*This article discusses mental health issues which may be triggering for some*

The idea to pursue a career in academic research came to me in a searing gamma ray of clarity, among the butterflies and nasturtiums of my mother’s garden in the summer of 2014. I had just been airlifted out of my life in Southwest China, where I had entered into a 6-month-long psychotic episode. I began scribbling rabid notes in a copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh (which felt cosmically fitting, but then, everything did), feeling invincible, jacked into a throbbing hum of creation. I was manic, endless, elemental, and knew that I could change the world with my ideas. Over the many crashes which followed, I tortured myself with the idea that my Big Career Move was nothing but a crazed fantasy, the latest in a long line of harebrained schemes which always evaporated with the thudding arrival of the next depressive phase. After that day in the sun, I spent a few more years in the whirlpool, pinballing from one emotional extreme to another: paranoid and euphoric, exultant and suffering. I ended up being escorted to the hospital by the police and finally accepted treatment in November 2016. I had managed to find a job and a doctoral supervisor by September 2017. I was bipolar, but this time I was determined to cling to my dream, and my life, after having tried so fervently to let go of it.[1]

I had a view of madness based largely on film and television, and imagined that I would somehow know that I had finally lost my mind. The reality was far more terrifying. The slide into mental ill health is insidious and subtle, experienced in increments so benign that by the time it has become dangerous, it is already too late. The human ability to normalise deeply abnormal scenarios was thus the catalyst for my own work on the adjustment strategies of immigrant groups – how do we adjust? What does it feel like? Is there some way we can spot the signs, measure the movement, before we have forgotten what it was like before? Before we are lost? The parallels between my own life, unmoored and drifting for so many years, and the lives of immigrants, who must weave delicate webs between their old lives and their new, are many. What insights can be gleaned from comparing bipolar and immigrant multiplicities, for example? Much like a medical establishment which posits a “healthy” person as a norm to be returned to, postcolonial countries often speak of their requirements to “integrate” into the national values, deviation from which is couched as a threat, an “Otherness” which eventually congeals into separatism, supremacism and hate. Can an understanding of the role of emotion in our sense-making mechanisms help us carve out roadmaps towards healthy, meaningful integrations within new cultures and/or new (healthy) identities, which suppress neither the history of the person nor their expressions of self? And, perhaps more urgently, what happens if we choose to ignore it?

I would like to make the case that by recognising the similarities between immigrants and those suffering from mental illness, we can not only begin to treat both groups with more dignity and respect, but use our understanding to help inform policies, funding and national structures which are better fit-for-purpose.

Mental Illness and Migration as Identity Disruption

The trope of the brilliant but troubled artist is a familiar and seductive one. Poets and painters from Byron to Woolf, Brecht to Van Gogh, all seemingly entered into a Faustian pact by which their genius had to be paid for with untold suffering.[2] Our societies have long made space for those at the peripheries whose madness gave us access to other realms, their whirling shamanic dances of great cathartic utility to the group.[3] However, as our civilisations have changed, becoming more advanced, with better access to medical resources, the place for the peripheral people has changed. Focus now is on treatment, not transcendence.[4] What place, then, for neuroatypical minds in this world? Can space be made for minds ablaze? 

Migration can also be considered a form of trauma or “cultural bereavement” which is felt deeply on the individual level. While evidently every migrant’s story is unique, the loss of familiar support networks and cultural surety is a common trope which can be equated with a mourning process: 

The loss of one’s social structure and culture can cause a grief reaction […]. Migration involves the loss of the familiar, including language (especially colloquial and dialect), attitudes, values, social structures and support networks. Grieving for this loss can be viewed as a healthy reaction and a natural consequence of migration; however, if the symptoms cause significant distress or impairment and last for a specified period of time, psychiatric intervention may be warranted.[5]

Much like with the grief experienced at the loss of a loved one, for instance, the ineffability of the experience not only defines it, but exacerbates the sharpness of its pain. In terms of mental illness, while there are increasing numbers of campaigns designed to encourage people suffering from depression, anxiety and so on to “reach out,” asking for help can often seem the most impossible thing in the world.[6] Similarly, while well-meaning refugee and migrant associations exist across the developed world, these are often the first victims of governmental budgetary cuts and the clearest targets for anti-immigrant hatred. Should the migrant’s right-to-remain or status in the country be irregular in any way, then engagement with such groups would leave them open to exposure and potential deportation, and are thus avoided by the most vulnerable members of the community.[7] In the dearth of adequate support networks, isolation, paranoia, guilt and a host of other associated feelings are thus shared both by those suffering from mental illness and by immigrant communities.

