I am meeting a number of people who are complaining of common themes: socio-economic stressors putting
pressure on peoples’ socio-emotional relationships that expose deeper conflicts
in their socio-cultural and psycho-sexual identities. This is a picture of mental
health that looks at the spread of illness through bio-psycho-socio-economic fissures
buried deep below the surface of the structural relations of capitalism;
this makes it a public health problem and an anthropological phenomenon that can
best be studied using an epidemiologic methodology. However, this bizarre triangulation
of scientific evidence-bases is not something that services are currently
equipped to monitor let alone analyse.
As central government’s austerity agenda begins to cascade down
through local communities, a tsunami of economic stressors is swelling up and
threatening to drown us all in a nightmare of gigantic proportions. The only thing
now that is standing between us, our local health and social care services and
complete psychological Armageddon is the resilience of our individual interpersonal
relationships. In a post-modern, virtual-reality, multi-cultural, local/global
community that is exposed to the daily fluctuations of almost every market, the
fragmentations of the psyche are never far from the surface of our social-emotional
and economic relationships.
