“In 2018, the word of the year, according to Merriam Webster, was ‘justice’. In 2019, I predict the word of the year will be ‘deep’. Deep mind. Deep fake. Deep news. Deep insight. I believe that there is something in the cultural zeitgeist. Some intuition that technology is about to take us deeper”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman — Intelligence Squared, 2019
The way the world thinks about the mind and mental health is not fixed. It changes over time. And between cultures. Different populations in different eras have developed different narratives to explain the complexity of our emotional lives — of what makes us suffer and flourish.
In the West, the 20th century saw a move away from psychoanalytic depth psychology towards behaviourism — the idea that disturbances in our mental health are the product of conditioning, and that we could therefore condition ourselves out of distress by changing our behaviour.
From behaviourism came the rise of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which uses rational argument and positive habit forming to help us correct our negative thought patterns. Today, CBT is recognised as a valuable tool, but it’s losing its status as a panacea, as the mental health landscape continues to evolve.
Slowly, we’re starting to see a rejection of starkly rational methodologies, and a renewed interest in the wider context of a person’s mind — their life, past and present, their physical being, and the world around them. All signs point to what Thomas Friedman intuits in the quote above: a surface-level approach to the human psyche is not enough.
It’s time to go deeper.
For Okina, which by its nature takes a deep dive on a person’s inner life, this presents an interesting branding challenge — to create a new cultural container for mental wellness. Holistic, without the joss sticks. Positive, without the wishful thinking. Analytic, without Freud. A new aesthetic for an integrated take on mind and body health; a humanistic approach that gives a bird’s eye view of the vast constellation of influences affecting each person’s
mental states.
While Okina has a unique capacity to see and understand its users, we will never exploit that capacity; never pry, never disrespect privacy. Integral to our success is effectively communicating our core truth: that deep insight must always be matched with deep trust.
