A Societal Mental Health Project

A Tribute to ‘One World or None’

It was inevitable that humankind should finally have to confront itself.  The rapid growth of human sciences, especially psychology, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology, over the past one hundred years or more has been the main line of the evolution of humanity toward self-consciousness.  It is the age-old tension between our path to enlightenment versus our own resistance.

No human group would have the power to prevent the coming of “the Psychological Age.”  We may call it left versus right, science versus ideology, or truth versus fiction, but the underlying conflict is life versus death, or more precisely, health versus disease (where a life impulse has gone awry to defeat itself).  Ironically, at the brink of many breakthroughs, an intense incentive for self-preservation has come to place the entire species at risk of self-annihilation.

Mental health is integral to this picture because the greatest threat of our time, nuclear and environmental violence, are amounting to a collective suicidal tendency.  Distinguishing us from all other animals, and our time from all other periods in history, human violence has reached a point where it will be the first species on earth to have the potential to bring about its own extinction. Because of the destructive power of the weapons that we have developed, and the extent to which we can alter our environment so as to throw our entire ecosystem off-balance, our decisions can have enormous—indeed terminal—consequences.

The World Mental Health Coalition came to be in response to a worldwide crisis that was the Donald Trump presidency.  Societal disintegration is seldom caused by a single individual, but revealed through him, and this is how dangerous leaders are a fair measure of societal disorder.  The election of Trump reflected a poor state of collective mental health of American society but also heralded a new era of psychological crises.

To help facilitate the power of the people, which is healthy power, it is important that mental health professionals speak the truth. They can serve as preventives through the early detection of personalities that hunger for power, only to threaten not just their own people and neighboring countries, but the survival of humankind.

Corrupt or compromised structures may collude, and similarly disordered individuals fervently follow, but we know that diseases do not always end in death. This is because the body responds, and even if it were initially unprepared for tyrants, once exposed to the pathogen, it can build its immune system to fight back. This requires that we each play our role in the struggle — and mental health experts have a special responsibility — in helping to face what is happening, individually and collectively, so that we can heal ourselves.

We try to acknowledge through the title, “One World or None,” the mission that Albert Einstein, H.H. Arnold, J.R. Oppenheimer, and others announced exactly 75 years ago for humanity’s survival in the Atomic Age.  At the time of this writing, the Doomsday Clock, a metaphor for the end of humanity, strikes at 100 seconds, but the next positioning is likely to be even closer to midnight.

The World Mental Health Coalition attempts to confront this Psychological Age, where a correct understanding of our own mind and its dynamics has become quintessential to survival.  We begin with our core membership of mental health professionals but endeavor to reach out to a broad range of domains to exchange knowledge and to collaborate in developing solutions.

Through our Truth and Restoration Town Hall series, we have invited experts on topics that are difficult to face but the awareness of which is critical to the healing of our collective soul.  We have selected the following five topics:

1.      Racism, White Supremacy, and Societal Mental Health

2.      Dangerous Leadership, the Silencing of Experts, and the Erasure of Truth

3.      Authoritarian Cults, Media Indoctrination, and Shared Psychosis

4.      Militarism, Imperialism and the Future of Democracy

5.      Structural, Environmental, and Nuclear Violence

We hope that a global overview will help readers to hone in on the central issues of our day as well as to bring focus to their common roots in our mental health, which is a basic requirement for all human affairs.