“NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE GROWING MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS”
A PRESENTATION BY DR. JIMMY MODY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PSYCHIATRY & MENTAL HEALTH
DUBAI 12TH NOVEMBER 2018
The world is growing more and more fragmented. Nations are growing more fragmented. The mind at the level of the individual is also showing a tendency towards more and more fragmentation.
The leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world is today more concerned about building walls and breaking alliances than he is about building bridges and integrating people of the world.
Geo political and economic unions of the past, like NAFTA and the EU, are under threat of breaking up. Prior to this, the world witnessed the break up of the USSR union.
Religions are growing more and more intolerant and radicalized. Terrorists are an everyday feature in the news headlines today. George Bush, erstwhile President of the USA, declared a war against terrorism worldwide. When he did this he divided the world up into them versus us.
In India, radical and fanatical Hindus have grown in numbers. In India, one dare not kill a cow, but for some, it is ok to rape women and toddlers or kill lower caste people. The Sufi community was thrown out of Islam even though they worshipped the Koran. There is also a movement on today to disenfranchise the Ahmediya Muslim Community.
The world is witnessing a growing mental health problem.
Mental Health Issues have become much more of a concern today than they were 50 years ago! WHO has declared 10th October every year as ‘WORLD MENTAL HEALTH’ day.
The Economist, 11th July 2015, published a special report on Mental Illness, titled – “THE AGE OF UNREASON”.
John Prideaux considers the consequences. “As the world grows richer and older, mental illness is becoming more common”.
The article goes on to say:
“The statistical relationship between mental illness and development is new evidence for an old theory. Since the 19th century, people have been arguing that mental illness is a price to be paid for progress.
“In “Civilisation and its Discontents”, Sigmund Freud popularised the notion that neurosis increased in tandem with profit. Before Freud, an American neurologist, George Beard, had noted that a nervous disorder he labeled neurasthenia (and others nicknamed “Americanitis”) was on the rise. He put it down to the speeding up of modern life, facilitated by the telegraph, the railway, and the press.”
Could it be that this technological progress put ‘power’ into the hands of a few? History has certainly proved that mankind has been in search for more and more ‘power’ since a long time. What we do not see though is that ‘power’ creates fragmentation, division, separation, and isolation. Everybody wants power, especially those who have historically felt disempowered, but only a very few people get it. So is this world now growing more and more divided into ‘bullies’ and those who are their victims, the bullied. Those who have the technology and those who haven’t? Thus heralding in what I would like to call the ‘Age of Arrogance’.
Evidence of this growing fragmentation exists also at the micro level of our families.
“The divorce rate is still high in the U.S. at 53%. But Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, and Hungary are worse off with divorce rates higher than 60%. Belgium has the highest rate of divorce in this data set at a staggering 70%. The lowest official rate is in Chile with 3%”.
May 25th 2014. MAP: Divorce Rates Around The World – BusinessInsider.com
“Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women”. NEW YORK TIMES, April 22, 2016.
A study published in the 2016 Lancet showed that even though Indians accounted for 18% of the global population in 2016, India accounted for 37% of the global suicide deaths among women and 24.3% among men. This could be linked to the growth of technology and progress in India, but it is probably really due to the growing fragmentation of its society. Suicides in India is highest among the women and also among the farming community, both of which are largely disempowered segments of our society. TIMES OF INDIA, SEPT 2018.
It is time that we all need to question as to whether this growing fragmentation is the cause behind the growth of mental illness in the world today, or whether it is the other way around. Whether the growth of mental illness is the cause for the incremental fragmentation and hence violence that the world is witnessing today.
We are all gathered here today at an international forum to discuss and investigate this important issue. Is there a connection between the fragmentation of our minds and the fragmentation we are witnessing in the world today?
Differences seem to breed conflicts, and conflicts, which could choose to conclude in integration, oneness, seem to prefer choosing disintegration, division, and separation. So we are witnessing a world that seems to be growing more and more fragmented every day.
