Co-Responsible Mental Health

To address the mental health crisis at the systemic level, there is a key social attribute that we need to learn how to cultivate and embrace together. And this shared ‘’superpower’’ is called co-responsibility.

My premise is the following: the more we practice and master this concept of coherent and meaningful co-responsibility locally, the fewer mental health issues we'll have in our community.

Now, let's explore this deeper.

…

I often talk about the hyper-individualization of suffering as something to be very careful and cautious about.

In my personal perspective and experience, our cultural tendency to put walls between our hearts and minds, and our obsession to attribute the "property rights" of collective pain to each other, is one of the most harmful social dynamics at the systemic level.

Suffering has always been, and will probably always remain, deeply collective and highly interconnected in its nature.

Ultimately, suffering doesn't really understand, or simply doesn't care about, the concept of the ‘’ego’’.

Suffering just is, it exists, and it belongs to all of us no matter how you look at it.

It's simply that some people feel it more than others.

Some maybe have personally identified with it and decided to take personal ‘’ownership’’ of deep collective suffering for some unknown reason.

Some are just numbing, or in denial or resist dealing with it because they think that it shouldn't belong to them or that they shouldn't be feeling it so much.

…

Suffering is like an ocean.

Some enjoy surfing there very much and have a lot of fun with big, intense and dangerous waves.

Some maybe have no idea how to actually swim, but have found themselves in open waters out of nowhere and are panicking to stay afloat.

Some have never seen or visited the ocean.

Some have bought a nice yacht and have been living mainly on the ocean for ages.

Some prefer just chilling on the beach and observing the water, but never going in. They know it exists, they even love it, but they don't really interact with it more intimately than that.

Some go to the ocean mainly to fish, to find food to survive. They see it as a source of life, an amazing provider of natural resources.

And some hate and fear the ocean, but they are stuck with a canoe in the middle of it. They need to work very hard to get out, but it seems almost impossible under the conditions they are in and with the tools they have at their disposal.

I think you see the point.

Suffering is like our shared waters, a wild, deep and very wide space with specific dynamics, qualities, and many unwritten rules. Each of us has different preferences about how we interact in this space and each also has unique strategies and desires for how they want to develop their personal and intimate relationship with the ocean.

But we can also see that sometimes "unusual" things happen in the ocean.

Perhaps sometimes we should rescue the terrified person who got lost in the canoe, to help them get out safely from a place they have no desire or need to be in.

Maybe sometimes we should let the surfer do whatever they want on their dangerously intense waves, because this is what makes them authentically fulfilled and happy, even if they seem to be risking their life every day to be able to surf.

Maybe we should support and help some to learn how to properly swim and even dive in deep waters.

And maybe we should keep some very far from the ocean and not even tell them there is such a thing as swimming.

Maybe we just need to scare and shame them even more about the ocean from a very young age and never let them get close.

Or perhaps we should be building nice, safe, diverse and interesting boats together to go on fun adventures into the ocean - to learn how to love it and how to better appreciate its inherent beauty, majesty, wisdom and mystery.

This metaphor connects directly to how we approach mental health in society.

Just as we have different relationships with the ocean, we have different ways of engaging with suffering. Our cultural approach tends to isolate those struggling most deeply (the person in the canoe) rather than bringing them back to shore with our robust, stable and safe collective boat.

We also sometimes tend to pathologize natural human responses to suffering rather than seeing them as part of our normal shared experience in the very vast and interconnected ocean of life.

As you can see, there are many "maybes" possible, but to not get stuck in these waters of potentials, let's move on to how all of this relates to the mental health crisis and our co-responsibility regarding suffering.

𝐶𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐻𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑡ℎ

I was born and raised in Eastern Europe - a wild side of the world with very interesting and very old cultures.

They are almost like us in the Western world, with almost no visible differences, and yet many still fear them and are fascinated by them at the same time.

These societies were "programmed" with a different kind of regime for many years. Half of the world went glorifying individuality and the other half praised the community and collective over the personal interests of people.

