It's often spoken about that we're in a "mental health crisis." I don't know to what extent this is as people are talking about mental health more where in the past it was more stigmatised. But there does seem to be some truth to this.
Not quite sure exactly what type of mental health people are saying is common. I hve noticed that a lot of the sorts of things people say that young people are like today, are exactly the sorts of irrational behaviours that would normally be considered signs of irrational depression and inrrational anxieties by any of my former therapists.
I was also talking to a 19-year-old the other day, who agreed when I mentioned that young people seem to be constantly presented with media that implies that they've got no hope of a positive future, and everything is very dangerous, which would probably give them
To me, there are several core things that are needed to strengthen mental health.
The latest theories in mental health, now talk about "mental wellness". Empirical studies suggest that sane people usually do certain things that insane people don't, that would probably increase mental wellness.
One of them is community, which can also take the form of a support network.
True. But the disparagement of organised religions sent a lot of people away from their religious services and their religious communities.
Then the local pubs and clubs served as community centres. But the clubs like the working mens clubs were shut down due to feminist pressures. The scouting clubs were shut down due to allegations of paedophilia amongst scoutmasters (there were cases, but no more than anywhere else). Smoking bans in pubs and the ease and cheapness of beers bought in supermarkets reduced their custom by so much that most of them have become restaurants for young families that also serve alcohol.
Another is purpose, which collectively in the past has been provided through religious institutions, but also takes the form of an individual's sense of purpose and a knowing of what they are setting out to do.
When you feel like you don't know what you're doing or why, you start wondering why you're putting in all that effort for no reason. Makes one feel hopeless about life.
Companies have severely cut back on training, so people feel like they don't know what they're doing half the time. They're repeatedly given messages like "fake it till you make it", or saying "We got this" when you're not really sure if you have "got" it. Generally, everything has been reduced to monetary terms, with everyone being given the impression that the only way to succeed is to "earn more money", with zero care put towards your sense of purpose in life.
Another is resilience. If someone has resilience, they have the confidence and resourcefulness to face challenges and overcome them as they arise. Challenges don't weaken the person, they provide a means to become more resilient, and a pathway to a more rewarding life.
Yes. But resilience is a skill, and you need to practise a skill to keep improving your skills more and more, until you get to the level of resilience that you currently need in your life.
E.G. If you pay for everything while your kids are at home, but the minute they want to move out, you leave them to it, then it's a case of "sink or swim". Some sink. Some drown.
Keep doing that with enough things, and everyone "sinks" on some things, and then some people drown due to each thing you take that attitude with. Now count up how many different ways people are being expected to "sink or swim",
If you want to get kids to deal with bills, without sinking or drowning, then you have to give them the bills equivalent of "swimming lessons". You have to progressively get them used to dealing with more and more of their bills, until they're comfortably handling so many of their bills, that if they were living on their own with a family, they'd still be OK at managing their own bills.
I don't really know how to put this in a nice way. But life is hard, tough shit happens, and if you don't think it will happen then it could happen and you have to respond to it when it does.
Most people follow their habits.
In those schools and workplaces that have regular fire drills, when there's a real fire, everyone just assumes the alarm is a drill because they've been habituated to associate alarms with drills, follows their normal habit calmly and does what they should do, and then when they get outside, discover that it was a real fire.
In those places that don't have regular fire drills, when the alarm goes off, most people panic and there's a crazy stampede. People get hurt. Some people stay where they are. People die.
If we'd had "pandemic drills" in every location, every year since 2014, by the time 2020 rolled around, everyone would have followed their habits, and the pandemic would have been little more than a nice 2-month holiday.
If you look at nature that's the world we live in - nature is brutal, the tough survive and the young are prepared for it from early on.
Nature is not any different to human experience, except that when groups of animals keep getting caught in forest fires, they usually don't start running fire drills. Only those with the nature to have a habit of dealing with fires successfully, will survive in large numbers.
I wonder to what extent we're in a mental health crises as people don't have these things anymore. They don't have as strong a community to lean on, or as strong a sense of purpose, or as much resilience. People are spoken about as if they're fragile little twigs that break and become infantilised at the slightest trauma
Part of the job of a community, is to provide emotional support and encouragement, which includes talking about you as if you're capable, and not as if you're incapable.
Also, therapists now describe capability and competency as a spectrum, and call the idea that someone is not capable of anything, a "deficiency schema".
The idea that someone can be given any task, or called "incompetent" as if he can't do anything right, "black-or-white thinking".
Both those perspectives are so incongruent with reality, that it's almost guaranteed that people with such views would make lots of choices that are clearly irrational when thinking in terms of reality.
I mean, imagine if ever since you were born, everyone told you that your bones were made of glass, and that if you did anything dangerous, you'd break dozens of bones.
Most people end up behaving in either of 2 ways:
1) Try things anyway, discover they didn't break lots of bones, assume that they don't have to worry about breaking bones, and then do really dangerous things until one of them hurts them badly.
2) Be so careful about not doing anything that might break bones, that they do very little with their lives.
and people over-protect people to shield them from anything challenging and rob them of the opportunities needed to develop resilience and confidence as they grow up.
One of the jobs of a community was to train the young, until they had the skills and resilience to do whatever they would need to do, to protect their tribe from the sorts of dangers they might have to face as adults.
In the past, that included going to war, fighting and killing wild animals for food, and even handling epidemics, the eruption of volcanoes and earthquakes.
So they had to be very resilient, or their tribes would not survive, and so if their communities didn't train them for over a decade, when those problems hit, they couldn't handle them and the tribe would get mostly decimated.
What do you think? Any other takes on what the current mental health crises is about?
I think what other posters have said are also relevant to this general malaise and ennui that seems to be commonplace nowadays.
However, I'm not sure which came first, and whic factor caused the others, at least, not at the moment.
