By: Stijn Willemse
With my lungs full of cannabis smoke, I held my breath and threw my uneaten apple into the back of the garden. Only a few minutes prior I had fashioned it into a pipe with my bike key, using the top as a bowl and digging an air canal through the side from where I could inhale my fleeting source of relief.
I was unaware of it at the time, but I had developed a drug addiction at the age of 16, smoking three, four, sometimes five times a day. The sole purpose of this? To tame an unrelenting existential discomfort I felt as the result of childhood trauma.
Breaking through this addiction two years later, I entered what I hope will remain the darkest time in my life. For two years I struggled with daily anxiety attacks, depression, depersonalisation-derealisation disorder, and suicidal ideation.
Unfortunately, stories like mine, of young people struggling with their mental health, are becoming increasingly common. Psychologists are even calling it a youth mental health epidemic.
At a time when so many of us feel disconnected, my experiences sparked a quest into how we can make the world more human, and help us flourish by promoting social connection.
Where are we now?
Today’s mental health crisis touches a huge portion of our generation. Since 2010 anxiety rates of people aged 18-25 in the US went up by 92%, with suicide rates of kids aged 10-14 more than doubling. In the Netherlands, more than half of people aged 16-25 experience psychological problems.
Although many people blame this crisis on the COVID-19 pandemic, these trends already started to pick up a decade earlier. Social media has also contributed to increasing social isolation among young people, with studies repeatedly showing clear links between hours spent on social media and depression and suicidal ideation.
Social media platforms are engineered to foster user addiction and reward sensationalist content. The hours spent online watching increasingly intense content create a powerful cocktail for loneliness, stress, confusion, and hopelessness. Even though social media are not the only factor contributing to this crisis, they are places where many cultural trends and global shifts converge, making them an important curator of today’s youth zeitgeist.
Where can we go?
Throughout history, humans have reacted to unfavourable conditions in relentless and inspiring ways. Until very recently, famine, disease, and conflict were the norm for most. But still, we found solutions, and human development has progressed steadily through the centuries.
Although many of us in the West now enjoy a high material quality of life, our economic development has carried undeniable “hidden” costs. Climate change, continued human exploitation, and the present-day degradation of mental health leave many impoverished in a different way.
But the resilience of humankind has yet again revealed itself in how initiatives across the globe are starting to respond to our mental health crisis.
On a micro-level, countless grassroots projects are helping people reconnect, and fighting social isolation. A few years ago, with a group of friends I launched DIS-ORDER, a company working to break the stigma around mental health issues. We’ve worked to initiate and normalise vulnerable conversations, by using clothing as a canvas for statements and graphic designs intended to provoke connections. And we’ve not only had a strongly positive response from the community in our town of Maastricht. Through the internet, we’ve also shipped our products to more than a dozen countries around the world, showing the paradoxical power of social media in both connecting and isolating people.
Not only are there many small initiatives working to change how we deal with mental health in society, but on a macro-level we are seeing action as well to increase human flourishing. In response to public and government pressure, social media apps like Instagram and TikTok are imposing age restrictions. In the workplace, employee well-being has also become more important. And because of increasing public interest, researchers and psychologists are given a larger platform to share the insights helping people at a massive scale.
Even though there is no single perfect solution for the mental health crisis, there is clear momentum towards changing our approach across society, business, and politics.
The road ahead
There is a long road ahead to improve society-wide well-being, but I believe it is one of our most worthwhile endeavours. By learning how to care for ourselves, our loved ones, and strangers, we have the ability to create more fulfilled, connected, and resilient communities, better equipped to deal with the growing challenges of the 21st century.
Whether we achieve that ourselves by sparking deeper connections over a board game, starting a conversation with a stranger wearing a thought-provoking t-shirt, or through our governments and research institutions prioritising human flourishing, the power to create this change is in our hands. For me creating this change is worthwhile. The wasted apples of my past would agree, and I hope you do too.