It shouldn't be a big surprise that no perfect scheme of governance actually exists. We experiment with different approaches, observe what happens, and make conscious choices about what we should keep doing and what should change.

Both systems, capitalism and communism, had it all - something amazing, something good, something bad, and something extremely ugly.

The point is not to compete in endless and useless argumentation over which was better or worse, smarter or less intelligent, kinder or meaner. The point is to discover what worked, what didn't, and the real reasons behind it.

The point is that each tribe, each local collective or community has access to very special ancestral wisdom, and to unique experienced realities, so they can build a coherent model that would best fit in the most appropriate way their own needs and deeper intentions for evolution.

Some communities might prefer having private healthcare but public education. Some might prefer the opposite. Some might have already invented something completely different, yet meaningful, beautiful, coherent, and super efficient specifically for them.

They may have combined all the knowledge they had to create a shared system that was unique but perfect for their local community.

It is also possible that all those collective visions co-exist already in the same country, each region having its own strategy for their desired future. They may all belong as they are, even if different, and still work in harmonious collaboration and cocreation together for some aspects of their shared reality.

It is possible to make the diversity and uniqueness truly performant and even fun. Not as easily done as said, but still very possible!

𝑇ℎ𝑒 "𝑀𝑦𝑡ℎ" 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑈𝑆𝑆𝑅

Those who are from Eastern European countries will know what I'm talking about - this very interesting "myth" about mental health there, or maybe it wasn't so much a "myth" but actually an experienced reality for people.

We obviously had mental health problems and many different things happening in our psychiatric hospitals.

But things like "depression" or "burnout" apparently didn't exist in the USSR.

This is not a joke. My mother worked at a psychiatric hospital. She saw a lot, but even approaching retirement age, she was still confused about what depression is and how it's even possible to get stuck in it.

No one ever talked about it. No one really seemed to suffer from it too severely or for long enough for doctors or scientists to get curious about this concept.

This particular thing puzzled me for years.

I struggled with some sort of depression for a large chunk of my twenties, and my mother, who was a mental health professional, looked at me deeply confused and simply not understanding what was wrong with me.

It was a mental condition and state of being that was very unfamiliar to her, and she seemed unable to properly understand how it was even possible.

I questioned her professional expertise and told her she was just ignorant, because many people are depressed, so it must exist.

At some point she told me, "OK, if you say so. Now, revisit your 13 years when you lived in Ukraine and tell me, have you ever met someone who was really struggling with this thing you call 'depression'?"

And this is where she got me. She was right. I had seen many disturbing things - much alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, sexual abuse, people beating each other on the street for no particular reason, sometimes even suicidal behavior.

But I had never encountered someone completely depressed or in burnout. And it made me seriously wonder.

I had no idea where to even begin to better understand this curious phenomenon.

Why? How? Where is the logic or systemic interconnection in this?

If I have the body and mind, the entire collective ancestral history that doesn't even know what depression is, how is it possible that I have no inner resources to deal with it to avoid suffering myself?

This question was huge and very complex. It's taken me years to even start seeing any emergence of logic or coherence about my many whys and hows in this space.

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑁𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛

Depression is the issue of individuals who forgot they are part of a larger community. It's the challenge of too "independent" and overly "free" people.

Depression happens when your personal individuality prohibits you from being part of the community in a safe and loving manner - when being authentically yourself is a potential threat for social rejection and survival.

It's the problem of people who struggle to find a proper balance between interdependence, deeper relationships with others, and their innate authenticity. They have no idea how to preserve their sense of ego, their self integrity and dignity, while remaining open-minded and open-hearted to the egos of others or the collective dynamics of their community.

Depression happens when there is an inner conflict of psychological survival.

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑜𝑥 𝑜𝑓 𝑆𝑢𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑙

For most of us, to survive as human beings, we have no choice but to be part of some sort of community. If you are rejected from that community, it's a severe risk to your own survival. But if you forget who you are internally to be part of that community, your uniqueness, emotional health and inner power will be in danger.

