I encounter a lot of mental health issues in my work. I regularly meet overwhelmed patients, scared parents, and stressed out nurses, and then there’s my own mental health to consider too! Mental health shows up pretty constantly in my day-to-day, but a recent CXMH interview with psychotherapist Eric Minton got me thinking about the bigger picture.

I’ve written before about the many influences on teen mental health: school systems, home environments, work schedules, the absurd college admissions process, etc. Sure, neurochemical imbalances and learned behaviors undoubtably affect teens’ overall mental health, and we like focusing on these things since they can usually be measured and adjusted. However, bigger systems also play a huge role in teen mental health, and it’s true for adults too.

Sure, I can blame my workaholic streak on learned behaviors in my childhood or my desire to prove myself or my brain’s difficulty with processing serotonin, but it doesn’t help when my seminary and multiple workplaces actively encouraged these behaviors as well. It’s hard to address individual workaholism without also acknowledging how “grind culture” and the “gig economy” and “these unprecedented times” have created a nation of workaholics. And here we start to get into the big question:

What if it’s not just individuals who are ill?
What if our culture itself is suffering from mental illness?
What if the spikes we’ve seen in mental health hospitalization are directly tied to this larger American Mania?

Some days, it feels like our whole society keeps pushing and pushing,
expecting people to put in absurd hours at minimum wage just to stay housed,
accepting algorithmically generated social media content as reality,
acting as though the past two decades haven’t featured multiple major recessions,
pretending the COVID pandemic is simply over and done,
writing off near-daily mass shootings as natural and inevitable,
denying our collective mortality in conversations about healthcare,
avoiding the housing market’s absurd inflation and inevitable collapse,
celebrating caffeine and carbs while making good nutrition less and less affordable,
focusing on increasingly polarizing and irrational politicians and religious demagogues,
insisting that everyday acts of violence against vulnerable people aren’t happening,
and demanding we do all this with a smile because of “The American Dream”
even though the American Dream is looking increasingly like the American Delusion,
if not the American Nightmare.

This is unhealthy, but there might be hope.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw death unlike anything we’ve seen before, but one of its few upsides was the way it sparked a national conversation about burnout and a reconsideration of how we approach work. Sadly, it seems like this crucial conversation has been set on the altar of “returning to normal.” We’re back to denial, but how long can we really keep this going? Maybe we can force that conversation yet.

So are you depressed? If so, maybe your neurochemistry is off, and some mindfulness exercises, counseling, and an SSRI would really help. But let’s consider a secondary diagnosis here: we live in a manic society which always seems to be careening further out of control, and how can any of us be expected to be perfectly “sane” when the rest of the culture around us seems so insane all the time? For now, we can focus on more controllable factors: an individual’s stressors and habits and neurochemistry. But eventually, we’re going to need to turn to the larger systemic problems too.

The economy is a mental health issue.
Healthcare availability is a mental health issue.
Student loan debt is a mental health issue.
Housing is a mental health issue.
Police practices are a mental health issue.
Nutrition is a mental health issue.
Access to firearms is a mental health issue.
Social media —and media in general— is a mental health issue.
And especially, how we think about work is a mental health issue.

It’s okay to feel overwhelmed in the face of all this. There are so many facets here. And please don’t misunderstand me: individual interventions like counseling and medication are real documented lifesavers. (I know. They’ve saved me.) But with the crisis levels we’re seeing, they’re not enough. We need change on a societal level, and yes, I know it’s going to take time.

In the meantime, please please please have grace for yourself.
It’s hard out there.
You’re doing better than you realize.