In recent years, there has been a significant surge in the number of individuals grappling with mental illness in Western societies. Frank Füredi, Executive Director of MCC Brussels, elaborated on this phenomenon in a recent opinion piece published on Mandiner. Füredi noted that in Britain alone, there are now one million more people suffering from mental illness than there were just three years ago. Poor mental health has emerged as the primary cause of disability among adults of working age. Alarmingly, two-thirds of those claiming incapacity benefit cite poor mental health as the reason. This increase in individuals unable to work due to mental illness has resulted in a higher economic inactivity rate than anticipated by the Office for National Statistics. Currently, a record 2.7 million individuals are out of work due to long-term illness, and the projected cost of providing sickness benefits for working-age individuals is expected to rise from £41 billion annually to £69 billion by the end of the decade.
With the diminishing influence of religion, traditional values, and cultural norms, coupled with a tendency to seek psychological explanations for life’s challenges, mental illness has been increasingly accepted as a norm. A significant portion of young people have been conditioned to view themselves as inherently unwell. While this trend is prevalent today, it’s not a recent development.
Speaking to Hungarian Conservative, Frank Füredi observed that this shift began in the West as far back as the 1980s. Ideologies such as liberalism, Marxism, and Christian democracy lost their sway, leaving a societal vacuum. Consequently,
a mental crisis emerged, with people turning away from traditional values towards psychology for solutions.
Füredi underscores the concerning aspect that psychological diagnoses are now sought for commonplace struggles like loneliness or discomfort in unfamiliar social settings. What’s most troubling, he notes, is that even children are being drawn into this process of medicalization.
It’s evident that the issues we’re facing didn’t arise overnight; rather, they’ve been brewing for at least sixty years, with a marked intensification over the past three decades. This prolonged period has seen a weakening of the foundational values of Western societies, creating fertile ground for the rise of gender and woke ideology.
Frank Füredi highlights that in an environment where people feel vulnerable and preoccupied with their identities, ideologies such as woke find it easier to permeate their lives. When these two phenomena intersect, they pose an even more formidable threat to our societies.
Protecting the Youth
As history has repeatedly shown, a weakened society faces an uncertain future. But can this decades-long process be reversed? Füredi suggests that one approach is to
reform how we educate young people.
Füredi advocates for reintroducing essential values and virtues, such as courage, resilience, problem-solving skills, and a strong work ethic, into the core of child-rearing practices. Instead of relegating these virtues to the realm of perceived mental illness, they should be nurtured and emphasized from an early age.
Moreover, Füredi underscores the importance of addressing and fighting back the normalization of mental illness in various media platforms, including social media, television, and streaming services like Netflix. However, he emphasizes that education is the primary arena where these issues can be effectively addressed. By instilling robust values and critical thinking skills in the younger generation, we can potentially counteract the detrimental effects of societal weakness and the normalization of mental illness.
According to Füredi, there are limited ways through which a state’s leadership can effectively reverse this societal trend. ‘Promoting old, traditional, and vital values, leading by example, and encouraging schools to impart these values to younger generations are areas where a government can exert influence,’ he stated.
In this regard, Hungary stands out among European nations, having implemented a notably stringent child protection law that prohibits the promotion of gender and woke ideologies in kindergartens and schools. This legislation greatly aids parents in providing proper education for their children. Furthermore, the government’s values policy places a strong emphasis on traditional Christian values within the education system.
A prime example of this commitment is the conservative education policy, which prioritizes knowledge-based learning and explicitly instils values in children from a very early age. Through such measures, Hungary is leading the way in fostering
a societal framework that upholds and transmits essential values to future generations.
While primarily a Western-centric issue, particularly rooted in America, the influence of American soft power has already spurred the emergence of medicalization in Asia, in addition to its prevalence in the Anglo-American sphere and Europe. This phenomenon is predominantly concentrated in major urban centres, notably affecting the affluent upper-middle-class youth in countries like India and South Korea. Moreover, signs of this trend are also beginning to manifest in Japan, among other Asian nations.
Read more on the subject:
