences, most people have a similar story: A simple error or request, then long wait times, weird loops (e.g. being sent back to the department you started with after speaking to three other individuals), difficulties escalating the problem, difficulties with follow through. Service that, in a word, is Kafkaesque.
Franz Kafka was a Czech-Jewish Author who wrote in the early 20th century. His novels and short stories often involve an isolated and alienated protagonist who struggles helplessly against a faceless and indifferent bureaucracy. Both the reader and the hero of Kafka novels (such the Trial and The Castle) are drawn into a state of confused helplessness.
Quite a while ago, I read The Trial by Kafka, possibly his most famous novel. It is not a pleasant read. The power of the novel is that it makes the reader feel the same puzzled powerlessness of the novel’s protagonist, Josef K. I felt frustrated bored and hopeless reading this novel, but I had the luxury of quitting at any time. No such luck for Jozef K. And no such luck for a person facing telephone service of a modern impersonal institution.
Kafka’s novels presage the modern era of call centres and impersonal service. The bureaucracies in his novels are obscure and deliberately incomprehensible. Their function seems to be to destroy the customers sense of agency. To engender learned helplessness.
Who is Martin Seligman?
Martin Seligman is one of the most influential psychologists of the last 50 years. He is most famous for his work on Learned Helplessness: The apathetic state exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control.
Seligman found that dogs which were given random, inescapable electric shocks, exhibited motivation loss (cruel, right?). The randomly shocked dogs would not take evasive actions to flee from future shocks. They had given up. Leant that there is nothing they could do to improve their situation.
Learned Helplessness is now one of the most influential ways of understanding depression. Many depressed clients find it difficult to make healthy lifestyle changes because of learned helplessness. Life has taught them that nothing works and it’s all no use.
What’s the Point of a Call Centre?
When we call for help from a governmental or corporate phone service, we face a machine alone. We don’t stand in a queue in solidarity with others. We can’t refuse to leave (I was hung up on for doing that). We can’t demand to speak to the manager in the next room.
The point of call centres on face value is to help customers. But from my experience and those I’ve spoken to; the real reason seems to be to encourage a state of learned helplessness. To give up on thoughts of being an agentic being who can work within the system. To cope by surrendering, which is the quickest and most painless way to deal with a repeatedly demoralising system.
Customers who know that they can’t fight the system are compliant. Customers who know that the same service exists everywhere else are grovelling loyal. Customers who value their mental health and time don’t ask difficult questions.
A system which rewards companies for their Kafkaesque customer service, pummelling customers into learned helplessness, must be playing a significant role in the mental health crisis that society is now facing.
