From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   The West’s Struggle for Mental Health   
   By Liah Greenfeld, May 31, 2022, WSJ   
       
   Since the 1990s, there has been talk of a mental-health epidemic in the U.S.,   
   particularly among young people. The mass shootings last month in Uvalde and   
   Buffalo, carried out by 18-year-old gunmen, have heightened fears that   
   something’s gone horribly    
   wrong. But the problem isn’t new. American psychiatrists have been studying   
   rates of functional mental illness, such as depressive disorders and   
   schizophrenia, since the 1840s. These studies show that the ratio of those   
   suffering from such diseases to    
   the mentally healthy population has been consistently rising.   
      
   Ten years ago, based on the annual Healthy Minds study of college students, 1   
   in 5 college students was dealing with mental illness. Between 2013 and 2021,   
   according to Healthy Minds, the share of U.S. college students affected by   
   depression surged 135%.    
   During the same period, the share of students afflicted by any psychiatric   
   illness doubled to more than 40%. “America’s youth,” wrote journalist   
   Neal Freyman in April, “are in the midst of a spiking mental health crisis,   
   and public health experts    
   are racing to identify the root causes before it gets even worse.”   
      
   They are right to race. Functional mental illness threatens society’s   
   existence and lies behind its social, economic and political ills.   
      
   Functional mental illness has no cure. It can only be managed, for example,   
   with lithium or Prozac. The effectiveness of such management depends on a   
   patient’s rationality, but a symptom of the ailment is irrationality. The   
   epidemic rates of mental    
   illness, even if taken at the 2007 measurement of incidence among adults aged   
   18 to 54 as 20%, means that 1 in 5 American adults at any point in time are   
   likely to be irrational. That is, their judgments would be erroneous and   
   subjective, reflecting    
   their psychological condition and not objective reality. If we consider the   
   current rates among college students, or tomorrow’s elite, we might expect   
   judgments about economic, military, political or social matters by 2 out of   
   every 5 American decision    
   makers soon to become unreliable.   
      
   By definition, functional mental illness is illness of unknown biological   
   origins. The constant, systematic increase in its rates of incidence since the   
   1840s is proof that its origins are not biological. Yet, against all logic,   
   mental-health research    
   focuses exclusively on biology and doesn’t cast a wider explanatory net. The   
   evidence points to a historical and cultural explanation of the increase in   
   incidence rates. Specifically, it suggests that functional mental illness is a   
   characteristic    
   disease of prosperous and secure liberal democracies.   
      
   The more a society is dedicated to the value of equality and the more choices   
   it offers for individual self-determination, the higher its rates of   
   functional mental illness. These rates increase in parallel with the increase   
   in the available occupational,   
    geographical, religious, gender and lifestyle-related choices. This explains   
   why, since the 1970s, the U.S. leads the world as the country most affected by   
   functional mental illness, though other prosperous liberal democracies   
   aren’t far behind.    
   Before the 1970s, first place belonged to the U.K., which lost that ranking   
   together with its empire and the dramatic contraction in the number of choices   
   the nation offered its members as a result. In contrast, rates of functional   
   mental illness in    
   societies that are insecure, poor, inegalitarian or authoritarian are   
   remarkably low. For decades, the World Psychiatric Association has pondered   
   the “perennial puzzle” of the relative immunity to such illnesses in   
   Southeast Asian countries.   
      
   Equality inevitably makes self-definition a matter of one’s own choice, and   
   the formation of personal identity—necessary for mental health—becomes   
   personal responsibility, a burden some people can’t shoulder. A relatively   
   high rate of functional    
   mental illness, expressing itself centrally in dissatisfaction with self and,   
   therefore, social maladjustment, thus must be expected in democracies. But   
   while high rates of mental illness are an old problem, the soaring rates of   
   the recent decades aren’   
   t explained by equality alone. They are related, in addition, to what happened   
   to Western values, especially in the U.S., since the dissolution of the Soviet   
   Union.   
      
   The disappearance of the West’s common opponent rendered individual   
   identities in the West more confusing and dissatisfying. Having lost sight of   
   what they, as a society, were against, millions of Westerners lost the sense   
   of what they represented,    
   rejecting common reference points, such as personal responsibility, which   
   previously constituted the core of the self in the West. Virtues and vices,   
   Soviet-style, came to be seen as characteristics of groups, significant social   
   groupings were defined    
   genetically, all personal discomfort was attributed to society, and the burden   
   of responsibility was shifted off individual shoulders.   
      
   This change transformed the understanding of justice from one based on   
   individual actions to one based on collective, biologically determined   
   dispositions. It encouraged social maladjustment because people believing   
   themselves decent were naturally    
   uncomfortable in a society that wasn’t decent. And at the same time it   
   trapped huge numbers within vicious, yet inescapable genetically determined   
   identities. While solving the problem for some, this change in values   
   accelerated the increase in rates    
   of mental illness.   
      
   The tragedies in Uvalde and Buffalo underscore the urgency of addressing the   
   mental-health crisis. Understanding its causes will help us do so.   
      
   Ms. Greenfeld is university professor and professor of sociology, political   
   science, and anthropology at Boston University and author of “Mind,   
   Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience.”   
      
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wests-struggle-for-mental-healt   
   -illness-uvalde-shooting-depression-anxiety-religion-meaning-aut   
   oritarian-11654034338   
      
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