Be mindful, listen, empathise: Is modern life killing our mental health? New findings reveal alarming truths about social isolation

The theme for this year's World Mental Health Day today is 'Lived experiences heard: Real voices, real change'. It provides an opportunity to meaningfully engage with people with lived experience (PWLE) of mental health conditions, and to recognise their knowledge as a vital form of expertise.

It means creating opportunities for PWLEs to influence decisions, co-design services, strengthen peer-led approaches, challenge stigma and strengthen accountability. It's also an opportunity to understand underlying societal conditions that might endanger mental well-being.

Alienation and isolation are the twin themes of this decade. Despite the many ways we have to connect online and offline, people feel cut off, and lonely. Our social selves seem to have shrunk. We have become the anxious generation(s).


Yet, our biology equips us to be social, to live in groups, to cooperate. Economist-epidemiologist Ramanan Laxminarayan argues in his new book, Bacteria to Buddha: How Cooperation Shaped Consciousness - and Makes Us Human, that consciousness evolved not in isolated individual minds, but as machinery to keep complex social relationships stable. Historian Rutger Bregman, in his 2019 book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, describes humanity's evolutionary superpower as empathy, and collective cooperation.

If we are so wired for connection, what is interfering with that today?

First, let's separate mental illness from mental health. Mental illness is real to some people and requires qualified attention and support. Mental wellness is for everyone. Like our bodies, our minds need the right nutrients and exercise to keep them balanced. Our brains, designed by evolutionary biology, thrive on face-to-face community interaction. Our neurochemistry is wired to build trust, repair conflict and maintain relationships.

In the last 30 yrs, we have moved from face-to-face interaction to screen-to-screen interface. We can engage with dozens of people a day without ever meeting them. As Laxminarayan says, we can now live and die surrounded by services, untouched by community.

Neuroscientists remind us that our brain circuits evolved to coordinate living in groups and can atrophy from under-stimulation. But these are the same systems that regulate stress and stability. Lack of social connection reduces oxytocin, raises cortisol, and breeds anxiety and mistrust.

This might well be why many more people - especially post-pandemic - are reporting an increase in common mental disorders. According to a 2015-16 National Mental Health Survey, ~5% of Indians (about 75 mn) experience depression, anxiety and stress, which are termed as 'common mental disorders'. Their higher prevalence in urban metros underscores how modern living strains human psychological resilience.

But we can rebuild our mental elasticity. While people with mental illness require specialised care, millions experiencing the loneliness or stress of modern life can be helped. Last year at 'Manotsava', the National Mental Health Festival in Bengaluru, psychologist Richie Davidson presented powerful research to show that practising mindfulness and compassion acts as mental strength training, and fundamentally alters the brain to make kindness and connection a default mode of operation. This connection may be as important to health as food or sleep.

Restoring social bonds and creating enabling conditions for connection is a powerful intervention by itself. Swami Satchidananda got it right when he said, 'Replace 'I' with 'we', and 'illness' becomes 'wellness'. Without that, we may fritter away our greatest evolutionary gifts of compassion and collaboration.

Society is the ultimate creative force to solve emerging societal problems. Today, AI's expanding influence in our personal lives surfaces new questions. Will we be able to retain and strengthen human capacities that machines may not be able to easily acquire? If we understand that our comparative advantage is in compassion, cooperation and caring, we might exercise that societal muscle more deliberately.

The writer is chairperson,Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies