Mental Health: A Dark Past and an Uncertain Future
History has shown us time and again what happens when people don’t know why something bad is happening. They panic. They look for the wrong solutions. They do things that, in hindsight, seem horrifying. We’ve seen this before— plagues, witch hunts, mass hysteria. And now, I think we’re in a similar era with mental health —not knowing the real reasons behind our struggles, and in our desperation, making things worse for ourselves. A History of Fear and Wrong Answers There were two catastrophic illnesses that ravaged societies, mostly in Europe. The Bubonic Plague and the Salem Witch Trials hysteria. The Plague: The Wrong Enemy Imagine if people dealing with the Black Death knew that it was fleas that carried the disease, not the rats. Imagine if they realized that the reason doctors wearing wax-coated clothing didn’t get sick wasn’t because of the spices in their beak masks, but because their clothes blocked the infected fleas. But they didn’t know that. Instead, they slaug...