According to the internationally famous sage and philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti,
“The problem is not the world, but you in the relationship with one another, which creates a problem; and that becomes the world’s problem.”
J. KRISHNAMURTI, “RELATIONSHIPS”
In other words ‘Relationships’ and how we each approach them is the real problem. Could this be true?
“Anthropologists who visit modern foraging tribes invariably notice something peculiar about their hosts’ social lives: Hunter-gatherers almost never spend time alone. Even though the typical village consists of only 50 to 200 people, it seems that just about every activity is a social occasion, hunting, cooking, eating, foraging, sleeping, grooming,…”
“The Depression Cure” by Stephen Ilardi, Ph.D.
Examples of such present-day populations are:
- Amish in the USA, and,
- Kaluli in the New Guinea Highlands.
Anthropologist Edward Schieffelin lived with and studied the Kaluli for almost a decade.
According to J. Krishnamurti,
“The process of ISOLATION (DIVISION) is a process of the search for power, (the process of divide and rule), and whether one is seeking power individually or for a racial or national group, there must be isolation, because the very desire for power, for the position, is SEPARATISM.”
J. KRISHNAMURTI, “RELATIONSHIPS”.
We all know what isolation breeds in the human population, right? It breeds loneliness, depression and even anxiety. But we are not aware that anger and arrogance create distance and hence isolation.
“My consciousness is the consciousness of the rest of mankind; though biologically and psychologically we differ, our consciousness is similar in all human beings. If I once realize this, not intellectually but in depth, in my heart, in my blood, in my guts, then my relationship to another undergoes a radical change. Right? It is inevitable.”
J. KRISHNAMURTI, “RELATIONSHIPS”.
In other words, the Consciousness of relationships that we may seek is built on the processes of INTEGRATION (Love, compassion), and not SEPARATION or divisiveness (Suspicion, Fear, Hatred, Power, and Control).
In psychoanalytic theory, authors like Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, and others, wrote extensively about ‘Object Relations Theory’. According to Klein, Fairbairn, and others, the early development of children began with a process called ‘splitting’, where all external objects, starting with the mothers breasts, needed to be ‘split’ into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects, resulting in a process of simultaneous internal splitting of the child’s ego.
This simply meant that at the very outset of life the child learns to differentiate ‘good’ from ‘bad’, and in so doing, develops a defense mechanism to protect it from all that is viewed and believed to be bad. This process of disintegration or fragmentation was seen to continue through childhood and adolescence and was usually balanced by a process of integration. Where the parts were integrated more and more, allowing the child to perceive the mother more and more wholly. Until she was found to be more than the sum of her parts but also a caring, strict, loving mother.
This process of integration leads towards developing a more realistic and holistic inner representation of the external world, where both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can coexist in everything or every object.
Yes, differences exist, and we can interpret them as being good or bad, or simply as different. If differences never existed there would be no learning, nothing to experience, no growth nor expansion of consciousness. Neither pleasure nor pain would have ever existed. It is up to us to feel threatened by differences or challenged by them and hence learns to grow from them and enjoy them, or fight them or run from them.
Hence, at the root of all real development and progress, integration is the key. When integration is blocked or arrested, the splits and divisions continue to rule and gain in force. There is continued violence and fragmentation, resulting in a need for more and more power. A vicious cycle is then formed. Force will always be met with Force, and arrogant phantasies will take over at the cost of Reality.
What this also means is that power acquisition is the antithesis to real inner mental or spiritual progress and development of the self and hence of the world.
We need to ask ourselves here, are each of us really interested in our own growth, development and ongoing learning? In our hierarchy of needs where does self-learning, development and consciousness growth figure? What are our priorities? Are we going to dedicate our entire lives to try and change others or to change ourselves?
Should we continue to learn how to ‘win friends and influence people’? Do we need our relationships largely to make us feel empowered? Special? Should this be what relationships are really for? Or, are our ‘Relationships’ really there to help us to learn, grow, and develop ourselves? To discover the wisdom of love? To become more happy, wiser, compassionate and effective individuals? How should we define the ‘value of Relationships’?