Heal Community, Not Individual (Global Mental Health Systems Congress 2026)

Heal the Community, Not the Individual (Video presentation to the Global Mental Health Systems Congress 2026)

Session: “Mental Health as a System-Level Phenomenon: From Individual Pathology to Population Dynamics”

Mental health issues are the hidden pandemic of our time. They are still being treated on the individual level, not on the population level (epidemiologically).

→ How mental health manifests at a population level rather than only at the individual level

Individual or relational (Object Relations, Lacan)

Socialization: modeling, roles, narratives, scripts, norms, mores, conventions, inhibitions, rewards and sanctions

→ The role of societal structures, culture, and environment in shaping psychological outcomes

Family

Culture-bound syndromes

Demarcating normal from abnormal (e.g. religion)

Weaponizing mental illness as social control tool

The role of genius (Eysenck)

→ Where current systems fall short in addressing large-scale mental health challenges

Crisis of Medicalization (recent incarnation: neuroscience, psychopharmacology)

The professionalization of care the sidelining of the village

Mental health as a luxury and mental illness as malingering (or stigma), a character flaw, fully at the behest of the individual

Current psychology is asocial, atomized, abstract, statistical, a pseudo-science. We need to rediscover the literary roots of psychology, create healing texts

→ What shifts are needed to move from individual treatment models to system-aware approaches

We need to heal whole communities, not individuals.

Mental illness is a contagion, we need a germ-like theory of psychology

We need to engender a new holistic communal psychology, de-emphasize the Self, re-emphasize the Other

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