I was reading an article on mental health in an old issue of Time. It went over a lot of old ground of how medicine needs to take into account the body and vice versa. Physicians explaining various therapies, drugs and such, wrote most of the pieces. While a whole slew of issues like usefulness of meditation, prayer etc to bodily and mental health were discussed; they hardly talked about the social aspects of health. And I think that’s a big hole in thinking about such issues. Mainly because human beings as we exist function as a community and a society and if as the statistics show (30,000 suicides due to depression alone last year and at least a book a month narrating a personal story of fighting some form of depression) the current society seems to be plagued by mental problems, I think it’s important to think about the connections between the community and the individual. And perhaps such thinking might be useful to see how we can live in more harmony rather than in opposition with it.

Wendell Berry in his book of essays, the Art of the Commonplace, points out that while health seems to share the same root as other words like, “wholeness” and “holy”, modern medicine seems to treat health as a fixable problem. He also asserts that wholeness can be only achieved by belonging to a community. He says that we can chose between belonging to a responsible community which might be limited or a limitless meaninglessness. While most of his views are too radical for mainstream consumption I think he has a point given the large-scale meaninglessness I seem to observe in the urban jungle. The city seem to be a diffused ecosystem merely consisting of sub ecosystems like clubs providing a more concentrated forum where one can pay to get in and experience more of such meaninglessness. And then perhaps wake up next morning, with a stranger in the bed, to only wonder why these lives don’t seem to have any value or meaning!

Two friends of mine, a successful businesswoman and a successful architect, seem to be a case in point. The lady had struggled with her own mind for many years now. When I found that out, I thought it was a very strange thing that she had to endure so much obvious pain while the man seems to have done well in living an almost parallel life. Then I think some of it has to do with the depth of the connections the lady perhaps didn’t have with her community and more importantly the natural world. Even each of their individual dwellings seems to reflect this distinctiveness. She lives high up in the city sky in a skyscraper, where the view overlooks the city and he in a place that overlooks a green wood. She has a very clinical apartment furnished with a lot of fine things while his is a house filled with things that connect him back to the community to which he belongs and back to the natural world.