To 'fit in,' to feel safe and to survive in a community, you might need to sacrifice parts of your authenticity. And you might do this unwillingly and even unconsciously. Your body may be genuinely afraid of being cut off from the resources necessary for your basic survival, so your mind simply forces you to be a 'hypocrite' just to ensure it keeps you safe and alive for as long as possible.

If you sacrifice your authenticity too often and too much because of fear of rejection or humiliation by your community, you will put your psychological survival in danger.

This is where your unique soul is scared to die.

So you face a paradox of survival:

• Too authentic: more risks of rejection from the community (physical survival)

• Too little authenticity: more risks of losing your inner sense of self, which leads to depression (psychological survival)

Do you now see why we are experiencing a legitimate epidemic of depression in this very freedom-driven, hyper-individualized country?

We are all properly ‘’ego-centered’’ and very ‘’self-conscious’’ about our boundaries, but we have no idea what sincere authenticity means.

Our "individuality" is mainly fear-based, not the result of genuine self-realization process.

We protect ourselves with superficial "individuality" because we actually don't have a resilient, safe, and compassionate community that enables us to be truly authentic together.

We are scared of being "rejected" from our collective shared field - a type of idealized community we don't actually even have yet.

Our main experience or perception of a "community" in the most developed countries is called "the system." It has nothing to do with real people, their preferences, or their needs.

You can be authentic only as far and as deep as the "system" allows you to.

For many, the sense of 'individuality' ends where it doesn't fit the artificial system of nonsense we have co-created together.

Sometimes, your freedom and authentic right to your individuality also ends when you simply dare to question the pre-established narrative and current conditioning of the system.

This basically means you are literally controlled and very deeply manipulated by the group-level biases of the ‘’system’’ itself, at the level of your physical and psychological survival.

The system has no soul. It's very different from a community, which does have one. So, if your survival depends on the system, and not on a real community, of course you will be more scared to be sincerely authentic and true to your own unique essence and inner power of your being.

If needed, most people will have enough courage, inner resources and power to stand against their own community despite the risk and terror of being harshly rejected. But very few will be able to make the same choice against the system itself. And, this is exactly why there is so much suffering in communities that rely too much on artificial systems to sustain and thrive.

The chronic and mass-scale repression of genuine authenticity imposed by our political, social, and even technological systems leads directly to depression and burnout among our population.

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑚 𝑣𝑠. 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦

In some countries, we have forgotten that the system is not a real community.

And even if you have a very nice, high-performing, just, and super sophisticated system, this will never replace the concept of community for people.

People will still need something between their naked individualities and the completely chaotic, soulless, heartless and sometimes even meaningless system operating at the global level.

When you have a proper community, it is much safer to be authentic and more pleasurable to be vulnerable with others. A community can hold you with love, understanding, compassion, wonder, and care. The system cannot do this for you.

Community has a huge collective heart that can feel you deeply, even if they are not able to welcome or accept you as you are. But they will not condemn you forever for simply being yourself and being different.

They might ask you to leave because who you are doesn't fit with their intentions or ways of being together, but you will still be free to find a like-minded community elsewhere, where you can be safely and authentically yourself with others.

But the system doesn't have any of those qualities.

No heart, no wisdom, and almost no differentiation in the operating rules to accommodate your unique authenticity.

The system is almost the same no matter where you go. The system is already international and omnipresent. If you get rejected from one system, you might be rejected and banned simultaneously from all of them.

It's a very different game.

Leaving a cult, tribe, or some closed-minded group of people is one thing. It's very scary and not simple at all. It's both psychologically and physiologically very challenging. This is why the concept of "cults" works so well on some people.

This is also why for some it's almost unthinkable to change their job, church or to move to another country. It's all the same dynamic playing out a bit differently. An idea of some sort of community provides the safe and convenient intermediary between their personal individuality and the macro system.

