“Mental health” is so all-encompassing in its breadth (It’s basically our entire subjective experience with the world) but at the same time, it’s actually quite limiting in the solutions it implies, as if there’s specific ailments or exercises or medications.
Are you saying that mental health is too limiting in terms of its solutions, because the real world is not involved? For example, I might come to a doctor saying that my child is restless. The child might be prescribed with medicine for an ADHD diagnosis, whereas the root cause is a flaky parent.
I agree with this point.
We’re miserable because our world is bad. The mental health crisis is probably better understood as all of us being sad as we collectively and simultaneously burn the world and fill it with trash, seemingly on purpose, and we’re not even having fun.
How is this not an over-simplification? People are miserable for all kinds of reasons. Of course the problem and the solution is always some combination of the world and how we interpret the world, but sometimes the problem lies more in the interpretation than in the world, right? It may have nothing or nearly nothing to do with climate change or the state of the world at large.
The mental health framework, by converting our anger, loneliness, grief, and sadness into medicalized pathologies, stops us from understanding these feelings as valid and actionable. It leads us to seek clinical or technical fixes, like whether we should limit smart phones or whatever.
Which may be valid under some circumstances, but sometimes a clinical fix as you call it might be in order. Sometimes people are just extremely unkind to themselves due to conditionings of the past, which are not relevant anymore today.
I would agree that solutions to mental health problems need to be examined in a biopsychosocial context, but whereas you say that just looking at the person and not the world is too limiting, I think just looking at the state of the world is too limiting.