Prioritizing Mental Health: A Call to Action for the Effective Altruism Community

By MichaelRipa, Zoé Roy-Stang @ 2024-07-26T12:43 (+15)

Thesis Statement

The Effective Altruism community would see a lot of benefit in placing a larger emphasis on valuing and working on one’s own mental health.

I see this as an important and feasible goal to work towards, and will use this article to make the case for my belief. Though I won’t focus too much on concrete interventions in this article, I do plan on writing up a post on this in the near future.

Underlying Assumptions

In this article, I’ll be working under a few assumptions.

First, I’ll be making the assumption that > 10% of the EA population suffers or will suffer from some form of mental illness which has a major impact on their lives. It wouldn’t be worth writing this article if it seemed like EA’s had unusually great mental health. My reason for believing this assumption comes from taking Inside/Outside views:

1. Inside view: Mental health surveys in the EA community (although prone to selection bias) serve a good signal that a lot of people in EA face difficulties with their mental health. See for example results from 2023 EA Mental Health Survey.
2. Outside view: Our World in Data, estimates “1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men will experience major depression in their lives”.

In practice, I believe this percentage is much higher based on my interactions with numerous EA’s, but this lower bar requires far less justification and still is pretty significant.

Additionally, to strengthen my arguments, I’ll work under the assumption that the reader does not see inherent value in making improvements to their own mental health if it doesn’t instrumentally lead to some form of effective positive impact (through their work, donations, etc.). I don’t expect most readers to hold this belief directly (I certainly don’t), but those who do may benefit more from this approach.

Making the case

I’ll provide 3 main reasons to back up my theory.

Reason 1: Long-term impact

Working on one's mental health is an investment for long-term impact.

Unless your timelines for existential risk are extremely narrow, and you have a high degree of confidence in your forecasting abilities, it probably makes sense to think of the impact you can make as a long term investment. 80000 hours heavily emphasizes this idea; they suggest that developing career capital should be seen as a priority for individuals throughout their early and mid career. From this perspective, taking concrete steps to maximize your likelihood of sustainably working towards your goals seems like a very important thing if your goal is to maximize your long-term impact.

This is a large reason in part why I see mental health as such a fundamental part of the equation, and such an important area of investment for individuals hoping to use their career to make an impact. This viewpoint is not unique to me, see for instance the following notable examples:

• In 2023, Rethink Wellbeing ran a CBT Lab program in which individuals in the EA community participated in weekly meetings with 5-7 other peers, guided by trained facilitators. Based on the results of their program (which they wrote up publicly), they made the claim that “You might save up to two lives per year using Cognitive Behavioral Treatment methods on one EA”.
• Numerous members in the EA community have openly talked about how working on their mental health (in one form or another) has been extremely beneficial both for their well-being and sustainability (e.g. Will MacAskill).
• In an 80000 article on job success, the first and second piece of evidence-based advice respectively were “Don’t forget to take care of yourself” and “If helpful, make mental health your top priority”.

Thus, a community which places a high value on impact should also place a high value on the mental health of its members. Despite this advice, we still haven’t seen large scale actions, or significant shifts in the community discussion, hence my motivation to emphasize it in this post.

Reason 2: Incidental harms specific to the EA Community

Being an EA has some inherent mental health risks.

Currently, I believe that there are a number of incidental harms latent in the EA community which pose mental health risks specifically to individuals in the movement. Although I label them negatively, I just see them as reasons to prioritize mental health more strongly (in a similar way to how workers in hazardous environments should receive specific training/PPE to minimize their risk).

2.1 Our Obsession with Impact

One of the most immediate and hard to avoid forms of incidental harm comes from how much value we place on our impact. We seem to place a high implicit value on how impactful individual community members are, which can lead to people feeling like they aren’t worthy if they aren’t always doing something that directly signals impact to others. Your likelihood to secure funding, get an opportunity, or find collaborators can be very much tied to how much “value” you bring to the table. This is something that creeps up in our messaging, where many of our recommendations to young professionals is to spend lots of time developing aptitudes relevant to pressing problems and seek out competitive opportunities.