But a cult can also become more like a superficial system and not an authentic community. It's important to keep that in mind too. Because this is usually when things go off the rails very fast and where cults may create way more collective suffering than they can provide any genuine service or care to its members.

That said, the challenge is exponential and much more intense if you want to leave or disconnect yourself from the entire system. It's possible, people have done this. But you need to have very solid nerves, transcend some of the most intense fears inside, and potentially a bit of craziness to completely break up and cut the strings with the system.

I would honestly not advise doing this to someone who doesn't have a proper community around them already where they feel safe and in alignment with who they are.

If you have no idea how to ensure your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual survival outside the system but you disconnect from it, you might suffer the most profound pain you potentially can't even imagine is possible.

You need others to survive, to live, and to thrive.

You don't really need the system. But you still need other humans.

If the only way you allow yourself to connect with others is through the system, you depend on it to have access to your community. If you lose the system, you lose the community. You lose the community, you die.

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑐 𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟

This is a huge social danger and a massive systemic incoherence.

We've made the system the key intermediary between our individuality and our collectivity.

Today, our local communities, our vision for the future, our strategies, and our cultural relationships depend mainly on the "programming" of limiting beliefs and pre-established ideas of "efficiency" of the global system.

The problem is we all seem to be agreeing on the fact that our system is not very safe, coherent or efficient right now. But where is the viable alternative? Most recognise that our system needs some deep change, but not many understand that we need strong and very resilient communities to make the required transformation happen.

To change the system each community must have a strong identity, and most importantly not be scared for their future survival.

What we have been discussing as a potential issue of severe lack of authenticity at the individual level can now be seen at the group level as well.

Today, we have entire countries that are scared to be real, honest, sincere, and authentic with other countries.

Some countries are so scared to be shamed, banned, devalued, censured, or judged by the "system," that they virtually don't have any individuality at all anymore.

They sacrifice their national identity to better "fit" the global system.

They are ready to become poor and sick. They are ready to erase their history and culture. They are ready to mass-manipulate and control their entire population. They are ready to work like slaves to save the system. They are ready to even engage in senseless wars, if needed, just to not be "punished", shamed, abused or starved in some mysterious way by our global politico-economic rules.

𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐻𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐴𝑢𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝐸𝑥𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛

To ensure proper mental and emotional health for a human being, it's very important to make sure that being can express their authenticity freely and safely at least inside their local community.

To ensure the same at the level of our community - proper well-being of our population - we need to make sure our culture, our society, our cities and villages are also free to express their authentic identity, even if it's a bit different from how other countries think it should be done.

To deal with mental health at the collective level, we must learn how to build communities that can create locally their own desired and ideal future based on what is authentically important to them.

There will never be a formula for something perfect that will work magickly for everyone.

Each human being is unique. This diversity of who we are is precisely what makes us so beautiful, happy, creative, healthy, and high-performing together.

Therefore, it's completely ridiculous to even consider that our cultures or our countries should, or even could in any way, be exactly the same.

It's completely useless and meaningless to compare ourselves to each other. It makes no logical or coherent sense to judge or condemn the authenticity of communities we are not part of.

𝐶𝑜-𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦

This all brings us to a deeper understanding that the only way we can transform or change the system is when we decide ourselves to do something about it.

But no individual would ever be able to change the entire system alone. There is no savior coming back, and there will never be a perfect leader or president to tell us what to do.

The system is the sum of our tribes, communities, and countries. You can change what belongs to you and to your people within it, but you should also let other communities deal with their own challenges and discover their authentic identity without your unsolicited involvement or opinion.

You create your community, not the system.

The system is something that emerges from us as individuals to become, with time, families, tribes, communities, and societies - not vice versa.

We are co-creators of all our systems. No system can create a meaningful country or a loving community; only people can. And today, we are all co-responsible for ensuring we build societies that preserve the authentic expression and desires of both our people and our cultures.