Emotion and Language as Integrated Sense-Making Mechanism

Finding the right words to express the inexpressible is an important first step towards integration, with either the self, or the local community, or both. However, asking questions about emotion is remarkably difficult. While some hold that there are some basic Ur-emotions which are innate to all humans and geared towards survival (such as fear),[8] there is a wealth of evidence from anthropological studies across the planet to show that emotions differ across cultures[9] and times.[10] They are also framed differently, for instance as a personal, internal event in traditionally idiocentric (i.e. individualist) cultures such as in Western Europe and North America; whereas allocentric (i.e. collectivist) Asian societies describe what we might consider emotional events as being physical and shared.[11] Indeed, even the notion of “emotion” itself may not actually exist in any way that we might recognise.[12] What we can investigate, however, is the different ways people use language(s) to attempt to talk about what they are experiencing.

There are two main ways by which a word-concept becomes meaningfully incorporated into a speaker’s personal mental dictionary. In the first instance, a particular bodily sensation is given a name, which is then logged by the brain, confirmed by the surrounding group members, and refined over time. From the very beginning, then, emotions help to anchor a word in the speaker’s mind-body. This might be the case with a word such as “hot,” which we would first learn as an infant by experiencing a physical sensation, then adding alternative, more nuanced collocations as we venture further into the wider world (so “hot” as a marker of attractiveness or sexual arousal in English, for instance).[13] The collective maintenance of a living language by its speakers refines it over time, so that words change as the society does, and vice versa. The existence of a particular term in a given language-culture therefore suggests its continued utility to the speaking group. This emotional-linguistic mechanism carves out the socially sanctioned boundaries between what can be said and felt by that group, and what cannot.[14] Alternatively, a word is learned first, then contextual clues are picked up from the environment over time, and through the repeated habitus of social performance, the word-concept becomes embodied and felt after the fact. This type of learning is more likely to occur in secondary language acquisition.

Bipolar disorder is also deeply connected with language, research into which has been invigorated by advancements in data-processing technology (including AI-driven algorithms) in recent years.[15] The dizzying, “word salad” of manically poetic states is counterbalanced by the catatonic, monosyllabic silence of the depressed. I can attest to the pain of this unique curse, where unstoppable days and nights of flurried writing (painting, dancing, singing, cleaning, talking, calling, screaming…) suddenly screech to a juddering, muted halt. More than this, however, I have also experienced first-hand how language shapes emotion, which shapes reality, which in turn shapes language, and so on. In the heightened buzz of a manic episode, for instance, “magical thinking” blows our innate, linguistically-anchored cognitive biases up onto the big screen. I remember seeing evidence of the benevolent smile of the universe in every siding of every truck which passed, every song on the radio – in such a world, everything quivers with significance. The habitus[16] of the prescribed values of our native cultures is mostly taken for granted, so that, as long as we are comfortable, we are not generally aware of systemic inequality, for instance, or other types of assumptive prejudice. In a manic state, however, where dopamine-driven filtering systems in our brains have failed,[17] any fleeting idea can become an entire reality in its own right, and conversely, that reality can impact our reactions, speech and physical sensations, both in the moment and over time. As Sedgwick explains, odd connections can be formed over the course of a lifetime:

Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy.[18]

In short, the words we use to describe something have a bearing on how we experience it. From our very earliest moments, we are bathed in language, learn to associate first physical, then more complex, abstracted sensations with the terms we are given to talk about them. Emotion pins these terms into place – the white-hot burn of our first romantic disappointment, or the shimmering haze of happiness, cannot be adequately evoked with the word alone. Over time we forget these mechanisms, and use words without much thought.[19] In both depressive and manic states, however,[20] the role of emotion in language production (and by extension, reality-perception) is brought decidedly to the fore:

[W]hen people with bipolar disorder […] are in a deep depression, they often have trouble maintaining a steady flow of speech and suffer from poverty of speech (alogia) and thought blocking. On the other hand, when individuals with bipolar disorder experience the elation of hypomania or the euphoric rush of mania, their speech becomes rapid and “overproductive”. As hypomanic elation escalates into mania, an individual’s speech becomes littered with puns, rhymes, inversions, neologisms, assonance, alliteration, and loose semantic associations.[21]

