wanderingintofocus

On the unintentional consequences of an unconsidered approach to raising awareness on mental-emotional health, and its loose parallels to screening and overdiagnosis, briefly _ In "Is it okay to be not okay?" , I had briefly written positively about the increasing awareness of the maintenance of mental-emotional health. However, today I posit that this might not be a wholly societally beneficial trend, for the nature of the current implementations of such awareness-raising might bring about some unintended consequences. Mental-wellness seminars peddled to students and young adults  through our institutions of education today seem to always be quick to denounce the effects of stress and emphasise their deleterious impacts on our quality of life. Often, such seminars use scaremongering to make it almost sound like it's your fault if you have some mental-emotional issues that you cannot overcome because you simply weren't paying enough attention to your health to proacti...

On the life cycle of interpersonal relationships with asymmetrical emotional needs, briefly _ It would be reductive to launch into a discussion about the "okayness" of not being okay without first considering what makes something "okay". Is it necessarily the converse of that which makes something "not okay"?  "Okayness" is not a concrete standard with a universal criteria - it is a value judgement that differs among different people that shapes the general consensus of the "okayness" of the action in question. Hence, two levels of abstraction must be considered - "personal okayness" and "common okayness". With the increasing awareness of the importance of the maintenance of mental and emotional health, the current consensus is that it is okay to not feel okay, because everyone sometimes feels this way, and that it is acceptable to reach out and seek help and/or mental-emotional support from other people. This is an ...