The journey toward co-responsibility is not quick, simple or easy. It requires us to face uncomfortable truths about how our individual actions contribute to collective suffering.

It demands that we question even the most fundamental assumptions about how our society should function. But in this recognition of our interconnectedness lies the potential for true healing—not just for ourselves as individuals, but for our communities and our shared world.

𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑣𝑠. 𝐶𝑜-𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦

Before we move forward, let's pause to understand the profound difference between responsibility and co-responsibility, as this distinction lies at the heart of our exploration.

Responsibility, at its core, is simply the "ability to respond."

We're comfortable with personal responsibility because it creates clear boundaries and a sense of psychological safety. We know precisely who should respond to what, who is accountable for what, and who to judge or blame if something goes wrong. This clarity about roles, rights, privileges, and consequences is reassuring in its simplicity and structure.

Yet there's a shadow side to societies that focus exclusively on personal responsibility.

What begins as a clear attribution of roles and duties often evolves into labyrinthine and dysfunctional systems where actual accountability disappears into administrative confusion and legal complexity.

We've witnessed how rigid frameworks of personal responsibility paradoxically create the perfect conditions for macro-scale corruption. As roles become increasingly specialized and fragmented, we collectively lose track of who is truly responsible for what and why. We become entangled in bureaucratic and legalistic interpretations of blurry lines around responsibility rather than addressing its authentic essence or purpose.

In these systems, energy shifts from solving problems to avoiding blame.

We argue endlessly about who should be held accountable while taking no actual steps to address the situation at hand. The result is a perverse inversion: a system built on personal responsibility transforms into one where effectively no one is responsible for anything meaningful.

We primarily invoke the terms and conditions of our personal responsibilities not as calls to action but as shields—ways to protect ourselves from being unfairly judged or condemned by others. This defensive or offensive posture creates fertile soil for corruption to emerge like wildflowers, growing in the spaces between our carefully defined responsibilities.

Such systems inevitably become more competitive than constructive or collaborative. People and organizations excel at demonstrating why something isn't their responsibility rather than stepping forward to address challenges that don't fit neatly into predefined roles.

The system very often rewards those who best navigate responsibility avoidance rather than those who embrace it most fully.

But co-responsibility operates in an entirely different realm.

Here, something vital and highly complex is shared that we must all take responsibility for in some way, together. There are no clear boundaries delineating who must do what. It's the territory of the unknown and the collectively held. If something goes wrong, there's no single person to blame or judge. If we fail, we all fail together.

To operate in this mode of co-responsibility, we have no choice but to trust each other.

We must create spaces where we can respond authentically and collaboratively while simultaneously considering both our personal interests and those of our community or collective as equally important. This balancing act requires a level of maturity, wisdom, and emotional intelligence that many of our current systems neither recognize nor nurture.

Yet this is precisely what we need to address our mental health crisis at its roots.

Depression and anxiety flourish in the confusing and badly defined gaps between personal responsibility (which can feel crushing when shouldered alone) and true co-responsibility (which distributes the weight of our human experience more meaningfully and coherently across our communities).

𝐿𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝐶𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑆𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑠

Before we explore practical steps forward, it's worth returning to our earlier observation about the apparent rarity of depression in the Soviet system. While the USSR had many profound flaws and human rights concerns, there is something instructive in understanding why certain mental health issues were less prevalent in that context.

The entire ideological foundation of the Soviet regime centered around the concept of community. Citizens may have had fewer rights to certain forms of individuality at the macro-system level, but at the level of local communities, they developed remarkably resilient and effective social structures. People were generally allowed and even encouraged to be authentic with their families, peers, teachers, and neighbors.

Culturally speaking, authenticity was often praised, respected, expected, and even demanded. This directness could manifest in both positive and negative ways—people might very authentically criticize you or even confront you physically because you were too authentic yourself. But crucially, you would rarely fear being completely rejected by your community or losing your ability to survive because of your authentic expression.