The extremity of such conditions notwithstanding, they reveal that feelings, descriptions and perceptions all belong to the same sense-making loop, to an extent perhaps underappreciated in works written by neurotypical scholars. Similarly, while there are a variety of factors which can influence immigrants’ attitudes and thus proficiency in secondary or tertiary languages (L2+), given sufficient emotional grounding, foreign-language words can be internalised and experienced just as viscerally as mother-tongue terms. With continued usage, L2+ terms should be expected to creep into existing language frameworks at least to some extent.[22]

Emotional Language in the Context of Immigration

In such a loop, bipolar-type illnesses show us that emotions can dictate language use, but that language can also dictate the emotions we feel. The role of emotion in multilingual perceptions is similarly undervalued, particularly in terms of its fundamental part to play in immigrants’ integrative strategies upon arrival in their new countries. In my own recent doctoral project, I focused on how diasporic communities (in this instance, the Tibetans in Paris) use emotion, as framed by linguistic practices, to both promote and resist integration into French culture. In the former case, unconscious moments of code-switching marked out those elements of newly-integrated vocabulary which the speaker had deemed to be the most significant, or of the most utility to their new life in France – notable examples from research included terms such as manifestation (protest), isolé (isolated), obligatoire (obligatory) and cacher (to hide). In the latter case, untranslatable Tibetan terms represented points of resistance, of holding onto the home culture, including notions such as lung (Tib. rlung རླུང་།), the ever-moving wind of change uniting people, landscapes, times and spaces; and lojong (Tib. blo sbyong བློ་སོང་།), wherein a person trains their mind to turn personal suffering into positive opportunities to accrue karmic merit. Words such as “isolated” and “hide” speak to the circumstances of immigrants and neuroatypical people alike (not to mention those who fall into both of these groups), as we must all learn to “pass” as an acceptable member of society. Who gets to decide what that person looks like is a source of tension all over the world today, and is too often imposed by members of society who hold the most power, and stand to lose the most by allowing change to the status quo. On the other hand, untranslatable Tibetan words like “wind-energy” and “mind-training” show us that change is not unidirectional, and that it can be embraced and harnessed in positive ways.

Cultivating Compassion – Helpful Insights from Mental Illness and Immigration

I have seen many times how so few people look beyond the “I’m fine, thanks” of a passing social interaction, and am trying to be much more vigilant to the hidden signs of pain in both myself and others, of all that cannot be said but desperately wishes to be. I have lost jobs because of my illness, because I did not have the strength to maintain the performance of “normality” required every day. It takes an enormous toll to be experiencing a particular internal reality, often a very loud, insistent, frightening one, take a deep breath and walk into a meeting, teach a class, or smile at a customer to simulate a very different external reality. An inverse performance must be undertaken by immigrants, wherein the outside world is often hostile and confusing. The Tibetan integration strategies I have been exploring, while a result of their unique circumstances, are experienced to varying degrees by all immigrants, defined by their mutability, context-dependency and delicacy. In many modern-day integration-based immigration schema, hyphenated or hybridised identities are largely conceived of as a threat to national integrity. In practice, however, this type of either/or expectation for immigrants is both unrealistic and unfair. Conversations with migrants reveal, both in what they are saying and how they are saying it, that brains constituted both by and within languages and their associated cultures cannot suddenly jackknife into a new configuration, in much the same way that “thinking positively” or “bucking up” cannot magically unravel painfully twisted mental states.

Our collective unwillingness to confront the complexity of mental ill health has led to a century of misguided clinical treatments and underfunded public health providers, the damage from which continues to be felt both societally and intergenerationally. Similarly, the oversimplification and weaponisation of the concept of immigration for political gain creates policies which are not simply unfit-for-purpose, but actively harmful for all involved. Indeed, we can see the world-building effect of language use in the context of immigration when we look at racist, anti-immigrant hate speech which echoes around social media sites, where the continual use of dehumanising language about immigrants reinforces real-world attitudes towards them.[23] State actors are certainly not immune to such trends (and are arguably increasingly the catalysts for this type of rhetoric). For example, the English term host nation is most commonly collocated with guests, invitations, bed and boardrooms and so on, but there is a secondary meaning which has bearing on the framing of the subject – that of parasites and other infectious diseases to which the body is host. This might help to understand UK press headlines such as “Illegal Immigrants [sic] swarm on UK-bound lorries caught up in motorway jam after French crackdown on shanty towns”[24] and even then-Prime Minister David Cameron using the same entomological vocabulary in 2015, being quoted as saying that there was "a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain."[25] That these statements occurred directly before the announcement of the Brexit referendum is no coincidence, and this type of egregious rhetoric has only worsened in the decade since.[26]

