Mental health, anecdotally and statistically, is worsening here in Shepparton and nationally, not to mention in other places around the world.
The evidence of what’s happening abounds.
Individual mental health, despite what we might think, is a fragile thing and sometimes the smallest and most insignificant moments can bring significant difficulties.
However, in the past few years we, and that’s everyone, has had their mental health assaulted in a variety of complex and major ways.
COVID-19 has been the most obvious as the isolation it has demanded is contrary to the inclusivity and social connection that undergirds human wellbeing.
On top of that has been the almost impossible to fathom war in Ukraine and although Australians are not directly impacted by the overt violence, it does drive troubles in our lives from market disruption, price increases and the somewhat sleeping threat that what’s happening on the other side of the world could escalate and Australians could be dragged into the war.
Most people inherently seek comfort from certainty and so COVID-19 along with what’s happening in Ukraine leads to mental dissonance, psychological unrest, and rips our confidence to shreds.
Beyond that people are coping with rising vehicle fuel costs, electricity and gas costs have reached hitherto unseen levels, house costs have raced to stratospheric-like proportions and bubbling away beneath all this is climate change.
And just a couple of weeks ago, I listened as South Australian general practitioner Kate Wylie talked about how many of her patients volunteered concerns they had about the state of the planet.
Climate change, she said, was being manifested among many of her patients as eco-anxiety.
Dr Wylie who has long been concerned about public health and the impact climate change is having upon it will be in Shepparton, virtually at least, next Saturday at a Zoom meeting organised by Beneath the Wisteria.
Further, it was only a week later that I interviewed the internationally renowned author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins, and he links much of our unsettled thinking to prevailing economic systems.
The United States writer has described what exists as the “death economy” and what should be our goal, he argued, is the “living economy” as the latter brings many benefits, including improvements in our mental health.
Of course the arguments of Perkins and his sympathetic counterparts do not pass muster with many who point to wonderful successes of our rich and modern societies.
Perkins will remind us, however, as does Ed Lewis in the preface of Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy that what exists has given us poverty, exploitation, instability, hierarchy, subordination, environmental exhaustion, radical inequalities of wealth and power.
All those things, combined with the climate-induced bushfires that raged along the east coast of Australia in 2019-20 and now more flooding in NSW, bring on what Dr Kate Wylie is seeing as eco-anxiety.
Bill Nye, who is known as “The Science Guy” says we need not worry about recycling, rather who we vote for when we step into the polling booth.
Well, we have just been to polling booth here in Australia and although we didn’t make too much climate progress when we handed the seat back to the National Party, it’s now up to each of us to work with our newly elected member Sam Birrell to tackle the climate crisis and, along with that, protect our mental health.
Robert McLean is a former editor of the Shepparton News