Ever since migrating to the United States, I am seeing that US society does not allow people who live in it to express the problems they are experiencing at all, altogether. In Asia, where I am from, there is admittedly a stigma against showing that you're falling apart. However (and this is particularly true for the Philippines which is considered the most Westernised of all Asian countries), the social structures there are communal in nature, meaning they are organically built towards people supporting each other. The US government's broken healthcare system, which I work with in my day hob, uses a clear-cut government definition of "immediate" or "nuclear" family versus "extended family," and siblings immediately become the latter once a person turns 18 because apparently "immediate/nuclear family" is just your grandparents, your parents, your spouse and your biological children if you have any. This is an important discovery for me because I noticed in the news that while highly individualist societies like the one here in the US may lead the global coronavirus vaccine production, the people in it are also consistently anti-mask use (folks in the US keep rallying against mask usage much harder than Asians do).
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| Photo of a woman at the supermarket, taken during the coronavirus (SaRs-COV2) pandemic. Courtesy of Freepik. |
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Given how highly individualist US society, it's expected to just pick yourself up by your bootstraps, grin and bear every single hardship. In that path lies disaster because humans are social beings, and our mental health both depends on and influences the societies we live in. If many of us are experiencing mental health issues or some form of mental instability, it doesn't just affect us, but it also affects other people, even those not immediately around us! Now the goal isn't just to fix yourself, but to be able to understand and help each other through our mental health issues or mental instability. Unfortunately the method of help needed isn't so clear-cut, and in fact it could lead us to hurting each other in the process even without meaning to do so.
I've begun reading into these a lot more because...