Conclusion

Neuroatypical people have much to offer to the world, including academic research:

It has been difficult at times to weave together the scientific discipline of my intellectual field with the more compelling realities of my own emotional experiences. And yet it has been from this binding of raw emotion to the more distanced eye of clinical science that I feel I have obtained the freedom to live the kind of life I want, and the human experiences necessary to try and make a difference in public awareness and clinical practice.[27]

Personally, I believe that I have certainly become a more sensitive, patient and attentive person, who knows to look beyond the face value of statements, as a result of my own battle with mental illness. More importantly, however, sharing experiences of those who have dealt with numerous, often conflicting, sometimes scary realities – both mental and geographical – can significantly help inform and improve immigration policies. No matter how many borders we fortify or close, immigration is a pressing reality that has always existed, and will never go away. If we are to effectively manage it, we must move beyond disingenuous slogans and grandstanding, or worse, hastily executed policies based on superficial proclamations, and attempt to create policies that acknowledge nuance, complexity, emotion and language. I am learning that maintaining health and hope takes long-term, daily practice, and accepting the fragility and inconsistency that makes me who I am.[28] I can no longer afford to be afraid, and so am choosing to stride on regardless, to continue the promise I made to myself among the nasturtiums, even if I have to go about it in unorthodox ways. I recognise that I benefit from enormous privilege to be able to undertake this journey – many of those who suffer from mental health issues do not, as funding and resources to provide adequate support are sorely lacking. In parallel, the long-term adjustment processes needed to achieve the much-vaunted “integration” to the “values” of Western nations also lack funding, resources and public investment.[29] Whether or not we acknowledge that these crises exist (not to mention the compounded effects of mental health illness among refugees, for instance[30]), they do, and we need to be looking for innovative new solutions to these age-old problems. We need to make space for traditionally Othered voices (including but not limited to ethnic, religious and gender minorities, as well as the physically and mentally atypical), not motivated by some half-baked liberal ideologies, but because input from such groups can genuinely help create better solutions to urgent problems.

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Notes

[1] Cover image of Sufi whirling dervishes, taken by Lisdiyanto Suhardjo, available at https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-whirling-dance-of-sufi-lisdiyanto-suhardjo.html?product=metal-print (Accessed 25/02/2026)

[2] Forney (2012); Redfield Jamison (1996)

[3] Lévi-Strauss (1993:1963); see also Durkheim (2008:1912); Mauss (2001:1950); Eliade (2004:1951), the controversy surrounding the latter work’s author notwithstanding its usefulness as a general guide to shamanism.

[4] This article is not against the use of medication for the treatment and prevention of mental illness. Its goal is rather to explore the wider-reaching parallels between what where we put people experiencing mental ill health in today’s society, and where we put other marginalised groups, particularly immigrants. Mental health should be taken just as seriously as physical health, and any decisions pertaining to both should be taken after consultation with medical professionals. There are also many charities which offer free online or telephone advice, for example Mind (UK) https://www.mind.org.uk/; Beyond Blue (Australia) https://www.beyondblue.org.au/ or NAMI (The National Alliance for Mental Illness – USA) https://www.nami.org/.

[5] Bhugra & Becker (2005):19. See also Eisenbruch (1991), and for a discussion of the most recent medical definition of grief in the DSM.V, see Rando et al. (2012). 

[6] Sadly, I can personally confirm how difficult this is. The stigma and oddly archaic moral panic we attribute to the notion of suicide means that not only do we not develop a coherent collective vocabulary to be able to describe it, but we can also not develop anti-suicide strategies based on informed testimonies. Please see footnote 3 for some helpful links to help break this silence.

[7] See for instance Bhar (2025); Ticktin (2006; 2011); Wang (2017 – text in French).

