My viewpoint on mental health: how you feel at any given moment and how long that feeling will persist will depend on the structure of your brain and the enviro

My viewpoint on mental health: how you feel at any given moment and how long that feeling will persist will depend on the structure of your brain and the environment in which your brain is in. There are a huge number of variables at play. This environment includes things like: baseline levels of chemical signalling of various kinds going on in your brain (this is plainly apparent when you do any sort of perception or mood altering substance which significantly changes the chemical signalling in your brain); physical health of the body attached to the brain; inputs from your senses and any feelings that may be arising as a result of these inputs; beliefs and assumptions about the world in which you're in; and finally structural considerations of your brain (e.g. is some part of your brain damaged or non-existent). For some people, the majority of problems lie in the "beliefs and assumptions about the world" variable and for these people, therapy is the answer. I imagine for the large majority of people, therapy may give some minor benefits but if you don't attend to your own physical and emotional needs on a regular basis, you are going to feel like garbage. This means eating a healthy diet (with enough calories), getting some exercise, spending time with family and friends, taking some time for yourself to relax and unwind. For those with persistent chemical signalling or structural problems in their brains, they may have to do way more to feel right, including getting on the right drugs and therapy for emotional support. It may suck, but we can only play the hand we're dealt. A few more thoughts on this topic: the world we live in now is so different from the one humans evolved in. We eat different food and eat way more frequently than our ancestors did. We exercise way less and spend very long periods of time in low to medium stress situations instead of short periods of time in high stress situations, which is what our stress response system evolved for. Many of us live semi-isolated lives thinking about how we can help ourselves as individuals instead of living in small to medium sized groups thinking about how we can help ourselves within the context of the group (you would likely have to be doing prosocial things with higher regularity). While there are many advantages of living in the world we now live in as compared to how our paleolithic ancestors lived, there are some incompatibilities with how we have evolved and I think we should be doing more as a society to address these issues.