Coming home after a long day of work. Feeling irritable. Your kids want your attention, but you just push them away. You feel empty. After all, you’re working two jobs just to make ends meet, because the rent just got higher. You can’t stop thinking about meeting the target your boss set, because he wants to increase profit.
However, you feel like you have no energy. It is hard to get out of bed every morning and to motivate yourself. Your body feels heavy. You tried therapy and that did help a bit, but the next day when you have to get back to that daily grind, that vicious cycle continues. You did try looking for other jobs, but with your age and no other jobs in the area to pay enough for you to be able to afford rent, this seems improbable.
How well can we be in today’s systems? Are they designed with an aim that translates to our mental well-being?
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines mental well-being as a state in which an individual can realize his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.
But do the systems we live in enable us to do just that? When one works two jobs and comes home depleted, how easy is it to work fruitfully?
Let’s add to this oppressive systems, non-functioning basic infrastructure, inadequate housing, or systems that award resource-grabbing over empathy and awareness.
How can we feel ourselves in such a system? Is there enough space to breathe?
Dealing with this kind of system requires immense energy. This, further, leaves less or no energy for recognizing one’s own internal needs.
How are our bodily systems then supposed to be regulated?
The whole social system as it is now is not designed with the purpose of well-being. It does not teach us how to love ourselves, how to take care of ourselves, or how to cherish ourselves. It is oriented towards profit, resource-grabbing and then mindless resource-using, while well-being is somewhere down the long line of priorities.
Where has this gotten us?
Over the past five years, both the US and Europe have experienced significant challenges in affording basic necessities like food and housing. In the year 2024, 69% were very concerned about the cost of housing in the USA. In 2023, 8.8% of the EU population spent 40% or more of their disposable income on housing
From 2020 to 2024, US food-at-home prices rose by 23.6%, outpacing the general inflation rate of 21.2%. In 2023, 1 in 10 EU inhabitants could not afford a meal with meat, fish, or vegeterian alternative every other day, which is among the items observed at the household level to calculate the severe material and social deprivation rate.
Gallup polls in 2024 indicate that half of respondents in OECD nations are dissatisfied with the availability of affordable housing, due to the surge of the rent prices at the same time that higher prices for other essentials, like food, have reduced disposable incomes.
A system in which one constantly has to worry about the roof over one’s head or being able to afford food is a system in which one is constantly in survival mode.
When our organisms are focused on survival, it is harder to reach well-being, because all of our energy is spent on surviving. There is little energy left for anything else.
But by that time that we discover this, we are already unwell. We are suffering from conditions that we can associate with lethargy, anxiety, not being able to sleep, mood swings, irritability, or more extreme states through which our ache materialises in our bodies.
Instead of the recognition of these imbalances, and looking into conditions that enable them, we diagnose these states and call them pathologies.
That is a view of a reductivist mind.
We humans are not isolated beings. As Atwood and Stolorow emphasize in their book Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life, an individual mind is itself a psychological product crystallizing within a nexus of intersubjective relatedness. This nexus of intersubjective relatedness is necessarily socially shaped- from attachment patterns in the family embedded within how well the wider social net is feeling, to the economic conditions and social policies that either produce well-being or weaken our ability to reach it.
Then there is a question of how much institutions enable or marginalize particular ways of existing. There are also cultural norms that shape the very core of our experience, enabling us or disallowing us to process and be aware of our emotions, to be with our grief, to have transitions when something meaningful happens in our lives or something shakes us to our core. There are narratives that are either there to empower us or weaken our ability to authentically exist.
In the current social system, psychological suffering is often marginalized and pathologized. It is not understood that symptoms are often a call for more balance in an unbalanced state. Categorizing psychological suffering in terms of disorders is a product of a way of thinking oriented towards management, instead the one oriented towards well-being.
The idea that a disorder is somehow disconnected from the wider social system is a reductivist way of thinking. There is no finding out what happens within disorders without systemic thinking and asking what kind of systems contribute to producing what kinds of being unwell.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger warned that when everything in nature is seen as only a resource to be used, the same will apply to humans. There will be a danger of reducing them to a resource.
This is what is happening today, and has been for some time.
When humans are seen only as a resource, there is no place for the sense of well-being. There is no empathy towards a person who is struggling. He or she is deemed useless, as the measurement unit of human value is usefulness. There is no respect towards each human being’s uniqueness, as there is no understanding of this uniqueness.
