Can We Put A Price On Our Mental Health
The one thing we won’t invest in
The perception of mental health has been through many iterations in its time, starting from simply a dismissal of the fact it even exists, to now being socially accepted as an issue that 1 in 5 of the world’s children and adolescence have a mental disorder.
It would seem we as a society view our mental health as a separate entity from our body’s health as if the two are somehow not intrinsically interconnected. So, we spend vast amounts of time and money getting our bodies to peak perfection but to our detriment forget to invest in our minds. The entity that keeps us functioning over the course of our life. The engine that keeps us alive is left behind, expected to naturally catch up and continue to function at the highest level despite being on the backfoot.
So if mental health is such a problem why don’t we invest in it?
The problem arises from the fact that we as a society have been wired in a way to see tangible gains, physical successes in the actions we undertake. In school for instance we are taught success looks like a 100% pass mark on a test. However with mental health, this logic does not apply, there are no pass marks for how well your mental health can be, it’s a feeling. An apt metaphor…
