Mental health and living conditions in today’s society (part I)

What relationship can there be between anxiety, sadness, feelings of failure and guilt and the living conditions in which we live?

If we want to adequately address the current malaise and mental health problems, it is necessary to understand that
they respond to certain characteristics of the times in which we live. Without proper guidance, certain therapeutic ideas and practices could be feeding suffering instead of alleviating it.

Mental health problems are usually approached from different dimensions that are interrelated but distinguishable:

internal neurobiological processes (neurochemical imbalances, for example)
individual psychological processes (inadequate beliefs, rigidity in response patterns, deficits in emotional management, etc.)
environmental situations (traumatic events, deficit experiences, bonding deficiencies, economic conditions, etc.).

However, it is not usually taken into account, except as an introduction to the subject, the more general socio-historical conditions in which these mental health problems occur and which seem to influence the way they present themselves and their intensity.
Prestigious authors, from different disciplines, offer us tools not only to better understand how the current world in which we live can be a source of discomfort and emotional suffering, but also to be aware that many of the answers offered to alleviate it can feed the causes of such discomfort.

Prestigious authors, from different disciplines, offer us tools not only to better understand how the current world in which we live can be a source of discomfort and emotional suffering, but also to be aware that many of the answers offered to alleviate it can feed the causes of such discomfort.

Very briefly we can mention some features that would characterize, according to these authors, the present time.

Nihilism: We are living a crisis of values (what is desirable and valuable and what orients our action).We have the perception that we can and should choose, but at the same time values have lost the strength and security they used to provide when they were assumed as absolute.

Crisis of the great narratives: “we are experiencing a crisis of narrative, which manifests itself as disorientation and lack of meaning. (….) Narratives used to assign us a place and give meaning to life and provide support and orientation.[1] The great beliefs and traditions are dead because they no longer have the power to shape and sustain life and communities.

Individualism: The center and axis becomes the individual, who is responsible for choosing which life, which values, which beliefs will sustain his or her actions.

Self-realization and happiness mandates: We perceive that each one is responsible for his own happiness and not achieving it would imply an individual failure.

Performance demands: We live in a culture of self-optimization, performance and self-efficacy. We have to always give the best version of “oneself” in all areas

These epochal tendencies on which we build our lives influence, without our being able to perceive it, the way we see, feel, desire and relate to others.

Our place in the world (social, work, family, community) is no longer stable nor does it give us a sense of identity, among an infinite number of possibilities we must seek our place, continually make decisions, choose what lifestyle to adopt, where to live, how to raise our children, what diet to choose, what risks to take. Faced with the anguish of the lack of references, we are forced to work hard to build a place that we perceive as safe, moving between anxiety, fatigue and boredom.

The feeling of failure, of never living up to expectations is promoted by cultural mandates of success, happiness and self-fulfillment. Placing responsibility on the “autonomous individual” only deepens feelings of guilt, low self-esteem and self-reproach.

A reality (labor, social, configuration of community spaces) in perpetual change, added to the ideas of optimization, permanent personal recycling and maximum efficiency, impel us to a movement of change, adaptation and continuous tension in the face of which we are not allowed to relax.

From the perspective of a psychotherapeutic option, it is essential to be aware of the trends of the time that generate emotional discomfort and to propose a response that is oriented in the opposite direction of these trends, i.e. to situate the particular problem in the context in which it takes place, how the subject perceives and assumes the social and cultural mandates that may be at play, what dynamics of attribution of blame and responsibility he/she presents, how he/she responds to what he/she perceives as threatening, etc.

We will continue to develop this proposal in other articles.

If you are interested in this topic, we will give a course in La Casa Encedida (Madrid) https://www.lacasaencendida.es/solidaridad/problemas-de-salud-mental-y-condiciones-de-vida-en-la-sociedad-actual?eventId=1440

REFERENCES

Augé, Marc (1999). Los no-lugares. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2009 [1970]. La sociedad de consumo: sus mitos y estructuras. Madrid: Siglo XXI.
Bauman, Zygmun (2003) Modernidad Líquida. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Byung-Chul Han (2023) La Crisis de la Narración. Herder
Eidelsztein, Alfredo. (2015). Otro Lacan. Estudio crítico sobre los fundamentos del psicoanálisis lacaniano. Buenos Aires: Letra Viva
Weber, Max (1979 [1944]) Economía y sociedad. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.