There is increasing alienation, frustration, and, in an attempt to survive and to fight for resources that appear limited, less and less regard for the Other or for the environment we live in. And we do not feel well.
This is not a viable path forward.
We need to figure out how to change the system so it can orient us towards more well-being.
In its recent document, “Guidance on Mental Health Policy and Strategic Action Plans“, WHO calls for more humane, community-centered systems. One of the core five policy areas that it invites calls for addressing and advancing social and structural determinants of mental health. Social determinants refers to the various conditions in which people are born, grow, develop, live, work, and age, all of which is recognized to play a crucial role in influencing their health.
This means that it is clearly recognized that mental health and well-being are significantly influenced by social factors that shape the distribution of power and resources. Inconsistency in treating people and not treating conditions contributing to them being unwell is also recognized.
To achieve more general well-being, structural factors that shape human existence have to be tackled and this has to happen across all sectors.
The mental health system is plunged into other systems and there has to be a flow within this wider system—material (housing, social welfare), institutional (welfare policies, funding), discursive (how suffering is framed). We need to have sufficient material resources not to constantly be in survival mode, available and affordable housing being the most important. There is a need for a social security system that complements it, as well as welfare policies as they shape the conditions of daily life and thus also mental health.
As outlined in WHO’s Guidance, mental health system requires a clear mental health policy and a plan that should determine goals, principles and priorities for mental health care, with consistent funding over longer time periods. It also requires sustained political will for implementation. It requires inclusion of organizations of people with lived experiences, and a clear understanding of who can contribute mostly to what. It also takes mechanisms to check whether goals that are actually measurable are really implemented and to reveal whether the needs of the community are indeed being met.
To this I would, that on the level of the narrative it also requires recognizing being unwell as an attempt to create more balance, however counterintuitive that might seem at first.
The embeddedness functions on all levels. Awareness of this is the crucial first step towards our collective well-being.
As Gregory Bateson noted, the unit of survival in our world is not the organism or species but the organism-plus-environment. The very survival of the organism depends on the wider net of relationships, including food sources, habitat, other organisms and larger environmental systems.
There is no organism without it being connected to everything else, a truth that mystic traditions comprehended already long ago.
As an Amazonian shamanic saying reflects, “To heal a person, you must heal their place in the forest.“
Therefore, it is time to reflect more carefully on how to heal our places in the forest.
To be mentally healthy, we need to experience safety. On a very basic level. A survival level. And for that, we have to have conditions that enable that. In a systemic, sustainable and replicable manner. On an everyday basis.
I concur with the aims and the scope of this article, and it’s general reflections, but I feel the WHO suggestion which you quote and the spirit of which you seem implicitly to conquer with that we need to initiate structural and functional adjustments in social systems and processes in order to advance the problem is an absurdly unrealistic proposition if you really look at what is demanded by such change and who we are demanding such change from. We are in the era of global and political and environmental crises the magnitude of which seem unequalled in recorded human history, and things have been deteriorating exponentially ever since, to the point that changes are impossible for most people to keep up with, and to the extent that what we once called mental illnesses such as ‘mood disorders’ including depression and anxiety and delusional ideation may even be effecting the majority of Americans right now, at least if they are sane. So to expect extremely expensive adjustments from a social system that has abandoned international aid and tackling climate change is to an extreme degree wishful and delusional thinking, not really thinking at all but a betrayal of your social conditioning which creates the social illusion of a responsive and intelligent social process. So until you wake up from this delusion you will always be reaching for the wrong kind of solutions. I agree with you in your suggestion that nature and a natural way of life is a means to health, but for a real connection with nature and the healing of reconnecting in this way cannot be imagined to take place from a walk in the countryside while living in an insane and catastrophically dangerous social system that is destroying the whole Earth out of it’s stupidity and greed. We have to face up to the fact that there really are no social solutions to many of the great problems that are destroying us, including what we misconstrue as mental illness, but there is a much more widely available solution for each of us individually, whether or not we consider ourselves mentally well or unwell, and that is freedom, truth and nature. We need a natural way of living, which implies natural freedom, and we need that relationship with nature, and we need that relationship with truth, which is to see and understand things as they are, and this is the basis for a healthy life. They are not diferent things – health, life, nature and truth – but this is something only each of us can discover for ourselves. It is not something that can be communicated by mere words, as is evident from the wisdom coming out of Native American shamans and medicine people with an increasingly wie and global reception, yet until the insight has been really discovered through your own perception and understanding of your life and world there is no real insight, and no real transformation. Now to me real health is a natural, free human life, something we have no living memory of and would have to create ourselves from the ashes of a destroyed Earth, if we ever get the chance of such an enormous privilege again. Admittedly it would be even more of a privilege if we hadn’t first destroyed it first. But everything heals given natural freedom for the who le of life, and that is nature healing herself. Society can never help her do that, or help us do that, but a living perception and enquiry into life using the eyes, ears and brain is nature’s own self-empowerment. So this issue of natural healing is something every bit as relevant to those with a diagnosis and those without, not that a diagnosis means indicates anything definite and real about the person diagnosed.
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Thank you for sharing your gifts with the world so generously
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right on – such a shame neoliberalism appears to bad for just about everything.
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We need a political system that is for the many, not the few! That is, “de-lobby” Politics so oligarchs can’t control the agenda of our Political Parties. That way, the manifestos on which these parties are elected cannot be subverted.
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Thanks for this blog post. As another commenter pointed out, it often feels impossible to change the larger forces that leave so many feeling desolate and alienated, and it can be overwhelming to even think about shifting today’s social structures or world events. Still, taking small, steady steps is essential for keeping your sanity. One step is questioning the biomedical model of mental health—the belief that “altered brain chemistry” is the root cause of psychological suffering. This is where the Mad in America community makes such a difference, steadily chipping away at that model and challenging its influence on how we see mental health. More and more, people are recognizing—and this is becoming mainstream—that social factors like heavy social media use, loss of connection, and childhood adversity play a major role in mental health. This is a shift away from the Pharma narrative of the 1980s and 1990s that placed the blame solely on individual brain chemistry, and it’s encouraging to see this change gaining ground.
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You forgot the out-of-control cost of living: safe, affordable housing, accessible, affordable healthcare, including dental & vision, higher education that doesn’t leave people in debt for decades, and a tax system where the mega-wealthy pay their fair share.
And I am NOT speaking as a socialist.
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We are in great, exponential change. Change driving us to something new. Beneath the decay of old systems, that have ALWAYS served only the few, a spiritual revolution is occurring. I see the inevitable decay as the compost that feeds the new garden. I believe it will serve us collectively as a reminder of where we cannot backslide to. And as it doesn’t create wealth for the decaying old system, no news outlets report on it. But I find it because I keep my focus there. As a matter of fact, for me, that keeps my mental well being well and goodly grounded. It’s happening and I’m grateful I’m surrounded by people seeking out that quiet revolution and sharing it as a community.
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It is true that we should not have a mental health system that sees the effects of widespread socioeconomic suppression as a mental problem of the oppressed. But it should see this a mental problem of the oppressors. By fighting the oppressors or desiring their demise, we kill our own chances to live a better life, as this does nothing to actually handle the suppression.
This whole scene is, first, not a widespread mental health problem, but an ethical problem peculiar to a relatively few. They are acting like criminals. Part of Earth’s problem is that we have no workable ethical systems in place. These systems should stand between the legal systems and our healing systems. They should help to resolve conflicts of interest that would make healing impossible, or that shelter people with evil intentions from being handled by the legal system.
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Living in chronic survival mode wreaks havoc on the nervous and endocrine systems, systems that set and maintain the body’s homeostasis. Chronic survival mode just wears them down, rewiring the very systems meant to keep people well.
Our minds and bodies aren’t meant to be repurposed for survival. But survival benefits the industries that feed on collapse—namely psychiatry and psychology.
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It has been suggested to me that the optimum activity mode for the human body would be to risk death at least twice a day. I presume that is based on how we lived in “cave man” times. The topic, however, is difficult to discuss between those who believe we are spiritual beings, and those who do not.
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I grew up with a father who was physically and verbally abusive to his wife and kids to the point we had to run for our lives.
Chronic hypervigilance is no way to live.
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There is certainly a difference between external threats like bad weather or predators and threats within the group or family where there is a promise of and responsibility for safety. I believe the stress comes from the sense of betrayal and deception more than from the physical violence itself.
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