62 Shares 0



62

0







We’re all familiar with junk food. We know chips, Oreos, and soda don’t make a healthy meal, and that eating fast food every day is going to leave you feeling awful. We can see our physical health reflecting the changes from that style of eating. But most people don’t make a similar connection with our mental health.

We are a unique species. Our needs are not purely physical, but extend to our mental, social, and even spiritual needs a great deal, as well. When we fail to meet those needs, we suffer. The issue is that we don’t suffer the same way we do with a nutritional deficit. With those, you can run blood tests and see what you’re missing, then pop a multivitamin, add some exercises, and start eating better. Your physical health should reflect those changes.

Mental health doesn’t work the same way. It’s invisible, it’s harder to test and fix, and there’s still a significant stigma around it. That is ridiculous, considering one in six people suffer from some kind of mental illness in the United States. That’s more than 44.5 million people who are struggling, and yet, we still find it so challenging to talk about.

Basic Values

Humans evolved to be social creatures. We have a strong need and desire to be around others, to interact with them, and to have steady, secure friendships. But there are surprisingly few people who have that. Our focus, instead of making friends with people, is competing with them.

Our lifestyle of consumerism leads to a Keeping up With the Kardashians mindset. The things you think you need become increasingly elaborate, and you don’t even realize you’re competing with your friends instead of fostering healthy relationships.

The way we have structured our lives in many first-world countries helps undermine the higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We excel with physical needs like food, water, and clothing. We also do fairly well with safety. But things start to fall apart when we hit the upper three levels, including love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

Our jobs are often out of our control. We can’t work the way we want, we can’t quit the job we have, and our level of inclusion and respect is largely dependent on title and seniority. In other words, for most of the time you’re awake, you’re likely in an environment where you are missing out on a significant portion of your needs. Without a way to counteract that, people become more susceptible to mental deterioration and illnesses.

The Role of Medications

None of this information discounts the role medications play. For many people, they are absolutely necessary — whether they’re mood stabilizers, benzodiazepines, or pain management medications.

However, if you have a mental illness and the only thing you’re doing is taking medication, you’ve probably only solved about half the puzzle, at most. You also need to be in therapy, both to help monitor the continuing effectiveness of your medication and to help you cope with life changes. If you have panic attacks regularly, then yes, medication may help control it and make your life livable.

But there is a definite problem associated with people wanting immediate gratification and reaching for medications first. The biggest danger comes in the form of drugs that are not ideal for taking long-term, like benzodiazepines and opioids. When doctors over-prescribe these medicines, people become reliant on them.

The opioid epidemic the U.S. is currently facing is a prime example of that, but opioids aren’t common with mental health issues. Instead, benzodiazepines such as Xanax and Ativan are the danger here. They are incredibly addictive, and people who are suffering from anxiety with that prescription are at an elevated risk of becoming dependent on them, especially if they’re relying solely on medication and not therapy.

Doctors write about 50 million prescriptions each year for benzodiazepines, which means a huge percentage of the people who suffer from mental illnesses are taking them. People with mental illnesses are already at an increased risk of drug use, and now we may be seeing another entry point for illegal, hard drug use besides opioids.

The Importance of Therapy in Eliminating the Junk

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs represents two kinds of motivation — intrinsic and extrinsic. Your job, your work, your car, the money you make to buy more stuff, and anything else where you have a minimal amount of control over your life are almost always due to extrinsic motivations. So, while there are plenty of people who legitimately need and benefit from medications, they are not the ultimate solution to mental health.

Many people struggling with mental illness need therapy to find what aspects of their lives are not meeting their social needs, the needs where they gain love, acceptance, status, freedom, and self-actualization. In reality, medication will not help a person fix those aspects of their lives — it takes hard work to address them.

The slew of mental health issues that have befallen the United States is a clear indicator something is wrong on a societal level. It makes very little sense for that many people — one-sixth of the population — to have a genetic, unalterable, chemical imbalance.

As humans, we take our cues from the environment. If that environment has become unhealthy for us, but we are forced to stay in it, we will try and adapt. We will not be able to do so with perfect health, so we see indicators of that popping up.

As we fall further into the culture of loving things instead of people, our society is becoming sicker. There are other factors, of course, but our biology and our evolution are important to keep in mind. We are social creatures. When we treat social beings as individuals with no connections, we negate a considerable portion of their needs.