Eco-depression: improving mental health

The Great Grief: How to cope with losing our world. Per Espen Stoknes via ecobuddhism.org. May 5, 2015.

To cope with losing our world requires us to descend through the anger into mourning & sadness, not bypass them to jump onto the optimism bandwagon or escape into indifference.

Climate scientists overwhelmingly say that we will face unprecedented warming in the coming decades. Those same scientists, just like you or I, struggle with the emotions that are evoked by these facts and dire projections. My children—who are now 12 and 16—may live in a world warmer than at any time in the previous 3 million years, and may face challenges that we are only just beginning to contemplate, and in many ways may be deprived of the rich, diverse world we grew up in. How do we relate to – and live – with this sad knowledge?

Across different populations, psychological researchers have documented a long list of mental health consequences of climate change: trauma, shock, stress, anxiety, depression, complicated grief, strains on social relationships, substance abuse, sense of hopelessness, fatalism, resignation, loss of autonomy and sense of control, as well as a loss of personal and occupational identity

Meditation, yoga, and tai chi can reverse damaging effects of stress, new study suggests. KurzweilAI. July 3, 2017.

Even a two-minute brisk walk every half hour will work wonders

The science of stress: from psychology to physiology. 3QuarksDaily. July 20, 2017.

related Q&A:

The surprising benefits of anxiety. Olivia Goldhill, Quartz. Jun 25, 2017.

How to Build Resilience in Midlife. Tara Parker-Pope, NYT. July 25, 2017.

Patients can be pretty good therapists to themselves. CBT self-help: researchers say you might as well be your own therapist. Olivia Goldhill, Quartz. Aug. 20, 2017.

Mindfulness is more than a buzzword; a look at the neuroscience behind the movement. Forbes. Sep 29, 2017.



books:

Anatomy of Melancholy. Minna Zallman Proctor, BookForum. Feb/Mar 2017.
Daphne Merkin wrestles with the albatross of depression in:
This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression. Daphne Merkin


The Psychiatric Drug Industry. Ian Welsh. Jun. 13, 2011.

The New York Review of Books looks into the question of why there is an epidemic of mental illness, and if the drugs used to treat problems like depression actually work. 

Short answer, no, the evidence for the drugs working is exceptionally weak. 

Longer answer, the drugs mess with the patient’s brains, and in the longer term they make their condition worse. The brain tries to neutralize the extra neurotransmitter, or to produce more of the suppressed neurotransmitter, but it eventually fails and burns out, creating what appears to be close to permanent damage (the brain is remarkably plastic so I hesitate to say it lasts forever, but Whitaker’s book, which I have read, includes evidence that even years don’t repair the damage.) 

To put it simply, the psychiatric establishment has been corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry. Shrinks, as a group, remind me of economists, most of them are frauds who follow an orthodoxy they never examine properly, highly credentialed fools who do more damage than good, prescribing medicine based on theories which have never been shown to match reality, or work.

The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? Marcia Angell, NYRB. June 23, 2011.

Nowadays treatment by medical doctors nearly always means psychoactive drugs, that is, drugs that affect the mental state. In fact, most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants. The increased use of drugs to treat psychosis is even more dramatic. The new generation of antipsychotics, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, has replaced cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the US.

What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising? 

These are the questions, among others, that concern the authors of the three provocative books under review here:

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. by Irving Kirsch

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. by Robert Whitaker

Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry—A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis. by Daniel Carlat

Have You a Positive Personal Practice? (Part Two). Cognitive Dissonance, Two Ice Floes. July 25, 2017.

The first step to returning to health is to acknowledge you are sick. The second step to getting better is to treat the cause and not the symptoms. Only the insane or someone who doesn’t actually recognize their illness or symptoms as a problem might argue with the above supposition. 

In other words, if something is perceived as normal and natural, there ain’t nothing to fix. And mama always told me not to fix what ain’t broken. Perfectly reasonable, wouldn’t you say? 

Of course, if everyone is ill (or insane), then ‘normal’ is simply what the majority are doing at that precise moment in space and time. On the flip side, abnormal would be defined as anything the collective hive mind believes is contrary to normal. This is the ultimate in a positive feedback loop, a self-reinforcing pattern that only grows stronger with each successive loop until the moment of self destruction arrives. 

While rarely expressed by individuals in this precise manner, essentially what many people think and say about their lot in life is that they’re doing pretty well, even very good, in adjusting to a difficult and slightly crazy world they were born into when measured against the symbols of success promoted by ‘society’. 

Of course, it is everyone else who is crazy and definitely not the speaker (or thinker) in question. 

Setting aside the question of how society goes about measuring its health, I am constantly reminded of a well known quote by Krishnamurti that goes something like this. 

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” 

Take a long hard look around you, at our so-called society and its inhabitants (that would be you and I) and tell me we are healthy in every sense of the word. 

I dare you. I double dare you. ;-) 

If you answered yes, that society is healthy, then I strongly suggest you are basing your assessment solely upon the fact society reflects back to you what you have been taught are values society prizes as a measure of health and happiness. 

Keep in mind we all alter our own perceived personal reality to fit our worldview and mindset. We seek out information that confirms our point of view and we reject just about anything that refutes our preconceived notions. Also note this exercise in self deception is very fluid and flexible and extremely adaptable to changing conditions in real time and on the fly. 

How else could we justify and rationalize all the murder, mayhem and injustice “We the People”, through our ‘leaders’, inflict upon others…including our neighbors and ourselves. ...

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