Not everyone noticed: We are writing the “Mental Health Action Week”, the title is also the result of a taboo. If your soul hurts, you prefer to bite your tongue – and be silent. So it’s really about mental illness. And their widespread distribution: Statistics suggest that depression and anxiety reach, and even top, the dimensions of a pandemic. If “mental health”, according to the destigmatizing international usage, received as much attention as the coronavirus, this demon would have been in shackles for a long time!
For a year and a half, we’ve been spinning around like buzzing tops. Shops, schools, pubs open, locked. Fireworks of numbers with incidences, new infections, confused by the emission of daily changing rules of conduct. Corona and future epidemics banned? No! The largest is not lurking outside. But inside. We ignore the mega-pandemic, this is the greatest inconsistency in the corona emergency. For a long time. Ten to 15 percent of all people in this country and worldwide suffer from depression and anxiety: an infection from the inside, endogenous, which is often fatal. Suicidal and so far without vaccination hope. Corona isolation has further accelerated the disease. Depression – without specific anxiety disorders – suffer from 322 million people worldwide. Compared to a total of 236 million people infected with corona, of which 214 million have already recovered (WHO 10/2021).
In Germany, there are a good 4 million people suffering from permanent depression compared to a total of 4.3 million people infected with Covid, of which over 4 million have recovered (Statista 10/2021). 94,000 corona deaths compare with 9,000 suicides annually. The reason for this is usually depression. Only celebrities like national goalkeeper Robert Enke (died 2009) make waves in public.
These figures raise questions in the “Mental Health Action Week”:
Why is critical mental health not declared a health risk of the first order?
Why doesn’t Big Pharma take a few billion of its profits into hand to develop a new generation of powerful drugs? Since the corona vaccination race, we have known: They can do it when they want – and when they have to!
Why did the World Health Organization (WHO), together with EU health authorities and national health ministers, not declare the “World Mental Health Day” on October 10th? The mental pandemic!
The reasons for this lethargy are as trivial as they are tragic. The achievement, growth, ego society does not like weak soul. It is a brake block, a malus, more disreputable than the plague and cholera of the past – in school, work, politics. Although for the first time it was marginally a federal election campaign issue. The 18-year-old student Noreen Thiel, admittedly depressed, applied for a seat in parliament with the motto: “Mental Health Matters”. And got ripped off via Twitter: “Depressives don’t belong in politics!”
How many other politicians, managers (including a former Bertelsmann CEO) and top athletes torment themselves with their inner devils and are bare afraid to admit them to themselves and to others?
The dreaded Cain’s mark, into which depression and fears are pressed, is purely fake. They are largely genetic, like Winston Churchill, who talked openly about his “black dogs”. The environment is a powerful driver. The hamster wheel, faster and faster, higher, further – only where? There is often much, much more to the fashionable and socially accepted “burn-out”. The third actor is: ourselves.
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