The pandemic played hell on mental health in the US. In June 2020, a CDC study found that 63% of young adults were experiencing depression or anxiety. 24% of Americans were prescribed drugs for mental health reasons last year. These percentages are staggering. An underlying cause of such widespread illness is simply that society sucks, yet few news stories on the topic make mention of this.
We live in a world where many natural biological needs and responses are suppressed, often for economic reasons. Our food, air, and water contain toxic chemicals. So do the building materials used to construct our homes and the products we use to clean these homes. The baseline stress this toxicity imposes upon our bodies is significant, and its burden falls disproportionately on the poor.
This biological stress is compounded by the psychological and emotional stresses of living as components of profit machines operated by unaccountable rulers. We're all treated as interchangeable parts by the economy, even as we inevitably encounter personalized problems that demand personalized solutions which often don't exist. Instead of real solutions, we're offered products that make it easier to avoid the problems. More and more, these products are pharmaceutical in nature.
To my way of thinking, the epidemic levels of depression and anxiety we're seeing are symptoms of deeper issues within culture. Media fear-mongering, social atomization, economic hopelessness for the bottom 90%, and many other factors likely play into this. And while improving social bonds has been shown to reduce depression and anxiety, our options for improving these bonds are limited by the constraints of our physical environments and our screwy social ecology.
There are of course degrees of severity when it comes to mental illness. I know one person who has done dozens of ER visits for crippling anxiety attacks, but know many more people who've learned to live with levels of anxiety that may be almost as serious. I've known several people with depression intense enough to be crippling, but know more people with lower-level depression on merry-go-rounds of medication experiments that seem, from the outside, like more trouble than they're worth.
This is not to suggest that psych meds are bad. Indeed, they improve the lives of millions of people, including my own. Yet just eating a healthier diet can improve the symptoms of depression and anxiety. And it seems like some of the increased psychological distress we're seeing since the start of the pandemic might be appropriately interpreted as a signal that society as a whole is doing something wrong and needs to change.
The great danger here is that we seem to be misinterpreting the signal. If a clear majority of young people are psychologically distressed, maybe we should consider improving life for young people. If record numbers of adults are also psychologically distressed, maybe we should think about improving life for adults, too.
As flippant as this sounds, the alternative is the ongoing progressive deterioration of our psychological wellbeing. Already, since 2020, I've noticed a sharp uptick in visible mental illness in my community. People are distressed. They're turning to fentanyl and Flat Earth for comfort.
Better food and the strengthening of social bonds have both been shown to improve mental health. There's a lot of room for positive action inside of that, on both a grassroots and a policy level.
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