Mental illness is surging even in the world’s happiest countries

My personal perspective:

There's a lot to be said about humanities value models of life. You aren't here to acquire wealth, build a career, or do anything that society may call normal and successful. Yet, most of us blindly chase this dangling carrot, often the price is a life we forgot to live truly for ourselves.

Being youthful means to be free from the shackles of normality that society uses to tie us down. Youth often sees the dilemma, they see the mess our false models have created for the planet and they begin to initiate their own internal struggles between their dreams and the human system. They go seek help from health professionals but the issues are systemic to society itself, not the individual.

By the time they are mid 30, most will be married, have a child, have a mortgage and a decent car, along side a job or career, but probably ended up suppressing their dreams and their truth to achieve all that. Now they have dependants and debt and there's not a huge amount of space for change that they are yerning for. They wanted to live abroad, learn foreign languages, busk as a musician in the streets and perform in jazz bars, but now they simply go to work full time, and maybe once a week and on the weekends work on a little side project to keep their creative juices flowing.

We are a civilization that has given into fear and would rather choose the guise of the security and materialistic rhetoric over the liberation of knowing that life is delicate, precious and could be gone tomorrow, so you may as well live it completely in truth, rather than in someone else's narrative.

As one clever guy once told me: our society ain't very functional. Modern medicine treats symptoms while disregarding root causes. Depressed? Get some serotonine boost here, that's it. Not to mention that psychiatry mostly relies on trial and error methods to try improving god knows what went wrong in your head. I'm still waiting for solid research on how to find yourself a fulfilling life ;)

One thing I don't see mentioned in this article is the effect of the unique seasons the Scandinavian countries have; specifically the extreme variations in day length from being so close to the arctic circle. Seasonal affective disorder is a real problem for the people living in that region, and can exasperate otherwise benign mental issues.

IMO: As advertising and consumer culture penetrates more and more of society and daily activities, its singular focus on youth and superficiality will generally make someone feel more and more on the outside, until perhaps there is a fundamental change of philosophy towards life... as well as no longer being targeted in the core 18-40 demographics of consumer culture.

As for men vs women, men basically used to value themselves with echoes of the disposable male: doing risky things. But modern life is less and less risky, and therefore a "brave" man isn't that valuable anymore.

As to the headline, the only advice proffered in the article seems to be "avoid social media". While social media definitely is a tool of the marketing wolves to foment dissatisfaction to drive consumption, that is still scapegoating a specific vector over the fundamental problem of consumer capitalism.

Here are two quotes on society's approach to mental health from Mark Fisher, a prominent social critic who took his own life due to depression. In short, the treatment of mental health as a purely individual issue (and one for which therefore it is the onus of individuals to solve themselves) ignores very real aspects of society which have worsened or at least changed form. This ties into to theory of alienation, too.

"It would be facile to argue that every single case of depression can be attributed to economic or political causes; but it is equally facile to maintain – as the dominant approaches to depression do – that the roots of all depression must always lie either in individual brain chemistry or in early childhood experiences. Most psychiatrists assume that mental illnesses such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated by drugs. But most psychotherapy doesn't address the social causation of mental illness either."

“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”

"It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”