The Milestone in Mental Health

The Milestone for Mental Health

My stake in the mental healthcare discussion is similar to everyone else’s. After half a lifetime of experiences that never quite made sense, things started to click and I was late-diagnosed with ADHD, although I think I’m more AuDHD. Mental healthcare is now a staple of popular media, millions of Internet users discuss it every day, and there has been a rise in activism to push for changes in the shared aspects of our world to accommodate for everyone. This might be a fire that needs to rage if we are to achieve the stubbornest of all civic goals, systemic change, but are we missing something more fundamental?

In this age of constant fighting, where everyone at a moment’s notice has to be prepared to cling-on to their rights, one can’t help thinking we’ve reached a moment in time for a much needed paradigm shift in terms of how we see each other. The wealth gap is eye-wateringly askew, willful planetary destruction coupled with climate change threatens our survival, and governments have inverted, to now be run by naïve ideologues obsessed with stripping all meaningful public services. It’s not surprising this is also the age that the contrived service of “AI” has been foistered on everyone as its core principle is to remove the person from exercising skillsets, although talking points mask this by marketing it as the removal of chores/inconveniences/thought; purveyors of lobotomies once promised the same thing. Chores and inconveniences are still needed to build us as humans – to remove them will make us less human and incapable of the oversight we are supposed to provide over the AI slop produced in our place.

From the outside, it looks like we are living in a fundamentally antihuman era.

With this background, it is not surprising that mental health is on everyone’s lips. One of our strongest pillars for maintaining control of our mental health is to believe that we have a future and it will be better than what we endure in the present. Maintaining this belief starts to become untenable if our standard of living drops and the world seems to be slipping into chaos.

In addition to these environmental factors, everyone remains at the mercy of their biology, something compounded in the US by struggles with health insurance companies. Our brain health can still be undermined by strokes, aneurysms and embolisms, cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, etc. These maladies can impact memory, mood, and personality, if not directly then consequently. A decline in brain health impacts how a person can interact with the world around them and how they have traditionally thought about everything they do and everything they are.

Mental health is a concept premised on the idea that should something be wrong with our minds, we should seek to correct them back to a healthy state of normal. A problem with this idea is that the passage of time, combined with the impact of aging, means returning to a prior state is impossible and the concept of normal quickly becomes a mirage. Normal is a state of mind, once held, that provides a sense of peace and security. When it comes to how we see our health, normal is the security blanket we all crave, and we are sometimes prepared to pay for with defiance. Normal also stops us from recognizing and appreciating difference.

When it comes to brain health, unfortunately there isn’t a lot of utility in talking about what should be. What should be is the question behind systems of morality, law, and justice, so as a line of questioning it is natural for people to think this way. If a brain develops a tumor, the resultant tumor was due to the complexities of human biology, and the oncologist is tasked with removing the tumor and preventing recurrence. They can rightly assume this is a state of brain health that should result in the best outcome for the patient, but should bes are human judgments and attempts at wish fulfillment over complexities that can only be minimally influenced.

Neuroscience has also shown us that common mental health disorders are indicative of unique pathologies, literally meaning that the brains of autists and those with classical personality disorders pursued their own unique development that differs from those without these conditions. Changes are often found in gray and white matter volumes, white matter conductivity (resting and during activity), and gyrification (the amount of folding in the neocortex). But again, these complex and enduring pathologies are not changing course from some ideal, they just are. Human.

To be human and living in the world means we are all united by the same risks to our mental health, even if our desire to see ourselves as normal and healthy prevent us from empathizing with those vocal about their struggle. Disorder and disease are not outside forces looking to infiltrate our bodies, they reflect how our bodies have developed within the complex rubric of gene-environment interaction and how our bodies are responding to life around them; they are all part of what it is to be human, even though our knowledge and technologies have allowed us some influence in these areas to better understand how we can live.

This means that the quest for a compassionate society might not be best served by a multitude of advocacy groups, all competing with their own interests, and quick to be ignored by those who cannot currently identify or use it to turn a profit. An understanding and acceptance of our human nature, as it rightfully applies to all, might be the milestone we need to move forward.

Where is mental health going?

There was a time I was happy that mental health was being discussed, simply because it normalizes that many people, at least temporarily, endure challenging times with depression and anxiety. The need for others to take mental health seriously is important because it supports and encourages people to address their issues, but it also fosters a sense of community that merits the value of not ignoring or denying underlying concerns.

I still think this is important, even though I feel that mental health messaging has become trite and platitudinous, no doubt because it is now a market that needs strict control of messaging for profiting and brand development.

I feel that two problems have emerged from this.

Firstly, even though the realization that comes with understanding one’s own mental health is empowering, there is a key personal choice that follows – how will you live the rest of your life with this information? I would argue everyone has a responsibility to themselves and others to structure their lives in a way that allows them to live optimally with their mental health concerns. Simply speaking, a diagnosis is not a long-term excuse for maladaptive behavior.

Secondly, the sheer number of people to come forward with concerns about their mental health is mindboggling. This raises the very real concern of taking a look at society and expectations and making long-term, systemic changes that minimize declines in mental health. My fear is that mental health is becoming a reliable market, and as such, in order to profit, the mentally disordered become necessary. This is not unlike establishing a private prison system, which needs prisoners to justify its existence.

One cannot help feeling that we find ourselves at the concluding end of a system where we will have to go back to some sort of beginning again to rediscover who we are and what we need.

The vigilance we need to keep track of what is being normalized is exhausting.