Picture This: Mental Wellness in 2050

I want you to do some mental work right now – if you’re up for it. I want you to pause and do the work of imagining.

It’s 2050. Mental illness has been transformed. It’s reached a status like polio or smallpox –?something that hurt people in the past and is still around, but is no longer a topic the surgeon general or the public talks about with searing regularity. Young, vibrant celebrities no longer “open up” about it. Press headlines no longer shock with so-and-so “being diagnosed” or “recovering” in heroic and tragic ways. As a society and culture we’ve moved on. We feel the full range of our emotions normally; we ride the proverbial waves and exist more securely in desired states: clear-headed, content, and calm. We were taught how to do so in schools as children. We no longer pursue happiness; instead, we exist in a state of contentment with the pursuit. Mental wellness is normal. All of it is, really, no big deal.

Can you imagine it? I’ll admit I barely can. But if you can see it, what happened? How did we get there?

May is mental health awareness month. For marketers and politicians alike, this provides a reason to be louder on topics as far ranging as teaching EQ in schools, gun safety measures, and the latest suicide statistics to Obamacare, meditation, and psychedelic-assisted therapy – and to tout products from anxiety-reducing gummies to over-the-counter Narcan.

Many of us who are deeply motivated to find long-term, viable solutions for mental illness do so from places of personal pain that have been transformed. Wounded healers and rising phoenixes amass aplenty in this space. Our hearts, mostly healed and whole, still trace the scarred tissue of where life’s storms passed through, regardless of whether those storms hit us or our loved ones. Our weather vanes are sensitive, and we feel new storms on the horizon. Building towards a better future is a purposeful way to give those scars – and thus our lives – meaning. (Or maybe I’m just speaking for myself here.)

How might we build towards a mentally well 2050, individually and together?

But back to the question: Can you imagine it? 2050, mental wellness, normal. Mental illness, no big deal. Can you see it, feel it, touch it, taste it, hear it? What happened?

When I do the mental labor of imagining my way into a mentally healthy reality, I struggle.

I see fragments of things that have changed: We don’t binge drink as a society, we don’t valorize hustle culture, and each generation can better articulate their inner landscapes than the one that came before. We all slow down more. We live half inside, half out. We eat better. We sleep more. We are more intertwined, with more respect for nature and our necessary daily rhythms. We have thousands of practices to care for the rushing arteries of each nervous mind. Family life has transformed, as have social services. The rigidity of health insurance and the FDA and what is clinical and what is non-clinical are things of the past. They are embarrassing in their immaturity and dysfunction, once we view them at a distance in the rear-view mirror. We’re more nuanced now. We speak of the difference between bipolar and burnout and postpartum depression like we speak of the difference between fibula and tibia and femur. And it all began for us at a young, young age. So young, in fact, that we don’t notice the changes until it’s taught in some kind of history TikTok. These changes came into our life like water: normal, imperative, pure.

As we zoom farther out, mental health just becomes about living well, caring for ourselves and the physical world, managing the depth of life’s strongest emotions with skill, and helping each other navigate the challenges when we inevitably get stuck.?

As far as visions go, this one is admittedly messy.

Here’s why. As we zoom farther and farther out, mental health just becomes about living well, caring for ourselves and the physical world, managing the depth of life’s strongest emotions with skill, and helping each other navigate the challenges when we inevitably get stuck. Mental health, at the end of the day, is about learning to live and thrive, independently and together. The deeper we get into the issues, the more we realize that these are issues of living a beautiful life, a dolce vita, itself. Mental illnesses are not eviscerated; rather, they are relegated to the long archive of things that may harm, paired with known solutions for how they’re healed.

I care deeply about mental health, and I’ve dedicated a large portion of my vocation to building solutions that create this very future. Perhaps what has felt like a Herculean effort will result in the tiniest of visible steps. Today, you know me as a wellness entrepreneur building for brain health, of which mental health forms one column of the arched door. In my past lives, I have also been a strict Ashtanga yoga teacher, a technology-scrutinizing Yale sociologist, an empathetic-AI-app-maker, and a meditation marketer.

In each of these chapters, jobs, and identities, I’ve asked myself: Why am I doing this? Is it worth it? What does the world need? How might I use my talents both to make a living and also serve? And how do I maintain my own mental health as my unflinching top priority throughout it all?

Over the years, I’ve progressed through chapters of utopian, cynical, hopeful, and pragmatic thinking as it pertains to the role I might play in my time on earth with respect to The Issues. I have both overshot and undershot my abilities to make change. But I will end here by telling you what continues to give me hope.

Mental health is about learning to live and thrive, independently and together. The deeper we get into the issues, the more we realize that these are issues of living a beautiful life, a dolce vita, itself.?

There are treatments and innovations – psychedelic-assisted therapy comes to mind – that will help us learn more about the intricacies of healing deep gullies of the human psyche. There is foundational support – nutritional changes like what we’re spurring here at Parable, along with regenerative agriculture –?that will fortify the day-to-day health of the physical organ that is behind the mind. There are cultural forces like the sober curious movement that are steering us towards newer, healthier, norms. There is social mental health support – peer-to-peer mentoring programs like Sholder and The Friendship Bench that give communities actionable ways to get involved in healing, together. There are solutions for the financial challenges associated with mental health – making therapy accessible through the likes of Therapy Notebooks is one of my favorites.?

And while the path to get there is proving to be excruciatingly painful, I believe we’re close to a tipping point where the gun violence in schools and advocacy groups like Moms Demand Action will end up in real measures being taken to both protect and teach. Emotional intelligence programs that now exist on the cusp — programs like RULER and Aristotle – will be taught in all classrooms with the same urgency and necessity as math.

There are good things happening. They are not easy. My ultimate hope this mental health awareness month is that we each take a moment to pause, imagine, and view The Issues with the gift and curse of an ambitious entrepreneur’s eye.

How might we build towards a mentally well 2050, individually and together?

Each one of us has a unique role to play.

I’ll leave you to imagine it.

Cristina

P.S.: If you’d like to learn more, below is a list of resources and references:?

• RULER and Aristotle-EI – teaching emotional intelligence in schools schools?
• Mindbloom – ketamine therapy for anxiety and depression
• Therapy Notebooks – mental health tools for daily life?
• Sholder – one-to-one support
• The Friendship Bench – student mental health programs
• “Sober Curious” by Ruby Warrington
• Moms Demand Action – grassroots gun safety movement
• Read more: "FDA Approves First Over-the-Counter Naloxone Nasal Spray"

For more notes from?Cristina Poindexter,?sign up for our?newsletter, follow?@thinkparable?on Instagram, and stay in touch right here, at?Parable.