How to *actually* solve the mental health crisis.

Here's the truth that's woefully absent from most mental health conversations: you are not the problem.

I'm of the opinion that very few people want to live their lives as victims. Very few people want to passively hand their lives over to a situation and say 'woe is me, I don't know how to cope. My circumstances have overcome me!'

Most people you'll meet with mental health challenges are working hard every day to work with and through them to live as normal a life as they can

(and we can talk all day about the things they can do to support themselves and the things we can do to support them.)

But if we REALLY want to make a dent in mental health improvement, we need to look in the opposite direction;

Instead of looking to individuals to cope with their circumstances, we need to look at the circumstances that are causing the problems. Chances are, they'll affect more than one person.

Quick side note to acknowledge there are MANY contributing factors to poor mental health, including biological and psychological. But today I wanted to focus on another part of the equation that is so often ignored; the social side.

Not the low-level social side where we focus on our immediate social network and how we treat each other. Sure, this can always improve, and it's important to keep our relationships in check.

But at a higher level, we need to look at how we function in groups; in communities, organisations, and as a society.

When we look at the bigger groups, it's easy to see a host of probelms that can affect the individual:

• workplaces with unrealistic workloads and ever-increasing demands, creating a culture of perma-urgency where people are told to 'thrive in a fast-paced environment' with comparatively low wages for the amount of labour expected from fewer people after the latest rounds of redundancies
• residential communities that had a brief glimmer of camaraderie during the pandemic, but have gone back to operating as siloed households where nobody knows anybody and we're all too socially awkward to ask to borrow some tools so we all have thousands of pounds of kit sitting under the stairs or in garages, unused for 95% of the year. (Or is that just me?)
• living in a society that gaslights us into believing that hard work and compliance will always be rewarded, while intentionally broadening the rich-poor divide, punishing the most vulnerable people with cuts to everything from disability allowance to care home funding, allowing the most privileged people in society to avoid taxes so urgently needed to fix everything from the mental health crisis to potholes, and supporting genocides, conflicts and injustices the world over.

With all that in mind, is it any wonder we're a little stressed?!

So what can we actually do about it?

What can we - as poor little individuals do to stem the tidal wave of sh*t coming at us on a regular basis?

Sure, we can build our own boats: by having individual coping skills and resilience, we can ride that tidal wave when it hits.

But wouldn't it be better - and more sustainable - to build a dam to stop that wave from coming?

Wouldn't it be better to build better organisations, communities and a society that doesn't dump on people?

Yes, that's a bigger project; building a dam feels more intimidating than building a boat and would take a lot more organisation, resources, time and attention

but that's where we need to start focusing long-term if we really care about improving mental health for everyone.

You might say we need to build a dam if we give a damn....

Alright, enough cheese - some practical suggestions:

How to build a dam

VOTE

Always vote. Don't give up or get complacent - we need to keep pushing for the best represention in our positions of power

LEAD

Take up leadership positions. The more people we have in influential positions, the more likely it is that positive change can come about. That means putting yourself forward for management roles, taking on responsibility in your hobby group, or starting a community online around a cause you care about. Leadership comes in many flavours; find the one that suits you best.

CHALLENGE

Got too much work on, all the time? Feed that back to your organisation. Encourage others to do the same. Initiate a conversation about workload. Ask how systems and processes could be improved to be more efficient. Get all the departments involved.

CONNECT

We need to stop operating individually to solve mental health problems, because it's a collective problem: we need collective solutions;

Join that group. Sign that petition. Restart that union. Go on that dam-building course.

Whatever you do, don't do it alone, because there is always strength in numbers.

I don't want this article to intimidate anyone, but the problem is bigger than we give it credit for.

Surprisingly, it's not you

but the cool thing is, you might also be a bigger part of the solution than you realise.

?

Vive la f!cking revolution!