HGI: The rates of mental illness are a legacy of government

Friday, 11, May 2007 12:00

One excellent and simple measure of how well our leaders – politicians, top bureaucrats, leaders of industry, commerce and the media – do their work is to ask; “is the burden of depression and mental illness rising or falling?” If mental illness rates are rising and life is getting worse for more people, we know we are badly governed. If they are falling, we are well governed.

The Human Givens Institute (HGI) supports a move towards more community-based care and treatment of mental health problems, but it is essential that, for any real progress to be made in tackling moderate and severe mental illness we all need to be working from a solid understanding of why most mental illness occurs.

The HGI’s premise is straightforward: those whose innate emotional needs are well met in the world do not have mental health problems and are better integrated with other people. Those whose needs are not fulfilled, for whatever reason, suffer considerable distress and may develop mental illness, and/or, as a means of coping, antisocial behaviours.

This understanding of mental illness needs to be absorbed: People do not have mental health problems if they are getting their physical and emotional needs met in a balanced way. That’s how nature designed us. Our emotional needs – which are ‘human givens’ – include; the need to feel secure; the need for attention; a sense of autonomy and control; a sense of achievement; being emotionally connected to others; feeling part of a wider community; a sense of status; adequate privacy to consolidate experience and a feeling that life has meaning – which comes from being stretched. These needs were programmed into us from our genes.

There are three ways people are prevented from getting their emotional and physical needs met.

1) The environment they are in is not providing appropriate psychological nourishment for the person;

2) A person doesn’t know how to operate his or her ‘internal guidance systems’ or resources (also ‘human givens’), such as our attention mechanism and imagination, which evolved to help them get their needs met;

3) An individual’s internal guidance systems are damaged due to developmental or environmental circumstances, such as autism or harmful conditioning.

Working on these three possibilities should be the cornerstone to treating mental health.

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In order to find out how well emotional needs are being met in our society today – the essential factor in determining stress levels and mental health – the HGI launched an online Emotional Needs Audit (at: www.enaproject.org) in 2006. The results show, for example, that 16.5 million people say they are ‘not stretched in ways that make life meaningful’ and 21.9 million feel seriously insecure in at least one major area of their life.