In the past, when things got tough, people buckled down and got on with it.
Many men died well before their allotted "three score years and ten", leaving widows with young families; many women died in or soon after childbirth, leaving husbands with gaggles of children to care for. Many children died in infancy or early childhood from diseases that are now almost unknown or, at least, are easily curable.
Populations suffered through famines and plagues and wars raged around them; poverty, genuine poverty rather than the invented poverty of today, was rife; people lived in constant fear of offending some overlord. During all this horror, people continued to get on with their lives without the help of armies of psychiatrists and psychologists, without the input of hordes of counsellors, social workers and other, often self-appointed, mental health 'experts'. the world continued to turn and dramatic advances were made - the Renaissance, the opening up of the continents, the Industrial Revolution, discoveries in science and medicine, even the beginning of the Space Age - all of this happened while people managed without the assistance of the mental health brigades.
Today, our society is top heavy with those who see every slight deviation from some invented 'norm' as being a sign of 'mental health problems'. The airwaves and media are full of people who never stop talking about the 'problems' faced by some group in society, be it school children, 'the young', 'first time mothers', 'single mothers', 'the bereaved, 'the elderly', 'the disabled', 'minorities' - you name it and there's someone offering to help them "deal with" their "mental health issues".
I have no doubt that some people do have genuine problems. Some people do have difficulty coping with everyday life but the vast majority, given respite from the constant avalanche of warnings, advice and offers of help about their "mental health problems", would find their own ways to survive as their parents, grandparents and hundreds of generations before them did.
We are told that today's world is so fast, that life is so hard, that things are so different from the past that it's not surprising that so many can't cope; that our school children are under so much pressure that it's not surprising that they suffer breakdowns. That people are "so depressed" by lockdown and the resultant inability to see our friends.
What utter poppycock.
All of this drivel is nothing but the invention of those who make their livings from 'helping' and 'supporting' those who are supposedly afflicted with the mostly mythical array of "mental health problems" that these same experts have also invented. We now live in a world in which virtually every single one of us could be 'diagnosed' with some sort of "mental health problem" if only we'd take the trouble to seek out help. It is a strange application of Parkinson's Law which itself states that work expands to fill the available time - now it's mental problems that expand exponentially to occupy the ever increasing hordes of mental health 'professionals'.
This is all very perverse. As our society has developed, we've created a world in which image is all important and one in which self aggrandisement assumes gigantic proportions. We are deluged with meaningless terms such as diversity and equality, true history is rejected in favour of some re-imagining of the past based on supposed modern values, and all of this in pursuit of ludicrous notions dreamt up by a band of self-serving 'experts' with axes to grind.
One of the principal consequences of this 'new world' has been the opportunity to invent new problems from which we can all suffer. Anyone who now feels a little left out or sad, anyone who is on the sharp end of some unpleasant words, indeed anyone who is slightly different, is encouraged to seek 'help'. This 'help' will inevitably involve 'counselling' and the reinforcement of whatever bad feelings the seeker had; soon, there will be a need for more 'expert help', followed by pills and potions. A self fulfilling diagnosis that serves the purposes of those providing the 'help' far more than it does those of the person seeking it.
There were bullies when I was at school and we survived because we didn't hear all of the rubbish spouted about bullying today. We got on with our lives, regardless of the bullies' activities. Of course, we didn't have the internet to worry about, instead we went out, to the local park with our real friends, rather than getting worked up by the unkind words of some virtual 'friends'. If anyone said mean things, we relied on the truth of the old, old adage "Sticks and stone may break my bones but words can never harm me".
Oh for a return to those days, when whingeing about what someone had said was met with derision. Today we have thought crimes, invented to 'safeguard' every minority under the sun as well as women, although there are no such laws to protect men. Crimes can be deemed to have been committed not in actuality but because the supposed victim feels aggrieved; can this really be just ? If a white man kicks a coloured man, the crime will be considered to be 'racially aggravated', regardless of the offender's actual motives; if the boot is on the other foot, race is rarely, if ever, considered to have been relevant. Why is this ?
Our world is a mess, largely of our own making, although that making has been accomplished by only a tiny minority while the rest of us have sat around and done little to influence things. Far too many of us have become comfortable and lazy, no longer even bothering to do our own shopping and relying, instead, on retailers to deliver everything from milk to medicines to our doors. We live on our computers, in whatever form they take, addicted to Facebook or TikTok, Instagram or WhatsApp, or whatever is the latest fad. Far too many of us open ourselves up to the 'online abuse' which seems to be the cause of so much of the imagined 'mental health problems' experienced by the younger generations.
We have created our own 'Hell on Earth' and the psych-fraternity love it. Now we need to rein this back, stop dishing out the empathy, sympathy and pills and start being rather more honest. Facebook and its like are pure evil and serve no purpose other than the enrichment of their owners. Thought crimes have no place in our world. People are not all equal and men and women are different. Sex and gender are the same thing and are not interchangeable. It is perfectly reasonable to say that homosexuality is wrong, but utterly unreasonable to be vilified for saying it.
Sadly, I see little chance that enough people will see the light before it;s far too late; indeed, it may well be too late already.
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