The relatively reliable access to this form of grounded authenticity within immediate communities served as a powerful protection mechanism against depression for much of the population. When people can express who they truly are within their close-knit communities, even while living under restrictive larger systems, they maintain a crucial psychological safety valve.

This isn't to romanticize or advocate for Soviet-style governance—far from it. Rather, it's to recognize that our contemporary hyper-individualized societies might have something important to learn from systems that, despite their many flaws, managed to preserve strong local community bonds and authentic interpersonal relationships.

The key insight is that these communities functioned as effective intermediaries between the individual and the larger system. They created spaces where people could navigate the tensions between personal authenticity and collective belonging in ways that protected their psychological well-being, even when the larger system was often oppressive.

Now I wonder: How might we create similar buffers in our current context, without sacrificing the individual freedoms we rightly cherish? How do we build communities that can hold both our innate uniqueness and our inherent interconnectedness with equal reverence? How might we build intermediary structures between individuals and systems that protect mental health while honoring both individual liberty and collective wellbeing?

𝐶𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐶𝑜-𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦

How do we begin to create this shift from hyper-individualized suffering to co-responsible mental health? Here are some reflections on dimensions we might explore or further wonder about together.

Our current approach to mental health focuses almost exclusively on individual symptom reduction. What if instead, we saw healing as the process of reconnection—to self, to others, to meaning, to place, to nature, to the world?

This might transform how we measure success in mental health treatment.

Beyond asking "Are the symptoms gone?" we might ask: "Has this person found their way back to meaningful community? Has their capacity for authentic expression grown? When they heal, how does it ripple out to heal others? Can this healing sustain itself outside the clinical context, within the messiness of real community life?"

A person struggling with depression might then be seen not as a broken individual needing fixing, but as someone whose suffering reveals a tear in our collective fabric—a tear we are all responsible for mending together.

…

Just as water needs containers to be useful to humans, co-responsibility needs structures to hold it. We need physical and social spaces explicitly designed to practice this different way of being together.

Within communities, we might create healing centers where individual struggles are honored while also being held in a group context. Places where someone can say "I'm not okay" and hear in response not just "Let me help you" but "Your struggle matters to all of us."

In neighborhoods, we could nurture initiatives that make conversations about suffering as normal as conversations about the weather—not to trivialize pain, but to deeper connect to each other, to acknowledge its universality and its place in our shared human experience.

Workplaces could evolve beyond seeing employee mental health as merely a productivity concern or personal problem of too weak and over-sensitive people, recognizing instead how organizational and individual well-being are two currents in the same river.

And perhaps most importantly, our educational institutions could become places where children learn from the earliest ages that being human means being both gloriously unique and inextricably connected.

These spaces would actively resist the tendency to pathologize difference, instead embracing diversity of experience as essential to collective wisdom, creativity and resilience.

…

The leadership that co-responsibility requires looks nothing like the heroic, charismatic leadership our systems often produce and reward. Instead, it could manifest like something more flexible, fluid, situational and fully open.

A quality of presence that listens more than it speaks, that asks questions more often than it offers answers.

A capacity to hold space for authentic expression without rushing to judgment or solution.

An understanding that true power flows from enabling others rather than controlling them.

A willingness to model vulnerability and co-responsibility in one's own life, showing that leaders too are part of the interdependent web, not somehow above or separate from it.

This kind of leadership emerges organically in healthy communities. It passes from person to person as needed, rather than becoming fixed in rigid hierarchies. It recognizes that wisdom resides in the collective, not primarily in individuals.

When such leadership flourishes, the community becomes capable of holding even its most struggling members without breaking, without rejecting them, and without demanding that they hide their authentic suffering behind masks of forced positivity or productive contribution.

…

If you consider exploring even deeper the relationship between mental health and co-responsibility in your own life and communities you are part of, I invite you to reflect on:

1. In what ways have you personally experienced the tension between authentic self-expression and community belonging? How did you navigate this paradox?

