Scholars, journalists, practitioners, and other thought leaders all agree — we’re facing a loneliness epidemic that’s as grave a threat to public health as obesity or substance abuse. Where do we go from here?
In this Forum from 2019 at the University of Minnesota, psychiatrist Curt Thompson discusses human flourishing and community. When it comes to mental health, he says, don’t go it alone.
We live in a story that we are navigating, whether we know it or not, and it's in context of that story that we come to develop an understanding not just of what we know, but how we know things. And one of the first things that's important to know is that nobody ever comes to know things in a vacuum.
Mental health is not the absence of pathology; it's the presence of effectively differentiated and linked systems. And for human brains, human minds, it means that I am only going to be as effectively integrated myself as I am integrated with you. I need interaction with you in order for my mind to effectively become what I want it to be.
If you look early in the biblical texts, we see that God says, "Let us make mankind in our image." The notion is that we were never made or designed to live as individuals; we were made to live in community. And what do you know? Neurobiology would suggest that that's how we have to function.
