Can we have vaccines for mental illnesses?
By: Syd Sidhardha
Tags: Societal Reimagination, Vaccines, Mental Illness Stigma, Therapy, Society

The discourse regarding treatment for mental health issues needs to go beyond encouraging the affected to seek help from medical professionals. While not denying the benefits of seeing a trusted professional and not downplaying one’s emotional turmoil, more often than not the societal structure plays a huge role in developing negativity. In technical terms, this concept is referred to as social stress theory and enough has been written about it. This piece is a more of a reminder.

At least in the context of India, it is no debate that collectivism is revered and individualism is frowned upon. We have been drilled all our life to give up individual interests for the greater good of the society — in smaller units, the family. Nevertheless, this particular credo is in sharp contrast to the new notions of societies and of changing human behaviours that have been developing for the past two to three decades.

This can be seen in the fact that most businesses (read dominant economic structures — “capitalist” businesses) are increasingly focusing on personalization a.k.a customization. The individual is highly valued or at least that is what the individual is made to believe.

From educational institutions to entertainment industries, most of them are genuinely trying to cater to personal tastes: VR technologies, interactive TV shows, personalized learning paths, movie-recommendation engines based on personal tastes, to name a few. This creates an illusion of gaining autonomy over one’s life, at least in materialistic terms.

The trouble starts when the same individual tries to exercise his ‘powers’ over the intangible, emotional, and deeply personal aspects of his life. The globalised world shows one path whereas the conventions force you to take a different direction. Familial structures are practically becoming overwhelmingly nuclear; things get difficult when one is pushed to fulfil the previous era’s familial roles. Individual opinions better be suppressed because ‘choose your battles’. The people whom you have always respected suddenly seem to be irrational.

All this is a tough thing to stomach. It is not easy.

Coming back to where I started, such contradictions lead to interminable unrest in our minds. The mental unrest does not stay mute. If close enough, one can ‘see’ it speak, and the sound is anything but pleasant. Medicine and other forms of treatment take care of the symptoms and pacify them for the time being. However, they are not developed to address the deeply entrenched incompatible ways of life and current societal structures.

Destigmatizing mental illnesses and normalizing treatment are only a fraction of the true solution, if there is one. Newer generations need to be taught differently about their role in the society. They need to be constantly told that they can act on their own and that there are no such things as holier values and that all belief systems carry the same weight. What needs to be taught is the ability to handle the consequences of one’s actions.

Durkheim, often regarded as one of principal architects of sociology as an academic discipline, compared society to that of a living organism, in which each organ plays a certain role in keeping the organism alive and functioning. This particular view is limiting in the sense it gives no scope for reorganization for each organ’s role is predefined and it is a sin to think otherwise. We need to ditch this view. Developing vaccines for mental illnesses probably requires us to go back to the drawing board and reorganize the existing structures. While it may be hard to induce such a change and witness it in one’s lifetime, each one of us can at least be a catalyst.