The Mental Health Crisis: An Insider's Perspective | Phillipa Walker | TEDxYouth@Canberra
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOt3YumyA-A Video ID: wOt3YumyA-A ============================================================ [Music] a little over a year ago when I had just turned 16 I tried to kill myself it was the middle of the night I had been alone for most of the day and I was very very scared the weeks months and years leading up to this had consisted of me seeing and hearing things that weren't really there barely speaking to the people that were most important to me and just generally falling into the pit of my own mental illness luckily before anything could happen I was found taken to the ER and hospitalized after being deemed a danger to myself this is is hopefully alien and horrifying to most people listening but it's not unique you don't need to pay to come to a TED Talk for someone to tell you that we're facing a mental health epidemic one in four teenagers is fighting something that's pushing its way out of them one way or another and this epidemic is as far as we know unprecedented it's a product of the society that's changed so much in the past decade couple decades century and what's changed is as far as I can see from where I'm standing that particularly in the wealthy Western countries where the mental health epidemic is the worst is that things have become even more commercialized even more rational the individual is King and what this means is that we've lost the place for community in our societies see the way that most societies not all but the vast majority used to be organized is that everyone would help one another to work towards a common goal whether this was a goal that they had no choice in we have to wake up in the morning so we can all hunt so we can all eat tonight or some kind of external religion we have to wake up so we can work together and all get to heaven right Heaven's not going anywhere but now the only goal that we're really given by Society at large is wealth which first of all is is completely intangible and second of all just pits us all against each other there's not a tightened group of people supporting one another the way they used to be and if you look around particularly in the middle class these young people who have their needs met who have no apparent external Community outside of their immediate family and sometimes they school it's not unreasonable for them to conclude that their lives are meaningless and that every version of their lives will be and when someone concludes this you can't predict what's going to happen but generally what they do next will fall under the infinitely large umbrella of mental illness whether their brain decides the world is so scary and nonsensical that it starts seeing every threat including the ones that aren't real or that they decide to completely stop participating in the world altogether like myself and generally kids seek help for this they know it's not normal they don't want to feel this way no one likes the idea of a completely pointless existence but when you seek that help you're pushed towards the society instead of away from it you're told that the only that this is an individual issue it's not the same as everyone else and that you need to seek treatment from the people that probably made you feel this way in the first place that's nobody's fault it's not a grand conspiracy as far as I know but um it just is and in my experience when I was in treatment no one could give me a reason to get better no one could give me that external meaning they also can't address wider societal issues that might be contributing to us individual's mental health cognitive behavioral therapy isn't really going to fix the wealth Gap unless I'm doing it wrong but yes so after treatment when I got home I was worse every day was a fight that I was losing it's like I had really died that night and that my body was just stumbling through the life that I'd left behind but luckily through a series of increasingly unlikely events I found myself doing a little bit of volunteering on the side now I won't say the name of this charity but I'll never be grateful enough to them so this volunteering was in shifts so I was always with the same people and it was directly meeting people's needs we were on the ground so I had people around me all working towards a common goal I had found a community within a wider society that didn't have one a little pocket of Hope now don't worry I'm not telling you that you need to go volunteer and build a well in Africa and you'll find your will to live down it that's not I mean unless you are and which go go do that Jesus but um no what I am saying is that this experience gave me the push that I had been looking for that I had been kicking screaming fighting and in one case spitting for that therapy didn't give me they made me believe in external goals external hope and they gave me a reason to get better I'm not done I'm still doing work today I'm pretty sure I'll be doing work for the rest of my life but they gave me what I needed to get me to do the work if you are suicidal if you are self Haring hallucinating mentally ill or otherwise just really tired I'm so sorry and you are right the world is terrifying absurd cruel and you are very perceptive for realizing something that some people never do but if you've realized this and you're still here you are strong you have fought through the cruel world and I have absolute faith that you will continue to fight until you find the community that makes you realize not everything is meaningless if you're not mentally ill if you have sway over mentally ill people if you're in any way involved in the society that I've described I need you to listen to me and I need you to recognize that mental health is not an individual issue it is not a trivial chemical failing and it is not a side effect of an otherwise good society that we can control for it is a direct result of more people than ever before being forced to live in a world where they're not given community the thing that humans are made for and I need you to realize that it is only by recognizing that people need one another and that we can't survive without one another that we'll be able to that we'll be able to address the mental health epidemic in Earnest thank you [Applause]