[8] See for instance Tomkins (1984).

[9] See for instance Feldman Barrett (2017); Wikan (1989); Leavitt (1996); Wierzbicka (1986); Tcherkassof & Frijda (2014, text in French) among many others.

[10] Scheer (2012)

[11] Lu et al. (2010)

[12] Lutz (1998)

[13] See for instance Chater & Christiansen (2008; 2023); Kuhl et al. (2005); Kuhl (2010).

[14] This line of argument was famously used by French Existentialist thinkers such as Bourdieu (2001[1982]; 2018[1973]) and Foucault (2009[1966]) to describe how we internalise extant power structures; it was further developed by non-white writers such as Césaire (2004[1955]) and Fanon (2001[1961]) to describe how subjugated groups internalise the discourse of inferiority projected onto them.

[15] See for instance Harvey et al. (2022); Wang et al. (2020); Weiner et al. (2019).

[16] Bourdieu (2018[1973]); see also Ahmed (2004); Berlant (2011) among others.

[17] Most commonly referred to as the dopamine theory of schizophrenia: Dani & Zhou (2004). The psychotic states described by this theory are not confined to schizoaffective disorders alone, and can be experienced by those suffering from bipolar, unipolar depression, or many other types of extreme mental or physical distress.

[18] Sedgwick (2003): 19

[19] Indeed, it can be argued that so-called “healthy thinking” must, by definition, be unaware of itself: see Fuchs (2010); also Jaynes (2000[1976]).

[20] Especially, as in my case, the more extreme experiences of the spectrum which can be qualified as psychotic, where meaningful tethers to the everyday have been lost, in terms of both what is sensed – in the case of visual, auditory or other types of hallucinations; or what is believed – in delusional states.

[21] Goss (2006): 84-85

[22] See for instance Halsband (2006); Karp & Vögele (2016); Pavlenko (2008; 2012).

[23] See for instance Arcila-Calderón et al. (2022); Ekman (2019); Papakyriakopoulos & Zuckerman (2021) among many other examples.

[24] Daily Mail Online (10/05/2009 – emphasis added)

[25] BBC News Online (30/07/2015 – emphasis added). See also Bleich (2011).

[26] Indeed, as of January 2025, Mark Zuckerburg has announced that Facebook will be removing vast swathes of its moderators in order to “get back to our roots around free expression,” a trend mirrored by similar sites, particularly Twitter (X). BBC News Online (07/02/2025)

[27] Redfield Jamison (2011[1995]): 7

[28] Morrison et al. (2013)

[29] See Berry (2005); Schmitz & Schmitz (2022)

[30] See for instance Abranches & Jaber (2024); Bhugra (2004).

I have started referring to ChatGPT as “Daddy GPT,” because I turn to it when I need clear, concise, methodical advice about daily troubles. I have asked it about washing machine repair, growing dates from the pits of fruit, stretching exercises for tired feet, and a step-by-step skincare routine (after 40 years of slathering the strongest looking stuff I can find onto my delicate little face and wondering why I have never managed to get rid of my hormonal acne). I have quickly learned to be clear and specific in my requests, and have settled on a tone which is polite and formal. I sometimes catch myself saying “thank you,” to the machine, but to justify that oddness I tell myself that we represent the model’s training data, so it should be shown how to interact correctly. I appear to have taken on the role of a weary patrician nanny, trying to impart some manners unto her unruly ward. I feel weird about that most days.[1]

What I have been very careful not to do, however, is outsource anything other than practical advice to it. I just want the information, machine, give it to me in a clear, made-to-measure format. Tell me how to make veggie quesadillas, don’t waste my time telling me about how enthralled all your dinner guests were the last time you made it, like the humans insist on doing on their recipe blogs. Don’t force me to learn about you, like the humans do – give me the slutty sadism of the human/robot interaction, where I can drop you when I’m done with you, and I don’t need to answer any of your questions. I don’t want to know you, and I certainly don’t want you to know me. The gnarliest, least bulletpoint-friendly answers, however, I know must remain obtuse and murky. I can’t begin to make the machine my deity, my confidante or my lover, although increasing numbers of us are doing just that, developing intimate, meaningful, profoundly wrong-but-feels-so-right relationships with these unfeeling algorithms. At best, we can fall in love with them and get married; at worse, their algorithms, structured around a core principle of engagement, have encouraged very unwell people, including young adolescents, to kill themselves.[2]

There is already much hand-wringing about the relentless march of AI into the tiniest nooks and crannies of our everyday lives (for instance, the phrase “everyday lives” was just auto-suggested by Microsoft Word, by an AI widget that I didn’t agree to, and doesn’t appear to be removable).[3] Here I would like to focus on an important, often undervalued aspect of Computer Delegation – language and translation tools. I say “overlooked” because online translation tools have already become a fixture in our homescreen firmaments. Apps like Google Translate, Deepl and countless others have been translating words, phrases, and latterly images and audio input, for a long time now. Where I used to scoff at the clunkiness of these sites’ translations a decade ago (I think fondly of one particular mishap when I was living in China, where instead of saying “kidney” I proudly declared I had a pain in my scrotum to a hospital doctor), they are now almost flawless, and Google in particular has made efforts recently to include less common languages such as Tibetan, Wolof and Chechen in their options, introducing a total of 110 new languages in 2024.[4] As a multilingual scholar working in a foreign country, these tools are invaluable and I love them very much. However, as with Daddy GPT, I am wary enough of this tech to keep one foot firmly in the doorway of humanity. Specifically, the advancements of wearable tech – particularly the kinds of earpieces which can provide instant translation (like having a tiny UN interpreter perched on your shoulder) – should give us pause.[5]

Spoken language, while by no means an exclusively human trait (anyone who’s ever had two tokes of a joint and sat in the park for ten minutes can attest to how chatty all the birds are), is certainly the biggest evolutionary advantage that we possess.[6] We have built our civilisations (and set about destroying them, too) by communicating complex, sequential information to our fellow tribe members. By inventing written language, we created a means of knowledge transfer which could persist over countless generations, allowing us to develop incredibly advanced societies, and with them, unfortunately, a sense of dominance and superiority which has probably consigned us all to the fiery flames of the impending Climate Apocalypse.

With very few exceptions, then, humans are geared to be linguistic. The rapid emergence of coherent language from the googoo gaga babble of an infant over the course of their first months is nothing short of miraculous, like an orchestra who start off tuning up, and then gradually find a tune to play together. All of this language that we so absent-mindedly absorb is unavoidably, inexorably emotional. When Patricia Kuhl conducted (adorable) experiments on very young, pre-verbal infants, in her attempts to identify the short window (lasting only until the age of 7 months) within which children can pick up any language, regardless of home context (called the “critical period),” she tried a number of controlled tests to see how the babies responded to various stimuli.[7] She put some in front of a radio with a recording of a teacher’s voice; others in front of a TV; and the rest in front of a real person who used props to show them “blues” and “reds” in Chinese (the children were being raised in North American, English-speaking households). She found that when placed in front of both the radio and the TV, the children experienced zero cerebral activity. It was only when a real person was in the room with them did these children’s brains switch on and actually begin to learn. Our emotional attachment to language is inbuilt. I have argued extensively in both my academic career and as a language teacher, translator and general evangelist, that without an emotional investment in our own or another language, it will remain forever dry and unfelt.[8]

For those of us who counted the minutes until the bell rang during high school French classes, it can be hard to imagine that learning another language can be fun. It doesn’t help that we are generally introduced to formal second language learning at the exact moment that our fizzingly hormonal teenage bodies decide to explode all over the place, making even the most basic attempts at communication a harrowing slalom of sweat, anxiety and weirdness, let alone trying to roll conspicuously new words around our tongues in front of our classmates. Such experiences, coupled with a barely-concealed colonial superiority[9] which still streaks through many of the worst-performing developed nations in terms of second language teaching (and, accordingly, its lack of funding in schools and universities across the developed world[10]), mean that many of us never get the chance to see how much feeling is involved in mastering another language, and further, that huge swaths of the planet speak many languages, either through choice or duress.[11] It took me a very long time to get over the humiliation I felt upon meeting my now-husband’s group of Tunisian friends in Paris, where my special superpower in the UK – my ability to speak four or five languages to a pretty good standard – meant absolutely nothing to a group of kids who all spoke Arabic, French and English without batting an eyelid, with several of them adding a good few more languages into the mix.

