The idea of what constitutes “good health” has evolved over time. A few decades ago, people would visit their general practitioner when they had issues with mobility, or some strange pain in their stomachs, or rashes on their skin, or any other physically tangible ailment - and the GP would examine and take a call on whether further medical interventions were needed. However, if people were physically fine but still behaved in a way that was different from what most people around thought of as “normal”, they would either be thought of as just “thinking too much”, or “possessed”, or at worst “crazy”/”insane”. Nobody knew what was going on with these people.
Not entirely physical
But now we know, after a lot of research, that “health” is not always physically tangible - the brain being a very complex and mysterious organ, it creates issues that are felt “in the mind”, so to speak - and hence it becomes important to address one’s “mental health” issues as well. Thanks to a lot of effort by the medical community and awareness campaigns, the acceptance of mental health problems and disorders has grown significantly in society, and people are mostly no longer thought of as being “possessed” or “insane” when they display abnormal behaviours.
However, one need not be at the extremes to be characterized as having difficulties with their mental health. In fact, in many cases, people may be going through their daily lives in a seemingly normal-yet-unsustainable way until there comes a point when they burn out, or have a breakdown, or spiral into major depression.
Especially now, with a variety of factors influencing people’s mental health, and the generally increased complexity and uncertainty of the world, it becomes imperative to understand and explore what kind of policy interventions would be needed at a societal level to support the population cope with this rapidly changing world. Left unchecked, a lot of people would enter a space of being unheard and uncared for, and this form of “disenfranchisement” in participating in the activities of society could have severe detrimental downstream effects for society as a whole; the costs are difficult to quantify, but are very real.
An increase in prevalence
While it is difficult to know the prevalence of mental health problems a century ago considering that it wasn’t really a studied (or even known) topic, there are robust estimates and data from the past couple of decades. There is a clear rise in the prevalence of mental health problems in the form of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, etc. among various age groups, but particularly among people in their teenage years.
There could be lots of underlying factors leading to this - extreme market competition, unemployment, financial distress, rise of social media usage, and so on - and a combination of these can really lead to a feeling of hopelessness among the youth, which can be devastating not only for their individual personal lives, but even for the stability of society as a whole.
Policy interventions
While difficult to formulate the concept of mental health from a “market failures” frame, and hence to justify government interventions directly, the government could nevertheless take some active steps in the form of better policies to help with the situation.
Incentives for mental health professionals
While merely increasing the number of available therapists and psychologists does not address the root cause of the declining general mental health situation, it does help to some extent to provide people a way to cope with their issues. The current number of mental health professionals is quite low in comparison to the population - and hence governments around the world need to focus on promoting education in mental healthcare using the appropriate incentives, be it through good facilities, tuition subsidies, tax exemptions, permanent contracts, funded exchange programs, and so on - so that the number of available mental health professionals is brought to a reasonable standard. The socio-cultural backgrounds of these professionals need to be diverse so that people can find appropriate matches, considering that the socio-cultural context plays a big role in making people feel comfortable while addressing their mental health issues.
Awareness campaigns around mental health
Though young people are more generally aware about mental health issues, in many parts of the world, people from older generations typically do not encourage discussions around this topic because it is entirely unfamiliar - so the government needs to invest in programmes that spread some basic knowledge about mental health, and offer resources that people can readily access to know what actions they could broadly take to help themselves with their situation. For instance, the Dutch government’s “Een Tegen Eenzamheid” is one such awareness initiative around loneliness in the Netherlands,
Greater funding to health ministry programmes
Considering that mental health is a topic that’s in active discussion, the government needs to also consider the fact that a lot is yet unknown (e.g. not having antidepressants without side effects) - so apart from therapy improvements, this includes providing research funding for programmes that can (i) establish robustly using data what biological and environmental factors truly contribute to declining mental health (ii) enable drug discovery and design for new or improved pharmacological solutions if needed for addressing various aspects of mental health.
Mental health issues seem to worsen in general if people spend more time in isolation, and it would help to have community activities on a periodic basis. In many cities, there are either none or very few spaces which are accessible to the public to join and form communities, whether it is in the form of public gardens, libraries, sports centres, or general purpose community halls. The municipality can be allocated enough funds to provide such spaces for people to gather and carry out activities like community kitchens, book clubs, discussions, movie clubs, community gardening, and so on - and this would create a sense of social cohesion over time, thus increasing the overall well-being of the community. The government needs to be careful to not overreach and define these activites, but let people self-organize and form their own communities; it only needs to provide adequate resources and a safe environment.
Appropriate mandatory leave policies
It is quite possible that in a free market, employers provide very few paid holidays as the norm, and employees are left with no choice but to accept the status quo, thereby making themselves prone to work stress-induced mental health issues like depression, burnout, insomnia, and so on. While businesses in general should be free to choose their work and holiday policies (even with regard to leaves), the government should mandate a minimum number of holidays that an employee is obliged to take per year, excluding days on which the employee is sick. The exact number can be worked out based on some deliberations between employee unions, companies, and the government, but it is essential that the government intervene and mandate such a requirement so as to provide a channel for people to reflect on their mental well-being, away from their work environment.
One would usually be wary of governments in matters of content regulation, but there are some exceptional cases in which the government does need to play a role - for instance, movies being rated for age depending on the content’s appropriateness. Considering that a significant link has been established between certain characteristics of social media applications (e.g. infinite scrolling, polarizing content) and their actual impact on people’s behaviour and mental health, especially among children below the age of 16, it is perhaps in the interest of the children to be kept off social media applications in their core formative years. This clearly needs to be deliberated upon to define how the implementation would look like, but this active intervention may be necessary looking at the current rates of mental health problems among the youth. The Australian government, for instance, quite recenty banned social media usage for children under 16, but only time will tell how effective such a drastic measure will be.
Other general interventions
We discussed interventions specifically intended to address the growing rate of mental health problems among the general public, and specifically among the youth. Apart from these, there are some other more general interventions that may aid the mitigation of this problem, like the promotion of sports and other outdoor activities, policies geared towards better working conditions, better healthcare facilities, development of green spaces, reduction in traffic congestion in cities, and so on. A combination of many of these policies would likely improve the overall well-being of society over the long term.
Additionally, there has been no precedent for social media platforms, and they pose a new set of problems altogether - and in most cases governments are not well-equipped to handle regulations around these platforms. No regulation would most likely lead to a toxic competition for people’s attention and have a major detrimental effect on society, and overregulation would stifle creativity and the ability to express dissent in any form. Hence, a permanent expert body comprised of relevant stakeholders and mental health experts would have to be established to periodically review policies concerning social media platforms from the perspective of mental health, and evaluate the next course of amendments based on the evolution of this field. New technological innovations like generative AI, for instance, are also matters of great discussion and it is imperative that any new policies concerning such advancements should take into consideration their possible impact on societal mental health.
To conclude
What the future would look like is anybody’s guess at this point, but one thing is certain - that without policy interventions for safeguarding the mental health of the population against the output of an ultracompetitive social media market, the future of today’s children wouldn’t be “happy”. We really need effective policies around mental health, now.