The case for more active mental health

While the landscape for mental-health focused startups, VCs, research funding, large corporations was beginning to tap into better solutions, COVID-19 has driven the point home and how (pun always intended). For parents, children, employers, employees, presidents, prime ministers, migrants, frontline workers, grandparents — basically everybody. Much like coronavirus, mental health is indifferent to race, colour, class, gender, national boundaries. Be more like coronavirus.

Since mental health has always been taboo, we just don’t know enough because we haven’t read enough, written enough, talked enough, done enough. While navigating through my own depression, I was recommended — Lost Connections by Johann Hari. I had been feeling immense disconnection with my job at the time, and slowly disconnecting with the other things I used to enjoy doing. Since I was already working on my own mental health startup, I wasn’t uninitiated with these ‘symptoms’. But if I knew why I was feeling like this, why couldn’t I have fixed it in time?

Johann Hari asks question after question about the status quo of depression and anxiety — ‘What are antidepressant pills doing?’, ‘Is there really a chemical imbalance?’, ‘Is this hereditary?’, ‘Is mental health a myth?’, ‘Are millennials overreacting?’. The book answers these questions better than I will, so I’ll spare your time. But months after reading this book, I can recall a few principles I’ve adapted to my lifestyle that improved my quality of life.

So while we’re joining friends and gym-buddies through online zoom classes and taking a walk every evening, it’s time to add an element for more active mental health routinely. Case closed?

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