“Dance to the tension of a world on edge”
The mental health crisis in the 21st century linked to excercise?
I personally think the majority of Personality Disorders and Mental Illnesses are what Alvin Toffler was refferring to in his legendary book “Future Shock”, written in 1970. In a nutshell: when you have a period of rapid social change (in our highly technological post industrial society), with an insufficent adaptation time, this creates overstimulation. Think of it as a type of ”information overload”. For example going shopping, have you ever just been startled by the number of cereals to choose from, or been completely overwhelmed by the current global internet communication network? This in turn leads to increased stress levels (despite our best coping mechanisms such as avoidance, disassociation, idealisation, rationalisation, regression, repression, supression, denial, fantasy, etc).
This is speculation on my part, but when your anxiety level is increased beyond normal levels, the resulting stress can lead to a whole host of terrible consequences -violence, illness, depression and other mental diseases. In fact there is a already strong link between anxiety and depression. Violence & depression are perhaps the two worst “coping mechanisms” of all. Suprise suprise, stress is also a major factor in heart disease and strokes. I don’t have to remind you that homicides, suicides and heart attacks are the top 3 killers in most developed nations… and possibly all three are due to too much tension in our lives. Stress is now seen as a risk factor in both cancer and diabetes as well!
I think reducing anxiety is the key to better physical and mental health. In today’s world, we don’t rely on exercise as much as we should. The study at the bottom of this page proves that excerise can reduce the effects of some mental illnesses. But could the reverse also be true; could decreasing our level of excerise in an increasingly stressful world actually be causing our mental health crisis? Instead of teaching our children outmoded concepts, perhaps we should be teaching them how to relax. Heres a short Stress Management Article.
Living in Australia, I was the typical ignorant person who could never hope to truly “understand” depression itself, always relying on 100% positive thinking no matter what the circumstances. And boy have I changed now. Depression is not something you can just spontaneously pull yourself out of. It takes time to become sick in the first place, but it also takes time to recover.
It’s like I had this CONSTANT internal struggle, always fighting for my happiness, but not exactly realising what was happening to me. I just now I wasn’t happy, the outlook was bleak, and I wanted to feel “normal” again. 
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