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Normalising Mental Health Issues May Be Masking a Cultural Sickness
Should we all be struggling so?
There’s no doubt that a shift towards increased transparency and honesty around mental health struggles has been a positive step. Life is, and always has been hard and arduous at points. Generations past tended to repress their emotional world and hide their mental health struggles, often with fatal consequences. So in no way am I advocating for a time when we put mental health back into its solitary box.
However, I can’t help but think that with this normalisation of mental health struggles comes the danger of normalising conditions that are a response to a sickness in our culture.
Yes, depression, anxiety and psychosis can be traced back throughout modern history but there is also research that suggests that this isn’t the way things have always been. Studies on pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer communities seem to show a complete lack of anxiety and depression and a framework for integrating many conditions we would today term pathologies.
In the modern West, the statistics on mental health are a huge cause for concern. One in six children between 5–16 have a mental health problem, hospital admissions for under 18's with a psychiatric disorder have trebled in the last ten years and in 2019 suicide…