You walk from your car to the office, make your way to your desk and clock into work. Your daily tasks begin to swirl around your busy mind as every memory before closing your car door fades into nothing. A complete schism between work life and personal life — that’s the sci-fi pitch of “Severance.”
It’s a two-time Emmy-winning Apple TV+ production with a massive fan base, and psychologists have said that the cerebral series may speak to a real-life mental health crisis facing America’s work-obsessed culture.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spoke with Morehouse School of Medicine assistant professor and licensed psychologist Kristin Carothers, Ph.D., to break down the realities of work-life balance and how “Severance” brings attention to the importance of connection.
The real-life ‘split-brain’ phenomenon
In the psychological thriller, the characters have chips implanted in their brains to create a split in their memory — seemingly two separate personas with completely different memories and experiences throughout the day who are unaware of each other’s existence. “Innie” represents a person’s work self, and “outie” represents their personal self.
In real life, the idea of surgically separating someone’s mind isn’t entirely a thing of science fiction either.
Earlier this year, London South Bank University cognitive neuroscientist and neuropsychologist Rachael Elward, alongside cognitive neuroscience researcher Lauren Ford, discussed some of the real cognitive neuroscience going on in the show’s storyline. Writing in The Conversation, a nonprofit news outlet, the experts revealed that minds being split in two isn’t such a sci-fi concept after all.
“Remarkably, ‘split-brain’ patients have existed since the 1940s,” they wrote. “To control epilepsy symptoms, these patients underwent a surgery to separate the left and right hemispheres. Similar surgeries still happen today.”
Researchers later discovered that “split-brain” patients could actually process information independently through each surgically separated hemisphere of their brain.
“This raises the uncomfortable possibility that the procedure creates two separate minds living in one brain,” they wrote.
Isolation and work-life balance
The “Severance” concept of “innie” and “outie” personas offers a chilling twist to the meaning of work-life balance, and highlights how memory and isolation shape our identity.
Carothers explained that, when it comes to staying mentally healthy, social connection is key. In that way, the series is a stark reminder of a very real problem — one worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I believe that one of the reasons that our suicide rates are up is that people are more depressed and that a lot of that depression originally started as a function of social isolation,” she said. “Which could have been a part of the pandemic and us being on our own, because the numbers were high during the pandemic.”
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, roughly 20% of all U.S. adults experience mental illness every year. And recent data from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that suicide is one of the leading causes of death in America.
“We are definitely at a point of crisis,” Carothers said.
The “outie” persona of a real-life “Severance” character could easily feel isolated from a lack of social interactions at work. Pew Research Center data showed that a majority of U.S. workers in 2023 had at least one close friend at work and felt valued in the workplace. The workaholic “innie” persona, however, might face other challenges — including burnout.
“What happens when you don’t have a work-life balance is you are more at risk for burnout,” Carothers explained. “We know as psychologists that the people who are most at risk for burnout are high achieving, insecure hard workers.”
Burnout affected at least 79% of U.S. employees at some point in 2021, according to a survey by the American Psychological Association. General exhaustion, cynicism at work and a drop in productivity are often associated with the syndrome, leading to a warning from the American Heart Association about the damaging effects of burnout-related stress on heart health.
When to seek help for your mental health
The TV series, now renewed for a third season, is a harsh reminder of the severity of glorified work schedules over employee well-being. According to Carothers, from therapists to support groups, help is out there if you need it.
“If you are at the point where you’re not getting out of the bed, you are not eating, you dread going to work every day, you dread picking up the phone to talk to people. You just want to be alone. You’re having these thoughts that are kind of uncontrollable, that are scary to you. That’s the time that you should talk to somebody,” she said.
For more information on mental health, visit nami.org.
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