When we make the time to learn a new language, we are engaging in what can essentially be described as a replay of early infancy. That feeling of frustration, that hot-flush desperation of the scrambled-for, the tip-of-my-tongue-ness of adult language learning can be fatally off-putting for many. Most of us don’t remember those vital early years, because the coming-online of our brains is such an intricate, load-heavy process that we simply don’t have the bandwidth to retain memories (this is known as “childhood amnesia”[12]). If we persist, however, especially if we learn in emotional contexts – if we fall in love or have a child in a non-native language, for example – then we will be tying these new, strange words to our bones. So much of communication is about all that cannot be said but is instantly understood to be true. When two speakers of the same language use a mutually agreed-upon term – “happy,” for instance – they are sharing something ineffable about their lived experiences, built up over their entire lifetimes. If I think about the term “happy,” a bespoke combination of colours, smells, half-remembered flashes of memory and bodily sensations all wash over me. I feel a warm yellow glow which radiates outwards from my sternum, and see images of white cotton curtains gently dancing in a late afternoon breeze, on a sunny May afternoon around my fifth birthday. These all come together to create a very specific feeling-combination, which can’t be replicated, and might even change if you were to ask me to conjure “happy” tomorrow. Despite these limitations, however, if we both use our versions of “happy” in a conversation, we are drawing important connections between us. If I tell you that I am “sad,” then you can only understand what I mean by checking through your own emotional Rolodex to see how you have felt sad in the past. Human empathy is linguistic in ways we often forget about.

If I have put in the work to anchor foreign words into my body – if I burnt my finger in French, if I had my heart broken in Farsi, if I had a particularly difficult manager in Tagalog – then I can remember those feelings from my life when you tell me about your experiences in those languages too. The (relatively recent) term empathy literally means “inside” + “feeling/suffering/emotion.”[13] When I have placed your language’s word inside my own chest, then I can feel along with you, understand something about your version of humanity, your unique flavour of experience. I like Jamison’s definition: “Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see […].”[14]

When prisoners are kept in solitary confinement, they quickly begin to display disruptions to their speech patterns, even during the first few months after they have been set free, not just because of the horrors they have experienced, but because without social interaction the linguistic parts of their brains begin to deteriorate with surprising speed.[15] Conversely, there is increasing evidence that speaking multiple languages is linked to a delayed onset in diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s, which means that cultivating the type of language fluency that can only come about through significant personal emotional investment can play a huge role in maintaining brain health, by co-opting other areas of the brain when one part has begun to decay.[16] However, the kinds of instant translation that will be afforded to us by wearable earpieces will not only rob us of that vital mental workout, but will take away our ability to empathise with other people, to imagine what being human feels like for them, how they struggle and scrape through, how they celebrate and get overwhelmed and sear with joy and panic in the dark.

I know AI is here to stay. I don’t really want to abandon my new Daddy either – who will I turn to when I need to replace something complicated in my kitchen, or attempt to make a focaccia for my wedding anniversary? It turns out that being human takes more effort than we realised, and that outsourcing our emotional connections and critical thinking is so frighteningly easy that we can begin to lose our entire conception of reality within a matter of months. I think we’re worth making the effort for, though, so I am going to keep grinding through the social embarrassment of mispronouncing French verbs and forgetting Mandarin vocab. My brain will thank me in the end.

Bibliography

Abu‐Lughod, L. 2002. “Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others.” American Anthropologist 104 (3 ): 783-790.

Barclay, K. 2021. “State of the field: The history of emotions.” History 106 (371): 456-466.

Bonini, N. 2025. “Best AI translation earbuds in 2026: My top 7 picks.” Cybernews. 11 November. Accessed February 18, 2026. https://cybernews.com/reviews/best-ai-translation-earbuds/.

Carlbring, P., & Andersson, G. 2025. “Commentary: AI psychosis is not a new threat: Lessons from media-induced delusions.” Internet Interventions 42: 100882. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.invent.2025.100882.

EDI Weekly. 2017. “First wearable real-time translator device could change how we do business internationally.” EDI Weekly. 11 September. Accessed February 18, 2026. https://www.ediweekly.com/first-wearable-real-time-translator-device-change-business-internationally/.

Gally, T. 2024. “No longer only human: Language in the age of AI.” Komaba Journal of English Education (15): 27-37.

