Mental Health In The City…

Living In cities can be stressful, Here in Seattle we are ‘suffering’ from a surge in construction, inbound migration, business growth, and enormous income disparity.  The city once known for garage band grunge is now becoming a pulse point for technology, on line retail and many other growth industries.  According to Forbes Seattle is 6th in the Top 20 fastest growing cities in the united states.

Tomorrow, October 10th 2015 is World Mental Health Day, perhaps its a good time for Seattleites’ to step back from the grind for a moment and assess what’s working in their lives, and just as importantly, what isn’t.  Time is a luxury we often fail to afford ourselves of, and the stress and competitive nature inherent in many of our technology and startup workdays can cause you to emotionally bind your self worth and emotional stability to a measure that actually holds very little meaning to you.  Mental health is now a bigger issue for society than ever.  The continual grind of the high stress, high competition urban professional lifestyle puts your mental systems at risk, not unlike the way excessive heat, inadequate access to airflow, can cause a computer to overheat and crash.  The effort to force more and more into the finite hours of our days can be the starting point of a mental illness, typically a depression or anxiety disorder.  Unlike the computer however, the human psyche is not disposable, and often acknowledging that there is a problem is met with disdain rather then support.It doesn’t have to be this way – The power to correct our course is in each of our hands. World Mental Health Day should remind us, and our government, of the need to continue to fund research into the unglamorous areas of healthcare, which address vast pools of human suffering.  We have begin to acknowledge that healthcare is a right that all humanity deserves, and that mental health is at parity with physical wellness, but there is far more ground to cover.

Mental disorders affect nearly 12 percent of the world’s population – about 450 million or one out of every four people around the world – will experience a mental illness that would benefit from diagnosis and treatment.  World Mental Health Day is an initiative of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH). The World Health Organization (WHO) and is promoted by the United Nations.