Why Self-Care Isn't Enough |
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Mental health challenges are often symptoms of our wider ailing systems.
Our distress isn't the problem; it alerts us to problems in our environments.
We can’t be healthy by only trying to feel better in a sick world.
We need to make a better world through actions that fix the problems that keep making us sick.
As a psychiatrist, people come to see me for help with their anxiety, depression, addictions, or any other label that fails to adequately describe why we suffer. These diagnoses take on a life of their own when we try to treat “the anxiety” instead of addressing the problem it’s attempting to signal.
We too often misplace the cause of our mental health challenges as problems within the individual, rather than symptoms of the ailing systems we’re all entangled within.
Yet our distress isn’t the problem; it alerts us to problems. It signals that the dynamic systems we depend on to survive—from our bodies to our social worlds, wider communities, countries, geopolitical relations, and ecosystems—need attention and care to bring them back to balance.
So, as our world is pushed to the brink of collapse, we need everyone’s alarms to sound loud and clear to bring all our systems back into balance.
We can’t be healthy by only trying to feel better in a sick world. We need to make a better world through actions that fix the problems that keep........