One day we will have a full biological understanding of anxiety and mental health, at which point people will no longer need to change the world around them.
There is a recent thread on how even CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is akin to wire-heading[0], and we've known for ages that loneliness encourages depression and addiction[1] so it's not a far leap to suggest that adverse environmental conditions can be measurably, significantly even fatally unpleasant. I think this conclusion is also common knowledge, intuitively accessible to any observant adult. It's strange, then, that we spend so much time addressing the chemical conclusions at which individuals arrive by virtue of their social relations. I suspect there are political reasons behind the medicalization of depression. Why should my neurochemistry be held responsible for relations whose creature I socially remain?
It's so sad considering how we treat our mentally ill in the U.S.: we tell them to find a tent and a piece of sidewalk and look the other way when they walk up the street. How do you possibly heal from a mental health issue or addiction in an environment like that? How do you not just get worse and worse until something breaks?
You have no safety living on the street. None of your possessions are safe if you leave them alone. You have no money, no resources at all because any step forward to lift yourself out of this requires putting money down up front. People treat you less than human based on your appearance alone, which grows more haggard the longer you are living out there with few pairs of clothes and limited ways to wash them or yourself.
It's absolutely awful how we treat our mentally ill in this country, and the lack of any will to do anything about it from all levels of government.
Knowledge that loneliness and environmental conditions impact depression is very much an incomplete picture. The causes of depression are far more complex and often recalcitrant to either life changes or medication.
Sure, if social conditions are the primary factor in a person's mental health problems then "blaming" and attempting to address the issue at a neurochemical basis with medication may not be warranted. But to paint the entire illness with that brush is to overlook the complexity of the problem.
That implies that all efforts to change external circumstances are linked to mental health issues.
Also understanding does not automatically lead to fixing. We understand a lot of things that we haven't been able to change. And what if the understanding we gain shows us that the causes of our anxiety and mental health issues are things in the world around us?
With anxiety borne from mental illness, at least in my experience, I cannot be sure if the anxiety I feel is more related to my internal state or external state. For instance, on a day when I am doing good, I eat a delicious meal, I am happy with it, on a day when I am doing bad, I eat a delicious meal I focus on the calories and my overall diet and my weight, etc.
In theory at least, with perfect mental health I will be able to confidently relate my feelings to the external world and be able to reason about changing the external world to deal with real anxieties rooted in perceptions of real danger.
I think for people who suffer from mental illness related to anxiety, or at least for me, the goal is not to completely eliminate anxiety but to be able to know that the anxiety I feel is reasonable and appropriate. (Similarly for my chronic depression)
Of course the line between reasonable and unreasonable anxiety is not always clear. The far points are clear, being anxious about some stranger approaching you with a gun, that's reasonable, being unable to get out of bed because you are certain everything is going to go wrong no matter what, that is unreasonable. But should you be anxious about this person because you did that thing but you have a history with this person and... that sort of thing is fuzzy.
Although "all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed," organisms have been known to alter our environments to suit our needs, rather than suffer them even to our deaths. For example, when it rains I often open an umbrella.
Perhaps with the right anti-depressant cocktail, I wouldn't bother.
Based on what I've seen in nature films regarding how great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, etc) react to rain, and the extreme aversion to being rained on that I've anecdotally seen in several different cultures, I have a suspicion that an aversion to rain--particularly to unwanted/unexpected rain--might be not only instinctual but peculiar and specific, similar to our aversions to spiders and snakes. Or maybe not, but it has definitely stood out to me.
If you don't need to change your environment (assuming mental health is the only reason to do so), why is it a problem that you won't have the inclination to do so?
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
As explained by the nihilist Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert ) to Albert (Jason Schwartzman) and Tommy (Mark Wahlberg) in I Heart Huckabees: "It is inevitable that you are drawn back into human drama: desire, suffering...." https://youtu.be/9EilqfAIudI?t=85 Pretty sure it's a riff on the traditional themes of Dharmic religions. (Not unique to them, though.)