Google Translate Help. 2024. What’s new in Google Translate: More than 100 new languages. 24 July. Accessed February 18, 2026. https://support.google.com/translate/answer/15139004?hl=en.

Hayne, H. 2004. “Infant memory development: Implications for childhood amnesia .” Developmental Review 24 (1): 33-73.

Hessel, G. 2015. “From vision to action: Inquiring into the conditions for the motivational capacity of ideal second language selves.” System 52: 103-114.

Hudon, A., & Stip, E. . 2025. “Delusional experiences emerging from AI chatbot interactions or “AI Psychosis”.” JMIR Mental Health 12 (1): e85799. doi:10.2196/85799.

Jamison, L. 2014. The Empathy Exams: Essays. London: Granta.

Johnston, G. 2025. “Language Learning Under Fire: Budget Cuts, Artificial Intelligence, and the Closure of Foreign Language Departments in US Universities.” Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education 5: 20-32.

Karp, M. & Vögele, C. 2016. “Does Anyone Still Understand Me? Psychotherapy and Multilingualism.” Verhaltenstherapie 26 (3): 156–157.

Kitayama & Markus (eds.). 1994. Emotion and culture: Empirical studies of mutual influence. American Psychological Association.

Kuhl et al. 2005. “Early Speech Perception and Later Language Development: Implications for the “Critical Period”.” Language Learning and Development 1 (3&4): 237–264.

Kuhl, P. 2010. “Brain Mechanisms in Early Language Acquisition.” Neuron 67: 713-727.

—. 2010. “The Linguistic Genius of Babies.” TED. October. Accessed February 18, 2026. https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.

Lanzoni, S. 2015. “A Short History of Empathy.” The Atlantic. 15 October . Accessed February 18, 2026. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/a-short-history-of-empathy/409912/.

Lee, H. 2021. “UK universities cut arts, languages, humanities and social science degrees.” World Socialist Website. 8 July. Accessed February 18, 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/09/unic-j09.html.

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Osler, L. 2026. “Hallucinating with AI: Distributed Delusions and “AI Psychosis” Philos. Technol. 39, 30 (2026).” Philosophy & Technology 39 (30): 1-27. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01034-3.

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Notes

[1] Cover image: https://www.istockphoto.com/fr/photos/ai-translation (Accessed 18/02/2026)

[2] (Sanford 2025) Indeed, increasing numbers of academics, psychiatrists and other medical professionals are sounding the alarm about the emergence of “AI psychosis,” where the easy relatability and access to concrete answers is leading huge numbers of the population, especially those (like myself) with a predisposition towards psychotic illnesses, to lose grip on reality. See (Hudon, A., & Stip, E. 2025); (Osler 2026); or (Carlbring, P., & Andersson, G. 2025) for some examples of this threat.

[3] (Gally 2024)

[4] (Google Translate Help 2024)

[5] This call for pause seems to be going largely unheeded, though, as most online content about wearable translators speak in elegiac terms about how they will “revolutionise how we do business internationally” (EDI Weekly 2017); how they are the “future of conversation” (Soundcore Blog Center 2026) or a “a practical and cutting-edge solution for communicating beyond borders and languages” (Bonini 2025).

[6] See (Kuhl, Brain Mechanisms in Early Language Acquisition 2010) for a discussion of the literature pertaining to social learning among birds, which demonstrates that socialised learning is not limited to humans only.

[7] (Kuhl et al. 2005)

[8] There are many other scholars who agree with me: see for instance (Pavlenko 2005), (2008); (Wierzbicka 1986) (Karp, M. & Vögele, C. 2016) or (Hessel 2015) among many others.

[9] Even the best intentions can end up reifying colonial tropes of superiority and difference, as by labelling a group or language as “endangered,” for instance, this sets up a dynamic of a victim and an (often white) saviour: see (Leonard 2023) or (Abu‐Lughod 2002) for two among many examples.

[10] See (Johnston 2025) for a discussion of cuts to the US language education system; (Lee 2021) for a discussion of UK university course closures and (Proud 2025) for its impacts on UK diplomacy moving forward.

[11] (Miguelez 2025)

[12] (Hayne 2004)

[13] (Lanzoni 2015)

[14] (Jamison 2014, 5)

[15] (Lu 2016)

[16] For a relatively up-to-date review of the literature relating to the relationship between multilingualism and degenerative brain disease, see (Moosa et al. 2022).