Neonatal consultant Erik Strandness reflects on whether focussing too much on “padding out our CVs” has contributed to the rising levels of mental health struggles

We are facing a mental health crisis in the West characterised by rising levels of anxiety, depression and unhappiness, a situation which seems surprising given that we live in a culture obsessed with self-care, self-help and self-actualization. It appears that when we make everything about us, we end up feeling nothing. 

Martin Luther suggested that the primary problem was our inclination to turn inward on ourselves (incurvatus in se), a problem we have ironically reappropriated as therapy. A tragic turn of events, because rather than provide a cure, it has unleashed a mental illness pandemic, a pandemic that didn’t spontaneously arise in some foreign marketplace of ideas but was the result of a mind virus modified by gain-of-hubris research and leaked from our local mental health centre. 

Therapy, while appropriately attempting to… (Register to read the rest of the aricle)