I’m prefacing this by disclosing that I am someone who does take daily medications for mental condition before I get dragged
I know that the overwhelming majority of “drink water, exercise, breathe” mental health experiences don’t fully understand the nuances of mental un-health or neuroses when they prescribe these as solutions to mental ailments over modern psychiatric treatment. But I do think we have to strike a balance between understanding how our world,shaped by the conditions of neoliberal capital, have created/exacerbated our current mental health crises and understanding the diversity of treatments we must consider in treating or coping with the latter. I’m reminded of this quote shared by @mehreenkasana from Charles Bowden,
“We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless.
We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breastfeed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life.
We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.”
Our changed relationship to nature and how we sustain our very bodies stemming from the never ending coercion to work in order to survive has meant that we’ve forgotten or overlooked the simple rituals of breathing, hydrating, exercising, or even eating and their enormous impact on our mental well-being. These shouldn’t be derided as inconsequential steps towards better mental health but should be embraced and implemented on a structural scale in any sort of addressing of mental health. We need to reminded of these simple rituals while, yes, embracing the benefits of modern pyschiatry. These won’t help with BPD, ASD, clinical depression, etc but when you have these the symptoms of habitual dehydration, malnutrition, lack of blood flow do have mental manifestations and can exacerbate more ‘complex’ conditions.
Anyway kids, take your meds but also do drink water, eat some food, stretch, socialize not as more or less immediate cures for your condition but as integral rituals towards a long-term consideration for your physical and mental well-being.
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