Impact is an important thing to value when trying to make the world a better place, and I am not suggesting we should shift our attention away from it. However, our obsession with it as a community likely has numerous downstream effects, which can be subtle and have negative effects without careful consideration. I think in one on ones, this isn’t as much of a problem; people who I have interacted with have mostly been very kind and non-judgemental when it comes to discussing our ideas, goals and beliefs.

Additionally, alongside the aforementioned issue, I suspect that our drive for impact makes the EA community very susceptible to workaholism, burnout and other forms of occupational stress relative to the general population. As the nature of our work is impact driven, taking time off not only could feel like a detriment to one’s team, but also something that is morally impermissible when considering the counterfactual. A corollary of this and the previous issue is that members of our community likely face more difficulty in taking time to work on their personal needs, as they feel like it would be self serving.

Overall, it sometimes seems to me like you can’t be an EA if you aren’t putting your all into it at all times, and it can be easy to get negatively affected by this cognitive distortion without careful checks and balances. This may be one of the factors that influence imposter syndrome and moral perfectionism which is seemingly prevalent in EA. Valuing mental health more as a community means that taking time away from direct impact to work on yourself would be looked up to and encouraged more, and could be easier for people in the community to make wiser long-term decisions.

2.2 Focus on Grim Topics

Another influential factor is how much time we focus and think deeply on grim topics.

• Numerous individuals hold strong beliefs on the risk of existential risks, which is a particularly dark and challenging topic.
  • See Igor Ivanov’s post on mental health in AI Safety for a better illustration.
• People working in animal welfare are often exposed to tremendous amounts of suffering, which can lead to compassion fatigue and emotional numbing.
  • See Ren Ryba’s post on self-care in animal advocacy for more details.

Once again, this isn’t something which is totally unique to EA; many professions such as health care and emergency services are quite intense, but there is something distinct about the nature of the problems we focus on (perhaps the uncertainty?) which is worth keeping close tabs on.

2.3 Changes in Lifestyle

Finally, I think that taking EA ideas seriously, although important, is in itself a mental health risk for new members in the community, as it often requires a large number of non-trivial lifestyle changes. To illustrate, here are some examples of changes I observed as I got more involved in the community:

• My moral beliefs.
  • Not unique to EA, but it certainly can feel alienating as your values start to shift away from common-sense morality / those around you.
  • I’ve also been noticeably plagued more by moral uncertainty and have seen this have a negative effect on others close to me.
• Career plans.

This one is nuanced. I think that getting into EA drastically increased how much effort I put into career planning and examining my options, which has had a lot of positive benefits. On the other hand, I have more factors to consider in my decision and the stakes feel much higher.

• This adds more pressure and stress to an already challenging endeavor, which can get chronic and unhealthy if not managed well.
• My commitments.
  • I felt more pressure to take on more EA related things (e.g., running university groups)
  • I also felt much less committed to things that weren’t tied to impact, even if they were intrinsically motivating (e.g., engaging with material in certain classes), which can start to be unhealthy once you start feeling bad for doing the things you previously enjoyed.  
• Who I spend time with.
  • I found myself wanting to spend more and more time with EAs and less and less time with non EAs, which further reinforced all the aforementioned changes.
• What I do with my money. 
  • I feel a lot more responsible now about my financial decisions than I did prior. I also feel more guilty about frivolous purchases now that I understand how much suffering could be averted if I donated the money to highly impactful charities instead.

Obviously not everyone is going to experience these specific changes, or even find them difficult. My point in illustrating these things is that not many endeavors in life require you to update so drastically on so many sensitive areas of your life at once. Asking our members to make changes in these areas without acknowledging the mental burden they raise feels irresponsible.

Reason 3: Larger scale benefits

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to mental health.

An observation I made about the EA community when I first got involved was that when an idea or belief is valued in the EA community, we tend to take it very seriously and there tends to be drastic observable differences in community norms compared to the general population.

I noticed this quite significantly with animal welfare. I’ve been vegan for the last 5 years, and before getting involved with EA, I had been very used to having little vegan/vegetarian options when going to events serving food. You can imagine how surprised I was when I started to attend EA events, and found to the contrary that food options often were strictly vegan.

