There has been much recent concern that many people will suicide as the devastation wrought by COVID plays out. Accordingly, the government has pledged $48,000,000 to mental health programs. The commitment, though small relative to the need, is to be welcomed. It also raises wider questions about the recovery from the crisis and the role of government in it.
After the Pol Pot era it was commonly said that about a third of the people who were traumatised benefited from therapy, a third came through the experience without intervention, and another third remained traumatised. After similar barbarism in the Balkans, local shoe-string projects proved particularly helpful, including enabling women to come together in church choirs. Culturally women were restricted in leaving their homes, Church activities were acceptable. The coming together and all the social activities that went with the singing had an extraordinary effect.
This story suggests that in recovering from catastrophic events we need to look beyond the simple defining of problems, finding solutions that match them and naming agencies responsible to fix them. We need to be curious about the persons involved, their interlocking relationships which have contributed to the trauma and the possibilities for healing within those relationships. This may prove to be more effective and even less economically costly.
Although this is common sense, it is not readily received in a culture with a digitalised understanding of people in society, which sees human beings as irreducible individuals, like single pieces of information. In such a view the most important human relationships are economic. The focus of government must be to foster them.
How thin this view is was shown in the response to COVID-19, when governments rightly accepted their responsibility to protect people’s lives, including supporting their relationships to shelter, family, income and food. They took control of economic relationships in order to preserve lives and prevent illness, taking on debt to keep people alive and businesses to survive. Governance, human well-being and personal initiative for a while seemed connected to a goal larger than the unfettered freedom of individuals or enterprises.
As we enter the time of recovery, we risk returning to lazy ways of looking at human life, including the economy. Really, apart from considering the detail of each problem, we need to consider all the relationships that shape the persons involved. Mental illness in real people is not separable from their relationships to family, to their past, to