Mental Health
Personalities, early attachments, family origins.
These are of my great interests and the cause I care deeply.
Let’s cut to it: mental health is health. It affects how we learn, connect, create, and cope. It shapes our relationships, our resilience, and our ability to show up in the world. And yet—for decades—it’s been pushed to the margins, treated as optional, stigmatized, or siloed off from “real” health care.
The numbers are staggering, but behind them are people—colleagues, students, parents, friends—quietly managing anxiety, depression, burnout, or trauma in systems that often ignore or underfund the support they need. It’s time we stop treating mental health like a private struggle and start recognizing it as a public responsibility.
Over 970 million people are living with mental health disorders today. That’s nearly 1 in 8 globally. Depression and anxiety are leading causes of disability and economic loss, costing the world around $1 trillion a year in lost productivity.
But this isn’t just about stats. It’s about the quiet normalization of burnout, the unspoken weight of grief, the silence around suicide. These issues don't fix themselves. We have to design better systems of care.
Mental health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Chronic stress and depression have ripple effects across the whole body—from heart disease to weakened immunity. And for people with serious mental illness, the average life expectancy is 10–20 years shorter, often due to treatable physical conditions that go unchecked.
If we want holistic well-being, then mental and physical health have to live under the same roof—integrated, not isolated.
When mental health breaks down, so do other systems: education, employment, housing, family. Youth suicide is now the second leading cause of death for people aged 15–29. In the workplace, untreated mental health issues lead to burnout, absenteeism, and turnover.
But here’s the good news: when schools teach emotional literacy, when employers support mental well-being, when communities normalize seeking help, outcomes shift. We can intervene upstream.
Let’s be honest—access is a mess. Even in high-income countries, mental health is wildly underfunded, often accounting for just 2% of health budgets. In low-income regions, over 75% of people with mental health conditions get no treatment at all.
And then there’s stigma—quiet, powerful, and deeply embedded. It’s what keeps people from reaching out, even when services exist. Tackling stigma takes more than awareness campaigns—it takes empathy, language shifts, and systemic change.
Mental health doesn’t begin at crisis. Prevention and early intervention work. Teaching coping skills in school, making therapy affordable, investing in community-based care, offering safe spaces for expression—all of it matters.
So do the basics: movement, sleep, nutrition, social connection. We can’t yoga our way out of structural neglect, but these small levers help build resilience when the bigger gears are turning slowly.
Mental health touches everything. If we want healthier schools, stronger economies, more connected communities, or just a shot at thriving instead of surviving, we have to center mental health in our public and private systems.
It’s not about fixing people—it’s about fixing the conditions around them. That starts with listening, investing, and treating mental health not as a crisis to manage—but as a right to protect.