This sort of qualitative difference seems to make sense when you look at the statistics: Rethink Priorities 2019 EA Survey reports 46% respondents claimed to be vegan or vegetarian (all of whom were EA’s), while Our World in Data reported in the United Kingdom 5% vegetarian and 2% vegan in July 2019. This of course stems from animal welfare being a cause area valued by a lot of members of the community, and illustrates to some extent my yearning for mental health being prioritized higher.

Though I cannot predict with certainty what having a larger community value on mental health would look like, I do have a couple ideas of ways it could have a positive impact.

3.1 Mental health support

The most immediate benefit which I could see happening is people in EA having access to more forms of mental health support and resources.

A great example is the Rethink Wellbeing CBT Lab. It’s an 8 week program which pairs participants into small cohorts of 2-4 people with a facilitator, and works through learning CBT and other psychological techniques. Currently, you pay a deposit (which varies but is around $550 USD), but you can opt to have it paid back so long as you attend at least 8/9 of the sessions.

The number of these forms of services would likely increase as the community continues to place a higher value on mental health. Concretely, here are some ideas of things which could be useful:

• Funding for therapy and/or mental health related expenses in contexts such as getting a diagnosis, support for time off work, mental health books, etc.
• More EA group therapy initiatives (similar to Rethink Wellbeing’s CBT Lab)
• More free access to people whose jobs are specifically to support struggling people in the EA community (e.g. licensed therapist or peer mentor). There could be specialists for common issues such as existential dread in AI safety or compassion fatigue in animal welfare.
• Mental health retreats/workshops for groups (e.g. burnout prevention workshops)

An added bonus is that members who previously couldn’t get access to mental health services would now have more options available to them.

Note that the above list is by no means exhaustive. We are currently in the process of collecting a longer list of ideas for a separate future post, so if any come to mind, please feel free to fill out this form or email me at m.ripa123@gmail.com.

3.2 Improved Community Norms

As more members of the community begin to place a higher value on their mental health, the way people interact will be more aligned to this shared common goal, which will further reinforce the value into the community. Some examples of what changes could take place:

• More awareness and consideration on people’s energy levels/capacity/bandwidth (e.g., not pressuring a burnt out group member to take on more responsibilities, and instead encouraging them to prioritize rest).
• Setting and respecting boundaries conducive to people's wellbeing (e.g., having times where you don’t talk about EA/work stuff).
• People feeling comfortable opening up and sharing their struggles with others (and conversely, people checking in on each other more regularly). This can lead to people having better support networks and feeling a stronger sense of belonging.
• Less people pressuring each other unnecessarily (e.g., saying “You should do X”).

These changes both benefit the wellbeing of people in the community, and give the community a better reputation. It’s even possible it could lead to a stronger retention of members and attraction of new members (as the vibes would be less off-putting), thus leading to even more long-term impact.

Summary

We owe it to ourselves as a community to emphasize mental health more and to work towards normalizing discussion and supporting our members. It’s important that individuals are making progress on the world’s most pressing problems; taking care of oneself is a key way of increasing the odds of meeting this objective. Systematic changes not only increase the benefits for individuals in the community, but also the community dynamic in general.

I’d love to see a world where the Effective Altruism community took mental health really seriously, and I deeply believe that it is within our means to make this a reality. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if this post resonates with you, and remember to take good care of yourself :) 

Acknowledgements

This article emerged from a memo session co-led by Zoé Roy-Stang and me at the 2024 University Group Organizers Retreat (UGOR), titled “Enhancing Mental Health in the EA University Community: A Call for Change and Support.” I am deeply grateful for the opportunity and the experience.

I would like to thank Zoé for her invaluable collaboration and feedback throughout the entire process, deserving co-authorship credit. Special thanks also go to Emily Budd, who contributed significantly during the initial brainstorming phase. Additionally, I appreciate the insightful feedback and discussions from Ben Hayum, Eli Svoboda, and Laura Messner, which enriched this article.