How Our Toxic Culture Affects Mental Health
It's time to talk about the elephant in the room
The “elephant in the room” is an English idiom used to describe a significant issue everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about. How our culture endangers our mental health is an elephant in the room many of us now want to discuss.
The popularity of books like Dr. Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (affiliate link) proves that. The book cites many specific ways our culture endangers our well-being and rewards unhealthy behaviors. Then it summarizes the problem with statements like this:
All in all, the system works with cyclic elegance: a culture founded on mistaken beliefs regarding who and what we are creates conditions that frustrate our basic needs, breeding a populace in pain, disconnected from self, others, and meaning.
A select few—especially those with the sorts of early coping mechanisms that prime them to deny reality, block out empathy, fear vulnerability, mute their own sense of right and wrong, and abjure looking at themselves too closely—will be elevated to power. There they govern over a majority who so crave comfort and stability, who are so ground down by cynicism and alienation, that they will trade authentic instincts and collective self-assertion for the pseudo-attachment of false promises and soothing charisma.
Completing the cycle, our wounded leaders with their blinkered priorities enact social policies that keep conditions how they were, or worse.
Other conversations about our culture’s negative effects on our mental health were in response to Substack posts like this one from
. It explains how visits to Italy helped her see that what is normal in the United States is not normal in other countries. She wrote:I realized there are other places in the world (not just Italy) where life isn't about conspicuous consumption and "crushing" and "killing" your life goals, where people aren't drowning in debt just to pay for basic life necessities. There are places where people have free time and where that free time is used to do things they love — not to start a side hustle.
I started to have a dawning awareness that we don't have to live this way.
In a follow-up article, Kirsten noted that many readers agreed and said they would leave the United States if they could. I’m one of them.
I think about how insane U.S. culture has become every time I see children with clear plastic backpacks. Clear ones are now required to make it harder for kids to bring weapons to school. Safety drills in which kids practice what to do if a gunman enters the building are also mandatory.
Mass shootings have become so common that those requirements seem like reasonable safety precautions. And according to the CDC, “Taking into account all types of firearm injuries, including homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries, firearm injuries were the leading cause of death among children and teens ages 1-19 in 2020 and 2021.”
The for-profit health system in the United States is also detrimental to our mental health. The high cost of care keeps many people from getting the help they need. Pharmaceutical companies make a fortune from drugs they claim will significantly reduce symptoms of depression or anxiety. Those companies fund the research they cite as proof of their drugs’ effectiveness. They also bury or challenge research that shows the drugs can have serious side effects or be highly addictive.
writes about how drug companies also influence the diagnostic criteria for and beliefs about the causes of mental illnesses. Her “Cured: The Memoir” Substack describes the harmful consequences of inaccurate diagnoses of and false assumptions about mental illnesses. She is also the author of Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses (affiliate link), a mental health memoir.Health care is not the only for-profit enterprise that harms our mental health. Our late-stage capitalist culture values profits more than people. Many workers do not get any paid time off; those who do often have to request it months in advance. Companies routinely terminate employees whose jobs can be automated, done by lower-paid workers, or outsourced to independent contractors. Or they relocate to less expensive countries. Or they hire undocumented workers too afraid of deportation to complain about unpaid wages or unsafe working conditions.
Our culture also teaches us to compete with each other instead of cooperate. We are praised and given academic achievement awards when we outperform other students. We learn to follow directions and not to question anything our parents, teachers, or other authority figures tell us to do. We adhere to a strict schedule determined by others and are punished if we arrive late or don’t do our homework.
Even when we work together on group projects or play team sports, we only cooperate with the people in our group. Our goal is to defeat the other team(s) and prove that we are better at something than they are. We still compete to see who scores the most points or is superior in some other way.
All of that prepares us to be employees who will allow someone else to tell us when, where, and how to work and what to do. It teaches us to see each other as rivals who must compete for jobs and promotions.
It also teaches us that success or failure is solely the result of our own actions. Poor people must be lazy, irresponsible, or mentally ill. Wealthy people become rich and powerful because they are smarter, work harder, or have skills that the rest of us lack.
As long as we believe that, we will blame ourselves when we don’t make enough money to pay the rent or buy groceries. And if we have more than enough, we’ll believe we worked hard to get it and anyone else could do the same. We won’t question the economic system, cultural values, and political realities that make it much more difficult for some people to earn a living wage than others. We won’t challenge discriminatory laws or policies. We won’t talk about how or why public schools in some areas are so much better than others.
I think there’s more than enough evidence that denying or ignoring the ways our culture jeopardizes our mental health isn’t working. No matter how much time we spend meditating or doing yoga, how many self-help books we read, or how often we make gratitude lists, our anxiety and despair keeps coming back.
At least mine does, and I’ve talked to a lot of other people who say theirs does, too.
Next week, I’ll suggest some small steps we can all take to help change our toxic culture into a healthier and more welcoming environment for everyone.
Yes, we have a culture in the United States, that is very materialistic and values buying expensive gifts for self and others, for example for Christmas. I am proud of the fact that I try to buy gifts that are reasonable in cost, ranging from $16.00 to $35.00, I remember in my family, during Christmas grow that we often got new socks, mittens, or some minor item for Christmas. And then my mother would take us to the January sales for a new dress or skirt and blouse, or shirt and pants, for my brothers.
I believe our medical and mental medical health care systems (Psychiatrists) emphasize medication as the answer to our problems. It is true that we have therapists and counselors to hear people's anxieties, suicidal thoughts, grief, and depression which I value very much. However, it becomes costly for some people to see a therapist regularly, if they have a wage at the bottom of the wage scale. The people at the lower wage scale, often feel less valued in our society, because of the popular view in the movies, and on social media-the belief that rich people have better lives, and have more happiness than the rest of us. I use to serve the military during my counseling career, and the majority of them were in their twenties, and thirties. They were struggling to gain a foothold in their military jobs; plus dealing with a young marriages or young families. In was no wonder they felt pulled a thousand different directions. Neuoscientists say our human brains do not fully mature until age 26. The young people in the military have to learn coping skills to cope with the long hours on Navy ships, the Navy women are trying to cope with sexual harassment, and sometimes Navy men are trying to cope with sexual harassment. Plus both Navy men and women are away from their families for about 10 to 12 days and nights, when they are on their ships. This is not a helpful culture for supporting young people and young families. So I did a lot of couple's counseling with them as a Counselor. The Navy supervisors of these young people in the Navy would think nothing of asking their people to fill 10 to 12 hour shifts when they worked on these ships. So these Navy people would come off the ships completely exhausted and go to their families. They would usually get 10 to 12 days off which helped. So what I am saying is the military didn't value their young people enough to make sure they had shorter shifts- an 8 hour work day on those ships.. Granted during war time, I can imagine 8 hour shifts would go out the window. So yes, in our culture, any people do not feel valued in the lower class job sectors. This leads to more Mental Health and Medical Health issues in our culture.