PREVENTING EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS
If the New Orleans Levy debacle taught us anything, it’s that we are not a society oriented toward prevention. We wait for a crisis and then react. Health care is an excellent example. Cancer rates are exploding. 550,000 people die each year from cancer and the resources dedicated to prevention are negligible. The same desperate situation exists for diabetes and obesity. In fact, efforts at prevention are negligible for diseases across the board. We may as well drive into oncoming traffic with our eyes closed.
My field (i.e., psychology) is no exception. We diagnose. We work on early detection and treatment. But we don’t prevent. And we scare people away by pathologizing: Before we can help you, you must have an anxiety disorder, a psychotic disorder or bipolar disorder. All we have to do is open our mouths and people run away.
But everyone has anxiety. Everyone gets depressed, angry and anxious. It’s human to worry, obsess and experience fear. You don’t need to have a phobic disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Unfortunately, few people realize that psychologists have developed a set of scientifically proven coping skills for life. Skills for preventing depression, controlling worry, and handling an obsessive thought; skills for handling an emotional crisis and managing feelings of panic. These skills should be made available to everyone, but they are offered almost exclusively to people diagnosed with disorders.
Skills training programs should be offered to everyone in workplaces, community centers, senior centers and places of religious worship. If coping skills classes were incorporated into the grade school curriculum, imagine how many “depressive disorders” and “anxiety disorders” we could prevent.