The mental health issue is on the rise and increasingly in the headlines. There is hardly a person alive that does not encounter a mental health issue during their life or the lives of people around them. Like any illness, mental health is gradiented – from the light to the severe; from the curable to the incurable.
There are many causes and reasons for mental health issues, some ranging into areas that the writer is not qualified to comment upon. However, an increasing number of mental health issues are given rise to by the following three prime causes:
- The human misalignment
- Stress
- People being treated like commodities
All three live within each other.
Humans are spiritual beings, gifted with life and consciousness, the ability to make choices, to develop, grow, create, and evolve; born naturally aligned and connected to the greater causes of life and existence.
A few days ago a family friend told us the following story: Her six-year-old son asked her “Mom, what stays alive after we die?” The mother said: “Well, life just ends”. The child replied: “This is not true. The soul never dies”; proceeding to provide incredible insights originating from a little human that is still joined to the natural alignment to living. He is not a stand-out case – we hear many similar stories. Something about the nature of the times seems to be engendering an increase; a deepening, persistent search in those who are still open and connected beyond the thinking framework of the 21st century.
Being in the flow and grace of natural human alignment; being exposed to the energetic wave-like flow of brilliance that emanates through it, is deeply settling, bringing with it special forms of well-being, enhancement, closeness to self, and an empowerment of one’s uniqueness and natural talents.
The 21st century, however, seems to excel at disconnecting people from anything real and natural. And one of the outcomes is mental health issues. When a human being is denied being their naturally connected selves, they need to deal with and handle invasive influences and persuasions that should have never come to be in the first place. When one is caused to be at distance from oneself, when one cannot find oneself in oneself, well, one gets lost in translation, leading to all manner of mental health issues.
Let’s focus on one major cause of 21st century stress: The incessant demand to perform, deliver results, meet deadlines… The other side of this is how a person handles stress, where most people do not know how to use themselves properly in their response to it.
Stress impacts two levels in us: The mental/emotional and the physiological. When not handled properly it gradually alters the body’s energetic and hormonal balances. At some point this begins to mess with the central nervous system and the function of the mind, leading to all manner of perception warps, mental apathy and lethargy, and in the more extreme cases, brain atrophy and the dreaded burnout syndrome. You are most likely well-aware of this, from your personal experience, and from witnessing other people’s experiences.
To much of the 21st century, you are not a human being. You are a commodity that delivers some service, part of the machine that keeps it going. You have a certain ‘competencies profile’ that deems you fit for certain tasks that you must fulfil under agreed to conditions, day in, day out.
This sounds terrible. Perhaps this is not true where you are concerned, and some organisations are investing substantially into changing this to a different balance. It is, however, true for most humans alive. In some world locations the resident humans are so much a commodity, where not acting like how they are instructed and expected to act means disposing of a commodity that has just gone off.
Consider the Simone Bales story from the Tokyo Olympics. To those in charge, she, and her compatriots are mere commodities, expected to get those gold medals, and feed the frenzy of glorifying their nations, whatever that means. The inner stories, wishes, desires, feelings, and well-being, of these athletes is of little to no consequence to their task masters. They need winners, no matter what, at whatever cost to the individuals. Examine closely how the US Olympic management initially tried to communicate Simone’s withdrawals, to perceive the depth of this problem.
When a human being is being treated like a commodity, humanity goes out the window and something else enters instead. Humans are sensitive feeling beings, in need of warmth and the right kind of confirmation. Human development cannot proceed in a cold, hard place. When a human is starved from the natural growth vitamins that ought to be part and parcel of human engagement, it leads to all manner of mental health issues.
Now combine the three causes in various measures to feel the scope of the mental health issue.
The answer lives in every one of us. Striving to understand the causes is the first step to creating space for the healing recipe to come into being. True to the theme threaded within the Fulcrum writings, the good news is that a mind-click away is present a wide-open window of opportunity to develop, grow, and discover one’s life’s calling.
With best wishes,
David Gommé
World Copyright 2021© David Gommé