Welcome to the Age of Anxiety
Mental health is an invisible architect that shapes our inner lives and the world around us.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that mental health is something to manage only when there is an issue that is interrupting our daily lives. More likely, we think it is a problem for others, those who beat the odds and aren’t one of the 1 in 5 people who will have a diagnosable mental disorder at some point in their lifetime. The truth is that we all have mental health, just like we all have physical health. Some may have a genetic predisposition to have more issues (whether they be mental disorders, cancer, or heart disease) but we all need to know how to prevent and manage it.
I have come to understand that mental health is all around us, a powerful force that influences our inner lives as well as culture, technology, business, and policy at large. Mental health is inherently personal, yet it plays the largest role in the public domain. Untreated mental illness is the root cause of almost every major social problem we have in society: addiction, violence, homelessness, and suicide.
As the stigma has eroded, the language of mental health has become embedded in our culture. Music and art have always highlighted emotions, though perhaps never to the extent that they play today in pop culture. Taylor Swift sings about her depression working the graveyard shift and millions (maybe billions) of people sing along knowing that they too are “the problem.” Greta Gerwig’s Barbie realizes she’s in the world once she starts to feel "fear with no specific object.” Later this year, Anxiety will play a starring role as a new emotion in Inside Out 2.
The jury is still out on whether technology will be a net positive or negative for mental health. Social media creates opportunities for connection, and also comparison, and competition. Forty-one states are suing Meta for playing a key role in the youth mental health crisis. On the plus side, tech is the enabler of telehealth which is uniquely positioned to solve some of the greatest barriers (affordability, provider capacity, convenience for patients) that hamper access to mental health care.
We are living in the aftermath of decades of bad or not-good-enough policies that will take decades to change. One of President Kennedy’s last legislative victories was closing mental institutions in favor of community mental health centers so that people like his sister Rosemary Kennedy, would be able to get treatment and live at home. Funding for those community health initiatives never really materialized and so now the largest mental health institutions are prisons.
Public health, the field that is supposed to look after the collective health of us all, has been primarily focused on preventing and managing infectious diseases, like AIDS and COVID. All of the work to improve mental health has fallen on the shoulders of clinicians who are largely trained to treat individuals, not populations.
The one place where mental health’s role is underplayed is in the media. The vast majority of coverage about mental health is relegated to news about celebrity spokespeople and service pieces with the same conclusion: reach out for help if you are struggling. It’s a start, but it’s past time for us to dig deeper and learn more about the outsized influence mental health plays in our world.
It’s past time for us to learn more about the outsized influence mental health plays in our world.
Age of Anxiety will explore how mental health intersects with life today through a public health lens. I’ll breakdown academic research, review policies we have and some we need, and uncover the history that has made the mental health system a hot mess.
I hope this newsletter will give you the context you need to make informed decisions to positively influence mental health for yourselves, your family, and your community.
Coming Up Next Week:
I’ll cover how the popular practice of holding back “younger” kids from Kindergarten can impact their mental health in later years.
Thank you for being on the front lines. This is fight worth having. x