Embracing Normalcy: The Truth Behind Mental Health Struggle
Why Struggling with your Mental Health may mean you Mind is Healthier than you think
During the first years of the COVID pandemic, when everything was new and countries locked down, the WHO reported that people experiencing mental health issues increased. Locked down, unable to work, worried about getting sick, hearing of people dying from the virus; the number of people experiencing fear, anxiety, worry and stress globally, rose and rose.
And why wouldn’t it? It is completely natural to feel fear of a highly contagious and unknown virus causing severe respiratory complications; to feel worry of not being able to work and to feel stress about paying bills, to name just a few.
However, these real human emotions were framed as mental health issues rather than rational human reactions to challenging circumstances.
It is as if the fact that these natural emotional reactions to this new and unfamiliar threat to life; namely dread and hopelessness, were ‘wrong’. Thus rational emotions were labelled as ‘mental health’ issues, simply because they made us feel uncomfortable.
In the midst of the chaos of Covid-19, it was claimed that a mental health epidemic was beginning.
Yet, when the lockdown ended, mental health problems among all generations continued, with women and children bearing the greatest brunt.
Women continue to suffer mental health problems.
Women are three times more likely than men to experience common mental health problems.
Today, approximately 37.1% of women suffer high levels of anxiety, a huge increase from 21.8% in 2015.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic is blamed as the harbinger of the mental health crisis among women and the young, it is incorrect to scapegoat it in order to conceal the true cause of the crisis.
Children are experiencing shocking levels of mental health issues borne out of a myriad of modern ‘advances’. Social media decimates their understanding and feelings of self-worth. Engagement with anonymous, online bullies puts them in states of perpetual fear and depression. Instant and constant entertainment gratification has destroyed their attention spans, working memory and ability to use their own cognitive abilities properly, leading to the direct consequence of their own brains’ inabilities to regulate themselves.
It’s not just children. David Graeber’s seminal work on “Bullshit jobs” lay bare the fact that a significant portion of jobs in our modern economy have no purpose at all, creating huge amounts of mental turmoil for the ones engaged in such non-occupations. Knowing the utter purposelessness of their acts, coupled with feeling trapped into performing such acts for financial remuneration to fund their own survival, has led to the modern phenomenon of burnout, a crisis of identity so severe it literally shuts down your brain.
These are all things unique to the modern world: Technological advances create an illusory online world and obsolete jobs, coupled with dogma that everyone must be engaged in a paying occupation, no matter how pointless and fictitious that occupation may be. Performing purposeless acts in order to survive because the prominent political doctrine says we must is simply something that in the entirety of history, has never occurred before. And women are often given the most bullsh*t of jobs in the white collar world.
Simply put, we cannot cope with the modern world.
Part One: Gaslighting to the Extreme
The modern world is an anathema to the natural world in every way. Propelled by neoliberal dogma, the primary aim of modern human beings is to amass as much of the earth’s resources as they can and to keep going in that direction. It requires growing one’s wealth unlimitedly on limited resources for no purpose. It is utterly illogical and a clear impossibility.
Human beings don’t need unlimited resources. Their physical needs can be met both frugally and comfortably with few materials.
Previous generations spent their time tending to these needs and the rest of their time was spent in leisure time, that is time to think and speak to others, to create and tend to the community. In other words, they had time to attend to their social needs, vital for psychological health.
Our modern world obliterates all of that. Physical needs are met not through digging the soil with our own hands and nurturing crops over months of care, but by going to a store and throwing ready-made meals into a basket.
Social needs are attended to in complete isolation; a screen of never-before-seen ‘friends’ and catfishes replacing genuine human interaction, loyalty and trust.
This is not normal.
However, our reactions to this unnatural, abnormal state are perfectly normal.
When stuck in this artificial state of affairs with no clear way out, the only reasonable reaction is to feel depressed. When acknowledging the huge, seemingly insurmountable and impossible task of changing the entire global status quo for something better and more meaningful, the rational reaction is hopelessness.
There is nothing wrong with you for feeling these emotions. It is entirely natural.
That we are so conditioned into believing we must have poor mental health for having such rational and reasonable reactions to utterly unreasonable and unacceptable circumstances, is nothing short of gaslighting. And as the WHO reports testify, such gaslighting is on an epic scale; a truly global concerted effort to make you believe the problem is with you and not the circumstances you are forced to endure.