2. What are the barriers in your local environment that prevent the formation of authentic communities? Are these barriers primarily physical, political, social, economic, natural, technological or psychological?

3. How might we adopt or redesign our physical spaces (neighborhoods, workplaces, public areas) to facilitate connection without forcing conformity?

4. What rituals or practices from your cultural heritage supported co-responsibility that might be worth reclaiming or reimagining for our contemporary context?

5. Where do you see examples of healthy intermediaries between individual authenticity and global systems? What can we learn from these examples?

6. How might we approach mental health education differently if we centered co-responsibility rather than individual management of symptoms?

7. What would it mean for you personally to take co-responsibility for the mental health of your community while still honoring your authentic self?

8. How can we distinguish between healthy interdependence and unhealthy codependence in our relationships and communities?

9. What role might art, music, storytelling, and other creative expressions play in bridging individual experience with deeper collective understanding?

10. If you were to create a small "oasis" of co-responsible mental health and emotional health friendly spaces in your immediate circle, what would be your first steps?

These questions have no simple answers, but in wrestling with them, we begin the process of embodying co-responsibility about our shared suffering rather than just theorizing about it (or endlessly trying to put it in the gardens of other people, to whom it probably doesn’t belong either).

…

Returning to our metaphor of suffering as an ocean, we can now see that this image, while powerful, is still too simple and limited. Human experience is not just one vast ocean but many waters, each with their own character, quality, texture and purpose.

Suffering might be like an ocean, but joy might be like rain—falling on all of us, sometimes unexpectedly, nourishing growth. Belonging could be like a river, carrying us along in its current, connecting distant places. Meaning might be like groundwater, invisible but essential, rising to the surface when we dig deep enough.

Within these diverse waters of human evolution, communities are like unique watersheds—each gathering, filtering, and distributing the waters of human experience in ways that reflect their particular geography, history, and values. Some are like wide, slow-moving rivers with room for many different kinds of life. Others are like mountain streams—fast, clear, and invigorating, but perhaps too intense for some to thrive in.

The global system, in contrast, often functions like massive flood control infrastructure—attempting to standardize, predict, and control the natural flow of human experience, sometimes preventing disasters but often creating sterile environments where little can flourish and thrive.

Co-responsibility invites us to become skillful stewards of our local watersheds while remaining mindful of how they connect to the larger hydrological cycle. It asks us to:

• Build small "islands of sanity" where those exhausted from struggling against the current can rest

• Create "harbors of authenticity" where different vessels can safely dock without having to weather the same storms

• Tend to "coastal wetlands" that mediate between the vast ocean and the inland territories, filtering out mental and emotional toxins and nurturing new life, new possibilities and more interesting opportunities

• Recognize humbly as well that sometimes even the most troubled waters have their own wisdom and medicine to offer to make our community more authentic

In this expanded metaphor, mental health becomes not just an individual's ability to swim without drowning, but our collective capacity to create healthy watersheds where all can find their place in the endless cycle of waters.

The challenge before us is to find that delicate balance—to honor the distinctive character of our local waters while recognizing their connection to the global hydrological system we all share.

To create communities that support both the self-realization of individuals and the coherence of our collective mind. To allow ourselves to be shaped by the waters we inhabit while also actively shaping the flow of those currents for future generations.

This is the essence of co-responsibility—not just for mental health, but for the entire ecology of our shared human experience.

As we learn to navigate these waters together with greater wisdom and compassion, perhaps we will discover that what we thought was an ocean of suffering is actually part of a much larger and more beautiful cycle of waters, flowing eternally between heaven and earth, between individual and collective, between past and future—connecting us all in ways we have only begun to understand.

The mental health crisis we face today is not just a medical problem to be solved but an invitation to reimagine our relationship to ourselves, each other, our unique communities and the systems we've created.

By embracing co-responsibility as our guiding principle, we may find our way to those clear, nourishing waters that sustain not just individual wellness, but our collective blooming of pleasurably coherent evolution, and our holistically perfect health as well.