World Mental Health Day 2022: ...welcome to the conversation, we're so glad you're here...

  From our team:

What better day than World Mental Health Day to try to spark some positive change?

You with us? 

Here's the thing. It's 2022. We've literally just survived a devastating pandemic that continues to impact almost every aspect of our daily lives. 

We.

All of us.

Every single person. Young. Old. Male. Female. Nonbinary. Healthy. Sick. Persons of every race, religion, background and situation.

We.

All human. All impacted. All changed.

All…coping.

Covid-19 came crashing into our lives in 2020 and suddenly the entire landscape changed. Empty schools and empty offices. Grocery stores with one way arrows, and nightly curfews.

Danger. All round. Invisible danger in the very air. 

We were told to stay home. Cautioned to sanitize everything. Suddenly, the world we had lived in was the most dangerous place on earth. And the very lifelines we all had to our own peace of mind (whether friends, or coworkers, or gym routines, or book clubs, etc..) were forcibly abandoned. 

We hunkered down, many in uncomfortably close quarters, others in utter isolation. Victims found themselves locked in with their abusers. Those reliant on childcare struggled to adjust to being primary caregivers. Children woke to find the doors to the outside world firmly locked, and their windows into learning (both in terms of education and socially-emotionally) shuttered. 

We sheltered-in-place. We masked up. We worked from home or didn’t, as the job and housing crises expanded exponentially. We suffered heartbreak and loss and dealt with the desperation of our impotence. For better or worse, mostly the latter, people found themselves cut off, and no matter how one regarded that socialization, we all longed for it, a part of life seemingly lost for good.

And then we Zoomed. (Never doing that again. Blech.)

The outside world came in, with fancy filters and backgrounds to hide or enhance. We stared into preview screens, fixing our hair and finding the right angle. We tested our sound quality and made countless adjustments. We became characters on screen, highlighting our self-perceived good angles and intonations, and hiding all the rest. It was “The Truman Show”, en masse. And as two-week stay-at-home orders extended into a month, then two and so-on, those on the other side of our screens began to seem like nothing more than supporting characters. Gone was the sense of connection. 

In every sense of the word, it was just mimicry of life, a pale imitation of what we’d previously chosen or fallen into. Zoom and its ilk soon lost their appeal. Signals faltered. Lawyers showed up as kittens on screen. Hackers hijacked. People tuned in without turning their cameras or audio on. The pressure to be perfect on camera was too much to bear, too much to bother with. 

As interaction fell by the wayside, we sought ways to fill that void. Some of us dove intensely into self-care, others took up new hobbies. New exercise routines and banana bread replaced the grind of office work, heatless curls and DIY supplanting ‘me time’ services. 

And yet, despite all of us finding ourselves in the same circumstances, hate flourished, a weed overtaking everything. Somehow, some way, things became worse. A shared experience, an almost necessary empathy and sympathy..broke us apart. Left to our own devices, we all developed ‘main character energy’. Our individual experience and the opinions we held - suddenly the only ones of importance. That overwhelming feeling of danger replaced by a sense that we alone held the key to both surviving and thriving. A need to be seen, to be heard…and the weakest among us suddenly became the loudest. 

‘Survival of the Fittest’ was the unspoken echo in a world devoid of social connection, and with no rules in place to steer the competition, contenders threw the worst of themselves into the ring. While plenty worked tirelessly to create avenues of assistance and support, so many others were determined to dismantle the systems of pre-pandemic life and remake the world in their own image…however grim that might be.

We continued to cope.

Masked and screened and removed…we went through the motions of life. Or at least, we tried. But realistically, remote-access meant no access to many in need. Counseling and support services on-hold and doctors’ appointments permanently postponed. Caregivers no longer permitted access. Social services shut down. Medications delayed in-transit. Every aspect of health-care was impacted, and mental-health services took the brunt of it.

It’s 2022 now. The pandemic continues, but we’ve accepted its presence. It’s just a part of life now. Masked/unmasked, we crept back out into the world and began the hard work of rebuilding. Some of us refined by the experience, others of us broken down to just our crudest parts. All of us still coping.

More to the point…all of us made aware of our own shaky grasp on mental and emotional health. All of us having learned how dependent we are on our own individual safety nets.  And so many of us burdened with new fears, new hesitations, new reasons to put off or avoid seeking help. 

Which begs the question: Why, then, are the “proven to be commonplace” struggles with mental and emotional health still stigmatized? Why has the vast majority not found at least some semblance of compassion?

Over the course of the next week, we’ll be diving into the root causes, the ongoing socio-political dynamics, the idea of individual responsibility toward collective reform, as well as our suggestions for changes we all can make, both within ourselves and in our interpersonal relationships.  Please join us, by reading here and furthering the conversation in the comments section across all our platforms.

~~~

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.” ~Mother Teresa