It is readily accepted that the set of circumstances that all living beings have been forced to live in have destroyed many of those living beings. Extinction of animals is now the norm.
Nobody questions this or puts the blame on these species. There is recognition that these species cannot be expected to thrive let alone survive in the unnatural habitat of the modern world. Yet, when human beings experience the same challenges to their own survival – physical and mental – they are told that the problem lies with them.
This is gaslighting to the extreme.
There is nothing wrong with you and I mean, nothing, for feeling depressed, anxious, fearful or worried at the state of the world. The problem lies with the system a few madmen have subjected us to in search of their impossible: unlimited growth.
This does not mean you cannot nor should not seek help to try and deal with these symptoms. It is simply to tell you this: To eradicate mental health issues and lessen their impact, the underlying cause needs to be eradicated. We need to completely overhaul the neoliberal dystopia we are in.
CBT provides a good basis to change the framing of thoughts and to make them more manageable. However, even the spirit of CBT can go too far.
Part Two: Gaslighting the Individual to Mindful Death
The new craze among corporations trying to portray their hippie, green human side whilst tax-evading and exploiting everything they touch, is the mindfulness craze. A rip-off of Buddhism, the idea is to bring everything around you to the individual. Reality becomes your perception alone, and that which you cannot change, you should not try to.
It basically goes like this: Everything you react to is a product of your mind. You can thus control how you act and react. The controller of how you react to even the harshest and cruellest of trials is therefore your mind. Frame your mind to think that you are able to endure, and you will. The entire universe around you is borne entirely out of your mind. Hence your universe is your mind. You don’t need to worry or address anything else; all you need to do is change the way you think about something – put effort, concentration and focus upon that alone – that is mindfulness.
It’s classic gaslighting that has gone mainstream. “It’s not the abuse we are putting you under that is making you depressed folks, it’s your own brain! Think happy thoughts, be mindful and all of your troubles will flutter away. The only world is you. Your world is fine.”
From this has exploded a whole genre of mindfulness and self-help books with titles as inane as ‘how not to give a f*’. We should give a f*! We need to give a f* about the very lives we live, the interactions we have and the world we walk upon!
Our world surrounds us and is very much, not fine. Framing global problems as simply a matter of perception shuts down any meaningful attempt to enact the change needed for the survival of the planet. It also gaslights the f* out of you. No, you aren’t wrong to be anxious about climate change and the fact you haven’t seen any flying insects for the last three summers. And no, the problem won’t be solved by sitting in meditation and telling yourself, "This too, shall pass."
Real Mental Health Sufferers
Maybe a thought should be spared for the ones who are gaslighting us to oblivion and the Age of Extinction, that is the billionaire media owners, or propagandists, and their billionaire ilk.
They devote reams of paper telling us how mentally sick we all are for not being able to adapt to an unadaptable world.
Because they have adapted well.
To them, we really are sick. They are happy to plunder a limited world for unlimited growth. They think it’s possible and as the zeros keep multiplying on their computer screens, they mistake the infinite nature of numbers to that of a limited, material Earth.
And it is not just them. The politicians who rule us blithely carry on with business as usual, continuing to grant drilling licenses and tax breaks for scarcer and scarcer resources whilst the lethal side effects of doing so are being felt as they sit beneath the air conditioning of their unliveable homes.
Maybe we vote them into office thinking they are morally healthy, unlike ourselves and our unsettled minds; not realising that our troubled thoughts are the only rational path while theirs is utterly insane.
The problem is that their insanity does not just affect them. They are so convinced in their beliefs, that their actions have far-reaching consequences for billions of people. They are the major cause of climate change and the only cause of such wealth inequality, dogmatic in their quest to hoard all resources for themselves whilst creating scarcity for the rest of humanity. Extraordinarily, that they will never use even a fraction of what they have hoarded is never a thought which passes through their minds.
You do not have mental health problems. You are feeling the symptoms of a healthy mind trapped in an unhealthy, self-destructive system.
Yes, get help to help you deal with these symptoms. I too, go to therapy. I go even when I feel fine, to ensure I do not fall into rational hopelessness to the extent it stops me from being active in working for change.
But don’t blame yourself and don’t convince yourself that you are sick. You are not. You are normal, reasonable and rational. It’s the entire neoliberal system which surrounds you that is so sick, it’s terminal.