GABRIELA OSORIO VILLASEÑOR PSY. D. WWW.PSICOTERAPIACATOLICA.COM 1 Mental health "in free fall" Mental health is one of the most in vogue issues of the moment, increasingly central to public debate and subject of growing attention by policymakers as well. Considered in the past as a secondary and marginal issue (at least in Europe), often underestimated, a source of great prejudice and social stigma, today it has instead become a pivotal point in the various global health programs. The reason why is quickly said: psychological difficulties and psychiatric disorders have literally exploded. The causes of this are well known: in recent years the world's population has been continuously exposed to economic crises, social and political instability, wars and threats of future wars, pandemics and natural disasters, not to mention the climate emergency that now monopolizes all the news... in short, a constant "psychological terrorism" by the mass media, which is accompanied by a progressive and inexorable loss of values in a society where disillusionment, nihilism, hedonism and individualism now dominate. Globalization and the mass migrations caused by wars and widespread poverty have also uprooted many people from their natural environment, displacing them from their family and culture. Many thus abandon real life, anesthetizing themselves and taking refuge in the deceptive virtual world, a problem that affects as is well known, especially the younger generation. The advent of social media in 1997 and the uncontrolled use of electronic devices, has produced a drastic increase in mental illnesses, such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, concentration difficulties, dropping out of school and sports, etc... The suicide rate in young people, which has been more or less constant throughout history, has increased exponentially in the digital age, as can be well seen in the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma." We psychologists are increasingly confronted with new issues related to "nomophobia" and social-media addiction, social isolation such as Hikikomori. In particular, the triggering event that devastated the already shaky psyche of all humanity was the 2020 health emergency, an absolutely traumatic and deeply divisive global event, as a result of which there was an alarming increase in mental illness in people of all ages, from children around 4 years old to the elderly over 80. Particularly affected have been adolescents, who have paid the greatest consequences while paradoxically constituting the category least (indeed not at all) subject to the risk of the disease: they have had isolation, confinement, and distance learning imposed on them; they have been deprived of sports and social relations, in a climate of hatred and "witch-hunting" that has also made them feel responsible for the life and death of their grandparents. And so they spent months in depression from which many never recovered, locked in four walls in front of a desktop screen or a small liquid crystal display. No event however serious it may have been in human history, no war, famine or natural disaster, has split society, the community, the state and even the family itself in two like the Covid because propaganda has imposed a radical polarization of thought by appealing to the individual's innermost fears.
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