On Mental Health
“Mental Health” is notoriously hard to measure. Unlike the body where you can check vitals, the mind’s vitals haven’t really been established in any field. (I know because I’ve created numerous mental health and wellbeing indices for several large organizations using the best research, data, and models available.)
Psychology has tried and failed miserably. Neurologists can look at blood-oxygen activity and poorly speculate the state of your conscious mind. And physicians can really only attempt to treat unwanted symptoms, which the patient’s uneducated opinion is required to determine.
Health
I think the recent increase in mental health disorders comes from the fact of “Mental Health” really being a single sample of “Social Health”, where each mind in the hive has their health standards set by the hive as a whole or those closest to them in the nest. Even the word “health” itself is a relative term and originally means “related to a whole”. The hive tells you that you’re depressed. The hive says your state is not normal, is good or bad. Social norms determine the mental norms your mental health is measured against.
The popular “mental disorders” are all unequivocally brain-metabolism based, resulting from lifestyle choices (sleep, diet, exercise, drug use) and socially-influenced stress. So these aren’t disorders, but labels for the things in your life your doing or not doing that put you in an undesired place. Looking at them like disorders has been dangerous and a complete failure.
For the most part, what we’ve been seeing as the “mental health crisis” is really confusing certain drug usage and reporting, with the facts. Westernized people use more weed, Adderall, Xanax, illicit drugs, etc. than they’ve ever before not because of a crisis, but primarily due to two mental-health-dictating factors: Trends and Availability .
Availability
Availability is easy to understand. It is driven by market dynamics and good ol’ peddling by corporate interests. That’s it. Producing more at scale has better economics, which means you need to increase demand, which means you try everything to get people to use it more, even and especially if they don’t need it.
Since this is pretty established and has been revealed to be happening at multiple large drug companies across numerous drug markets, I’m not going to go into this one further. You can’t even knock the companies for doing this, they’re simply playing the market game as it was designed. I think availability is an equal factor to trends, but most ignore it because it’s a law of the market which we’re not going to be able to change anytime soon, if ever.
Trends
By Trends, which really results from social availability, I mean the aggregate social patterns shown amongst groups - esp with the highest reported mental health issues. These include the social group “norms” and “identifiers”.
“Norms” are the set of beliefs and behaviors adopted by a group. “Identifiers” are the keystone to the identity of the group (think black clothes and death-obsession for goths or sports teams for jocks).
Norms are almost never explicitly set, but somehow the group converges on them. Norms can be contagious and bad too, where they’re good for each group but bad for the population as a hole. But the bad ones usually die off.
How trends form
As most know, when enough people gather in one place, social groups or clusters naturally form. Each group has a rough set of shared norms and identifiers establishing commonality amongst its members, which is why they grouped that way.
With each cycle of this population of people, new groups with new norms and identifiers get formed or old ones get modified or removed. Sometimes they get simpler, sometimes they get fairly nuanced and complex.
The marker of a trend is that a group has adopted some new belief or behavior as a norm or as (or in support of) their identifier. The strongest trends have the greatest contagion and can spread across multiple groups while keeping the group intact. Sometimes norm trends are so good, they’re adopted by most of the groups (for example, it’s not cool to bully others).
So if a norm or identifier gets co-opted by many different groups, it’s a strong indicator of a standardized belief across the whole population (comprising those groups). In the case of younger generations, watching popular norms and identifiers will indicate the updated beliefs of each new generation.
Contentious trends
This is where things like gender identity and other evolving social norms start to play an interesting part. I think the most interesting part of gender identity becoming a trending norm of the youth is that it’s a concept rooted in identity itself spreading around people who are just starting to search for theirs.
By becoming a norm, it actually gives the group members more time to decide their own identity since it’s now less well defined, being more varied and ambiguous. Assigning themselves labels where there’s no established consensus on a definition. An avoidance-based defense mechanism via equivocation. A pretty impressive means to prolong childhood. [In another chapter, I discuss the natural tendency of advancing societies to increase the length of childhood over time.]
Knowing and even being romantically-involved with numerous LGBTQ+ people, it’s clear a large chunk of them simply want to be part of a group. With each new experience that makes them question the label they assigned themselves, they begin to see playing identity games was simply identity avoidance. At some point, they hated their own identity and thought by changing it, that would make them whole and accepted. When in reality, identity is a truth discovered not a label created.
Parenting undoubtedly influences these trends. Different cultures’ parenting styles allow or block different types of trends. It’s curious that indentity trends are almost completely absent from indian-americans.
I will mention that market influences also absolutely effect social trends. Companies are gaming memes everyday to create trends to move the needle. However, I don’t think these are as impactful on mental health as the local clusters of trends.
If I accept being depressed, because I think or people are signaling that I am, it really means I’m deficient in some, basic health ways (diet, exercise, positive social interaction, etc.) or because I think it’s socially desirable or acceptable to be that way. Maybe my friend says he’s depressed, even though he’s really just avoidant and excessively pessimistic.